Thursday 29 October Alicante to Toledo

Well what a day! We left our hotel in Alicante at 9am, anticipating arrival in Toledo by train at about 2.30pm. We were fortunate that neither yesterday’s accident nor today’s 24 hour train drivers’ strike looked as if they would impact our plans, so we headed off across the road to the station and onto our train… smiling smugly as it took off on time at 9.40am.

Fast forward to 11.30am, about 40 minutes from Madrid… and the train comes to a standstill.

We learnt through some fairly impressive hand gestures and poor language skills on both sides of the conversation, that there was a breakdown (not sure if it was a train or a system breakdown) and that we were going to be stuck for up to an hour.

Three hours later we took off again, arriving in Madrid 30mins after our connecting train to Toledo was scheduled to leave. (Does this sound familiar to our North American friends?) We also learnt that three of the four trains to Toledo (including the connection that we had just missed) had been cancelled due to the strike.

Fortunately, we had bought bus tickets from Madrid to Toledo as a Plan B when we heard about the crash yesterday. So we decided to take the bus rather than risk waiting for the next train.

After a 30 minute transit on the Metro à la sardine across Madrid at peak hour, squeezed in with our large suitcases and backpacks, enduring some fairly filthy looks from other passengers, we made it to the Madrid bus station and onto a bus to Toledo.

A relatively comfortable 60 minute ride, and a short taxi ride later (when we finally found the rank) we arrived at our beautiful hotel at about 6pm…very relieved to be here!

We dumped the suitcases and headed out to find a cold drink and a meal, having had little to eat since a light breakfast early this morning.

We were in awe of the beautiful buildings around us as we dipped our toes into what Toledo has to offer, also finding a fantastic sampling menu of local specialties at a cafe down the road.

Tired and very full, it was back to the hotel for a hot shower and an early night, charging our batteries to tackle the hilly roads tomorrow.