Buenos Dios from Madrid and Toledo!

 Our flight from Indy to Philadelphia was delayed by almost an hour, so we didn’t have much time to get to our connection in Philly--They were already boarding when we got to the gate!  

We hurried on when our boarding group was called, and in the first row of first class sat Justin Timberlake!  What a way to start the trip.  I did not have my camera ready to steal a photo, nor did I have my camera waiting to capture the crowds of people waiting to get a snapshot of him leaving the customs area of the airport.  I was tempted to wait around for him to show, but we moved on.

It’s hard to imagine that you can leave home at 2pm, have dinner on a plane thousands of miles over the Atlantic Ocean, get a quick snooze and wake up 3,700 miles from home-- and you’ve lost 6 hours along the way!

Customs was a fairly simple process; however we are used to more signage and directions, especially signs that we can read!  We've found that there are not of lot of English speaking Spaniards, so we fumbled around trying to find our way.  

Our challenge was to get to Toledo, about 1.5 hrs south of the Madrid airport.  We decided to take the adventurous route...the subway and the high-speed train instead of a taxi.  It was quite an adventure.  

We were able to get to the central station in Atocha with the help of a nice guy who could help by pointing.  But then we had trouble figuring out how to get a ticket on the high speed train to Toledo.  They had a customer service center that looked like the Bureau of Motor Vehicles--take a number and wait.  By the time we were able to get our train tickets, the next three trains were sold out, so we had a 3.5 hour wait for one with available seats.  During the wait we had lunch and celebrated international beer day with a Spanish brew.

We finally made it to our train.  Luckily there were assigned seats--we were in coach 6, seats 85 and 87, so it's hard to determine how many people were on this train.  Judging from the line to board, it was a whole bunch of people! The other challenge we had was hoisting that 48 lb suitcase into the overhead bin!  We definitely got our workout in today.

We arrived at the Toledo train station that looked more like a cathedral than a station.  We found another couple from our group (we could tell by the yellow luggage tags), so shared a taxi for the short ride to the hotel.

We were so happy to get to our hotel - Palacio Buenavista, where we were greeted by our tour director.

It is a very nice boutique hotel with a great view out our window.  The view doesn't show the 102 degree heat of the day!

We were able to get a quick shower and a one-hour nap before our 8pm dinner.  We met many of our group (more about them later) with such diverse and interesting backgrounds.

Dinner was delicious! When they brought out the chicken salad appetizer, we thought it was dinner!  The main entree was sea bass followed by a wonderful dessert.

Needless to say, it didn't take long to get to sleep.