Toledo - Ole!

We got up on Friday morning and rode the Metro to the train station, I have never ridden a train so I was excited and we had tickets on the bullet train called the Ave train. We, being either smarter or dumber than the average bear, decided to get to the station a little early so we could figure out our tickets. We bought a rail pass on the Internet (they came with an international cell phone and 30 minutes of time, more about that later!) with 4 days of travel and made reservations also for the other days we were traveling but not for Toledo, so we found it was cheaper to buy a new ticket than to use the rail pass and pay for the reservation. It was such a good thing Ken speaks Spanish, we were in trouble anyway but at least he could get us the info we needed!!
The Train was fun, we arrived at a beautiful train station and caught a bus up to the town, everything in Spain is UPHILL!, so off we go.
These are some of the buildings in the town, the square one was the Royal Palace, it is said that El Cid was the first governor.


This Cathedral was really beautiful, so huge and amazing in detail. It was started in 1221 and has some amazing art, including paintings by El Greco and other Spanish Masters. In the ceiling is a painting and sculpture mixture called the Transparente, it includes a window that is Incorporated into the painting. The 3d effect was so cool - some of the people were painted and some were statues. Directly opposite was a wall of rows of statues of saints. As I said the detail is incredible.
The stain glass windows were big and really old, hard to make out exactly what they represented.

Also a big room with paintings of all the Cardinals or Prelates - the pictures started at 68 AD and went to 1968. The art was overwhelming, I felt like I saw too much to remember it all. I am glad we bought a bunch of books, the history is interesting and they have pictures we were not allowed to take.




We were not allowed to take pictures inside but once we came outside to the cloisters I took a few.






This is me and Don Quoite (sp).

This tram was kind of tacky but gave us great views of the city.





Ken likes all guns - here is one that won't fit in the gun closet (if it ever gets built).


Toledo was one of my favorites. If you go to Spain this is a do not miss. Charming town, skinny streets and lots of history. I will do another post on Toledo because we spent a whole day and I have lots of more pictures!!!