Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Toledo Spain, to Naples, Italy...

Steven got up at 5am and walked 2km to the train station, and caught a train to Madrid for his flight back to the USA while Nikki and I had a sleep in!  We finally got up about 8am and hit the streets of Toledo while it was 'cool', although it didn't stay cool for long.  Nikki continues to take photos of all the doors in Spain and even got me interested in a few this time too...



This one with a Moorish influence...


We wandered around little alleyways with no set plan, just set out to explore and get lost..



The early sun throwing beautiful light on some of the buildings...

Walking to the Cathedral...





A man getting his shop window ready for the day...





Another Church. So many in Spain in such a small area..



And I really did find this door interesting...





We kept walking - many of the buildings looked ancient, yet some looked as if the bricks were new, so I wonder if they rebuilt Toledo at some time in the past...




We found ourselves at the edge of the wall looking over the newer part of Toledo..




And  back to the Cathedral...



When I was in Morocco in 2010, I came across an artisan who hammered silver thread into metal plates with beautiful design, and I bought one home as they were really reasonable in price.  Here in Toledo we visited artisans doing the same thing but with 22 carat gold thread.  The designs also were beautiful, but the prices were out of my reach.  The plate I wanted was 220.00 E.  So it stayed on the shelf. 



We then went back to the Cathedral and went in for five minutes.  I got in free because I was Deaf.  Nikki forgot to say.  However disaster struck in that I dropped my phone on the marble floor in the crypt in front of two mummies or saints.  The screen shattered.  They obviously didn't want their photo taken, or Karm for being an atheist!!

After the cathedral we collected the luggage and walked to the car - which took nearly half an hour through many alleyways in confusing directions.  Drove to Madrid airport - and that was confusing too, we ended up at the wong terminal, but dropped the car anyway as I didn't want to meander through everywhere again, and caught the shuttle bus to our terminal.  Madrid airport is lovely.  I had a photo but it's disappeared somewhere!

The flight to Naples was fine, but disaster struck at the car rental.  Nikki had left her drivers license at home, so I'm doing the driving, however she has the credit card (I don't) and they wouldn't accept my Mastercard Debit card.  Apparently the DRIVER has to use the Credit card.  They were unhelpful, wouldn't try any other way.

We sat outside and discussed options and decided to try another rental car company and managed to book with my license and nikki's credit card. No problems.  We have a small smart car which is cosy. Nikki will try and get a refund from firefly in the next few days.

We then drove though Naples (eek - I'm going gray), and got to our B&B - although both google maps and our GPS sent us to the wrong address. The husband of the B&B had to come to us and we had to follow him through the streets to the house.

So all in all, one of our bad days - but all part of the adventure.





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