We started our travel south through Andalusia by renting a car for a few days. From what everyone tells us, driving is the best way to get around in Spain as the roads here are quite good. Our rough plan was to hit Toledo and then the big destinations south of Madrid: Cordoba, Seville, and Granada. We booked our reservation online… really easy as we have internet connection in the hotel and our own laptop. When we got to the car rental desk though, all hell broke loose. We hadn’t copied down the correct reservation number and were required to actually have a paper printout of the reservation! Are you kidding me? After about an hour of running back and forth to internet cafes, we got out on the road in our beat-up little little car and proceeded to get lost. Driving on the highways here may be easy, but getting out of the heart of Madrid is no small feat!
Once we were found the Autovia driving was pretty easy. Our first stop was Toledo, just 60km south of Madrid. Technically Toledo is in La Mancha, but we decided to start off our driving tour here because the driving distance was not too intimidating for our first stop.
We arrived in Toledo in about an hour, only to realize that Toledo is not a driver friendly city. The city was a medieval fortress back in the day, complete with towering city walls and labyrinthine streets. Most of the streets could barely fit a single car and had tourists walking willy-nilly all over the place to boot. We circled endlessly looking for our hotel and somehow (miraculously) found it by accident! We were quite pleased with our good fortune and proceeded to check into our hotel. The woman at the desk explained to us that the parking garage was quite close (in fact we could see it from the lobby), but that unfortunately the street was closed for repairs. We would have to circle around the town yet again to park! Another half hour later (and many illegal reverse driving down one way streets) we were finally parked and ready to explore…
There is nothing really specific to see in Toledo except Toledo itself. The scenery here is spectacular, as the town was built upon a towering bluff surrounded on three sides by the snaking Tagus river. The whole thing is protected by a fortified wall, and has roads and alleyways that would put Lombard Street (San Francisco) to shame. We skipped all of the churches and museums as we would have many of those to see in the following days.
Check out the uploaded pictures for more insight:
http://picasaweb.google.com/richmosko/Toledo
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Let me just be the first to say, ...
ReplyDelete"Holy Toledo, those are some narrow streets, Mosko-Man!"
or ...
"Holy Toledo, that's some Cathedral, Robin-Liu!"
Great stuff gus, but seriously, if you get tired keep posting. (;-)
my ex-boss' brother lives in toledo and drove us around, those street are super tight! when he was car shopping he said he had to measure each of the cars to see if it would fit in their garage and streets. well, if you can drive around there you must be a damn good driver!
ReplyDeleteReally tight... It helps having someone spotting the corners for you. Really, the only hard part is making sure you don't hit all of the people walking in front of you!
ReplyDelete