El Reino de Espana - Toledo for no apparent reason

Before going to Spain Mary and I divided the financial and planning responsibilities. I bought the plane tickets (because I harangued American Airlines into crediting me for a flight I purchased but never took. That's a story for another day.) and the EuroRail pass and Mary reserved the hotels and was generally the cash-cow (moo) in-country. I decided on what cities we would visit and Mary was going to plan the individual days...or so I thought.

So Sunday was blocked out to take the train to Toledo for the day. According to Wikipedia and the guide books we consulted Toledo was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its "extensive cultural and monumental heritage as one of the former capitals of the Spanish Empire and place of coexistence of Christian, Jewish, and Moorish cultures"...until they were expelled from Spain of course. Sounds dreamy no?

And so it is, See?.......ok perhaps not the best example.

We arrived at the Madrid train station and went straight to the information office to figure out how in the heck to use our EuroRail pass. Here I will give one of the only useful travel tips you can glean from my blog: The EuroRail pass is pretty much useless, or at the very least not cost-effective, in Spain. EuroRail requires reservation fees in addition to the cost of the pass for trains that are high speed. Wait for it, wait for it...pretty much all the trains in Spain are high speed and, as it turns out, the reservation fee is often more expensive than just buying a normal ticket sans EuroRail.

We did make it to Toledo finally and tooled around the town. Unfortunately many of the the touted cultural sites were closed for renovation. That's ok. There's always the Torture Museum!

A note on this photo in the spirit of oversharing: like many women I am prone to retaining water during certain points of the month. Generally that bloat contributes to distractingly large boobs but sometimes, due to large amounts of water consumption and/or trans-Atlantic flights, I can expand in all directions. So yeah, that's what's going on.

Afterwards, we basically went to whatever was open. The cathedral:



The monastery church:

And several other churches that were churches and several synagogues and mosques that were churches and castles that had churches.

Then we got tired, and perhaps a little heat-stroked after all the walking and started taking cheesy photos. Mary with the Spain beer guy:

And me with Cervantes:

Then we headed back to Madrid for dinner at which point Mary, who up until that point had made no indication of reading the guide books, mentioned that most restaurants were closed on Sundays except those that catered especially to Americans. (another travel tip! Amazing!) So we entered a restaurant in a parellel universe where the typical American dish was enchiladas, Michael Jackson was dead, and Brazil lost a soccer game to the USA....and the day ended.

Still to come: We travel to Cordoba but it's closed!