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Toledo, Spain
Missed the last train home, birds pass by to tell me that I'm not alone
Welcome to Toledo (the good one- sorry, Ohio), an incredibly easy day (or half day) trip out of Madrid Atocha and an incredibly easy place to get both intentionally and unintentionally lost in.
Holy Toledo (or maybe I mean Holy Toledo!) is centered on its cathedral, a massive one although nothing nearly as massive as you would find in Seville. It does however have a few nice features including a surprisingly pleasant cloister and an El Greco heavy collection of surprisingly nice paintings. It also has a strict ban on photography and a lot of ornery looking guards, so you'll have to imagine what you're missing instead of seeing a picture of its inside. Luckily its outside isn't all that bad either and its tower provides the rarest event in all of Toledo, a brief moment of actual wayfinding when the confusing unmarked streets, incoherent signage and hill that seems to go nowhere but up all briefly break free to let you know where the hell something actually is for once.
Toledo is correctly advertised as the best preserved of all of the Spanish cities. Around every turn there is another interesting street or building, and while few are individually as spectacular as what you might find in Cordoba or Granada or Seville or Barcelona or Madrid (or anywhere else in Spain really), collectively they remain impressive as smaller parts of a greater whole.
The streets of Toledo are narrow but- unlike many historic districts- they have not yet been taken over by pedestrians. Shockingly there are cars and a lot of them, most driving faster than they should and many through choke points in the stone paved streets, places without sidewalks where cars almost scrape the sides of the buildings just to get through. It's an interesting sensation of impending doom- first you hear a noise get louder and louder and then- boom- it's time to quickly get out of the way. I do not know how many pedestrians are run over every year in Toledo but I remain pleasantly surprised that I did not witness one meet their untimely end or, better yet, that I actually survived walking through the city unscathed.
Finally the postcard view of Toledo that you all (probably) know and all (probably) love, complete with bridges and gates and Alcazars and rivers and trees.
A bit out of order and clearly chronologically in the wrong place, this is Seville's Santa Justa Station, where AVE Trains leave to whisk you away at 300km/h across the countryside.
All of my intercity travel time was spent on RENFE Trains, comfortable and fast and almost always exactly where I need them to be. I bought all but one of the tickets before I left (Rick Steves warned me that Spanish trains sometimes sell out), and since the price difference wasn't all that noticeable, I decided to get first class tickets. Unlike everywhere else in Europe, Spanish first class trains come with a high level of extras- free food (multiple courses on most trains), free hot towels, free Spanish newspapers, free perks all of the time. You would think that is a good thing except that every time you might try to rest, every time you might try to relax you suddenly find yourself face to face with an earnest but immovable RENFE employee who just doesn't understand that you might want to be left alone for once. Suddenly downgrading to second class doesn't seem like that bad of an idea.
