08-02-2019 – We are leaving Madrid today and heading on to Toledo, Spain. I got up early to make sure we were all packed up and started cooking some onions for our breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. When Wayne got up I took the eggs out and started to crack them only to discover that they were hard boiled eggs…HAHA… oops. Sometimes in foreign countries reading labels can be tricky. We ate a couple hard boiled eggs and yogurt and left our barrio apartment…

Our drive was really pretty today once we got out of the city. We drove through golden fields, which we soon found out were grazing areas for all of the Spanish cows that we passed. Many of the fields had groupings of very large oak trees. Again, there were large old rock walls fencing off property lines… we love that. The landscape gave way to more hay fields with interesting rock formations and then started to become green with interesting pine trees that were shaped more like oak trees…they were very cool and it is so neat to watch the landscapes change. Also along the way were small fortresses on the hilltops. Very cool. We didn’t get any good pics of the drive today. Most were too blurry to post. It is difficult to get pics while driving.

We arrived to our cute new home for the next two nights…a nicer inn called
Los Cigarralles. There was onsite parking and we literally parked right in front of the lobby door, which was so nice for a change. The receptionist was very sweet and cute and spoke just a little bit of English. She was especially nice when I spilled my milk all over her lobby and front door mats… UGH. We cleaned it all up together. I felt embarrassed and bad about the mess, but she was totally easygoing.

Toledo is an ancient walled city set on a hill above the plains of Castilla-La Mancha in central Spain. Toledo is known as the “Imperial City” for having been the main venue of the court of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and as the “City of the Three Cultures” for the cultural influences of Christians, Muslims and Jews reflected in its history.

The history of Toledo dates back to Roman occupation (Toletum) circa 192 BC. The ruins of the Roman circus are still visible just outside the walls of the city. Roman occupation was followed by Visigoth rule, Muslim rule and finally the Reconquest of Toledo in 1085 AD. Toledo was the capital of the Spanish empire until the mid-1500s when the royal court moved to Madrid. Toledo sits above the Tagus River, which borders it on three sides, and was denoted a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1986. 

We have big plans for tomorrow to see the amazing town of Toledo. We stayed in tonight though so Wayne could work. I heated up leftovers that I brought with us from the Madrid apartment. I had a bad headache so we layed low and we watched a little bit of F1… More tomorrow!