December 30, 2012 - Madrid & Toledo, Spain
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| Toledo, Spain |
"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
~ Ernest Hemingway
August 3, 1998 Journal Entry
Madrid, Spain
I just want to recap today (August 2nd) for future humor. Right now it is 12:30 am (August 3rd). We are sleeping in a very upscale train station which we partially broke into. We have spent the last 26 hours on three different trains from Paris to Madrid. We met a bunch of really great people including a woman from Madrid named Maria - she clued us into life in Spain. The only thing I have eaten today has been two Kit Kat candy bars and a loaf of bread w/butter. I'm over bread - that's all I've eaten for the last month. I also discovered today that the structure of my pack is all f#@*'d up - possibly broken. Pretty great since today is only my second official day backpacking Europe. All I can do is laugh. Someday I'll look back in retrospect to this trip, and say I wouldn't change a thing.
+ Around 1 am last night we got kicked out of the train station & on to the streets. 'D' went to call [her now husband] so she was nowhere to be found. We were so scared. All these crazy thoughts were running through my head such as being kidnapped or/and worse. It took us over an hour to find 'D' - the guards didn't see her & locked her in. She was still on the phone. We ended up pulling our sleeping bags out & sleeping in a corner on the street outside the station. It's now 10:30am, I haven't changed or showered in three days. I just paid 300pts. or $4.00 for a lemonade which is giving me a headache.
+It's funny how many good people there are in Spain. There's also a large number of good looking Americans walking around. There are few things I feel like I have to do on this trip. I don't want to do the tourist stuff. I want to hang out with the people & take in the culture. The only thing I really want to do is scuba dive and the only thing 'D' really wants to do is see her grandfather's church & back-country camp in Switzerland.
*Note: I did scuba dive in Nice, France. We did attempt to find 'D's' grandfather's church in Bari, Italy to no avail. And we spent a week back-country camping in the Swiss Alps.
