May 4 - Day 4 of "after-ship" life on our own
Because the Toledo train station was a "bridge too far" away for walking from the hotel, we drove to the station and hopped a train which got us to central Madrid in only 33 minutes. When we first walked into the train station we thought we'd been transported back in time. The station is beautiful.
It's been a long time since our last train trip so we had to relearn a few things. We had asked the person who sold us the tickets if their was first-class or tourist seating and we were given the impression that it was open seating. So off we went toward the train. We watched some people ahead of us going into this train car and we just said let's go in this one. We each took a window seat and the train started to fill up. A man came up to Norm and pointed to his ticket. Turns out that our tickets assigned us not only a car, but also seats. By fluke we had chosen the correct car and Pam fluke had chosen her assigned seat. What are the chances? Norm then moved to his correct seat next to Pam. The man was very nice and showed us how to read car/seat info on the ticket. But, we thought it was a good omen for the rest of the day that we'd blindly found our correct seats. Well, we were wrong.
Once in Madrid, we headed for the Museum of Archeology as our first stop of the day. We found it after 10 Metro (subway) stops and one transfer, which seemed odd since the museum is actually not that far from the train station. Pilot error? On the way, we were serenaded by a couple of guys playing for handouts.
Saw these billboards about 30 year celebration of 007:
Lots of traffic in Madrid. Glad we didn't drive.
We walked up to the museum entrance and the guard told us it was closed every Monday. Rats! We had known that in our original trip planning but when we made changes to stay in Toledo...we forgot.
The guard then told us that the must-see Prado museum was also closed. Sacre Bleu! That was the museum which we really wanted to see.
An 18 minute walk got us to the Prado at 3 PM, a time which Rick Steves says has the least foot traffic (actually, 3 to 6). Rick was right. We walked right up for our ticket, €7 instead of €14 because Norm could prove he's over 65. Luckily Pam didn't have to show her ID, although the clerk wanted to see but we made like we didn't comprehende. She issued Norm two tickets out of exasperation. We roamed the many galleries artists on who are on exhibit are world famous but here are just another one of the guys. The artwork and exhibits and the facility itself demonstrate why this is rated among the best museums in the world.
We were walking all over carrying a bottle of water that we bought in the museum cafe and 2 hrs into our visit Pam went to drink some and a lady guard told her "No Drinking"....what? It's ok to carry it, but don't drink it? Well, #@!& it. Anyway, that shock triggered a Pam coughing fit where her eyes water, face turns red, and she said later that she wanted to die. The guard couldn't backpeddle fast enough....she kept telling Pam to drink the water, drink it, drink it, and then she gave her a cough lozenge too. That about ended our two and half hours of peaceful art viewing. Pam has been fighting off a cold for the past few days - probably triggered by the late nights onboard the ship and it's evolved into random bouts of hacking fits. Once she starts to cough, it takes awhile to stop. Meanwhile, everyone around us runs in terror of catching Ebola.
So, our eyes turned back to Madrid. A 15 minute walk from the Prado took us back to the train station. We bought our tickets and settled in for a 45 minute wait. We felt confident with learning the ropes this morning so with 15 minutes to board, we headed off to find the departure area. We looked on the lighted board and it stated that our train would depart from platform 15. So...we found the signs leading us to platforms through 12...where is 15? We asked a number of people working at the station and either they feigned ignorance to our language barrier or they confidently sent us in the wrong direction. We found the departure area but it was blocked from us walking through in our direction....we were getting so frustrated and the minutes were swiftly speeding by. By accident, we found the sole entrance to the platforms where passengers and luggage were being searched with TSA-type equipment. In olden days access to all platforms was free and easy. Toledo was a much smaller operation by far. After we got finally through, we broke off in a run only to have the station attendants at platform 15 casually tell us that we missed the train (by a couple of minutes) and we'd have to go back to ticketing and buy another ticket. What, what? Well, long-story even longer....we tried our best with customer (non) service to explain all the trials we'd just been through and how this station is not set up well for tourists...etc...and you guessed it - we ended up buying another ticket with another 45 minute wait. This time we sat waiting by the platform!
As one of our erstwhile leaders announced years ago, "Mission Accomplished" -- sort of. We'll keep Madrid on the bucket list for future consideration but it's surely not a tourist-friendly city. When the train arrived back in Toledo, we realized what a good choice we had made in making our home base Toledo rather than Madrid.
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