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Published: September 26th 2014
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a wide street
Toledo is maze of narrow streets. The Yaris had only an inch on each side in some places. The flight was as usual - irritating things that make you wonder why you travel:
• the person in front fully reclines her seat
• the entertainment system isn't working so watching a movie meant if you were able to get one going part way through it flipped to a Korean action movie
• I had actually forgotten to download my series and movies to the micro chip for my tablet so I could rely on that if there were any problems
• Second flight must have been testing their refrigeration system out - luckily that was only a 3 hour flight
• Of course the last half hour I finally fell asleep.
• Went through the Madrid airport in a dazed fog. We arrived in Terminal 3 and walked to terminal 1 for the rental pick-up - I think I did 5000 steps right there.
We have a green Toyota Yaris with only 11 scratches on it. We carefully checked so there are no surprises at the end when the company wants to charge for damage. We haltingly circled the the parking lot a few times while Ross figured out the gear shift (2nd gear seems to want to drop
outside the old town
Looking from the walls of the old town into 4th gear instead) and tried to get the Garmin to realize we were in Madrid not Lower Lonsdale. This took very controlled loud voices and heavy breathing to accomplish. We finally made it out of the parking lot with Nuvi (the Garmin) constantly telling us she was recalculating. We had decided to avoid the Madrid traffic and just head straight to Toledo and spend our first night in a smaller place. Somehow with much more recalculating we passed many of the inner city sights of Madrid and some big name designer stores during rush hour. After many roundabouts we ended up on a highway heading to Toledo. Thank goodness Ross can sleep on planes because he had to drive. I was a bobble head passenger because I couldn't stay awake and I would jerk alert everytime Nuvi would yell out directions.
Somewhere during my hotel research I read that the hotel was difficult to find. I pshawed this thinking they were probably amateurs. Not so... this place is difficult to find. Around curvy tiny, tiny streets where we inched along so the mirrors didn't scrape the buildings. If we'd met another car I would just stop and camp.
church spire
Sometimes looking up was only way to figure out our way around. A pedestrian would have to lie flat in the road while you drove over them - baby buggy - forget it. on one circuit we tried we got wedged into a smaller and smaller area and Ross had to do a 20 point turn to get out. I was standing out the car yelling stop - no - 2 more inches etc. Not easy to do in a car that likes 4th instead of 2nd. We at least provided entertainment for about 5 construction workers taking a coffee break. Our final incident with the car was doing a 180 left turn up a steep incline on a narrow road and then an immediate right turn at the top to enter the parking garage. After stalling and nearly hitting the car behind (thank god that driver was alert and agile) Ross just gave up and directed the traffic around him until no one was in sight. Then we rolled back to the bottom of the turn and gunned it up into the parking garage. Whew - no new scratches. Found the hotel by the way. After dropping off baggage it was off for tapas.
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Anne Warden
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Spain
Bienvenido a Espana! And keep the blogs coming! Anne :-)