So much to see, so little time

I seem to have gotten out of practice with blogs since my friend arrived and now have to try to remember all we've seen and done to dazzle you all with our adventures. We did have a few interesting experiences whilst on our road trip, but before we head down that adventure, let's start with some of our day trips from Madrid.

Gillian and I have a shared love of history, architecture and literature. Hence, many of our trips included sights of old castles, Moorish buildings and alcazars,  churches, roman ruins, and visits to birth places of famous writers or artists etc.

As mentioned previously, this necessitated us getting to grips with the metro system in Madrid, the train and bus systems in Spain to get to our various destinations and making sure our sense of direction was actually where we thought it was. (In a previous trip to Europe, I discovered my sense of directions was 180 degrees off and had to keep going the opposite way to what I thought I should be going). Luckily, we didn't have any trouble this time and were able to find our ways with little difficulty via landmarks as once again, old towns rarely had town planning the all the street signs (where they exist) are on little plaques well above normal visual range and are impossible to be seen on the other side of the street.

We indulged in lots of walking, climbing of steps and towers whenever the chance presented and had lots of fun trying to communicate with the locals. Gillian often tried out her French or Italian in absence of any Spanish, but did it so nicely that everyone seemed to know what she was saying anyway!  I did try to teach her the basics - please, thank you, hello, goodbye etc which she mastered pretty well. I also tried to correct her pronunciation of place names but with little overall success. Jan, you were a better student but in Gillian's defence, she had learnt smatterings of many languages when she travels, knows French quite well, and can get by in Italian. I suspect if I knew that much, I'd have trouble remembering which pronunciation goes with which language as well.

So, off to Toledo we go!!