Anyway, about our trip. I'll try to catch up on the three locations we saw, but for now I'll just start with Toledo. We began our trip early last Tuesday morning and drove four or five hours straight through the middle of Spain. I was surprised at how beautiful the landscape was, as I'm sure my friends from the coasts would be surprised that Kansas can actually be beautiful too. Instead of terraced orange groves were rolling hills with different crops and grasses. I was delighted to discover that we drove right past the famous Castilla la Mancha windmills and snapped a few photos. I've wanted to see them all year, but being on a random highway in the middle of Spain makes them hard to access by public transportation.
We finally reached our hotel where we met up with Justin and Ryan and some others who had gone to Madrid a day early to meet up with a friend and former teacher. We set off to find a Mercadona and enjoyed our usual supermarket favorites: fresh baked french bread, cookies, yogurts, etc. We met the group back at the hotel and the bus took us into town where we had a short walking tour of the city and the cathedral. Most of the boys wanted to look at or purchase some variety of sword of knife, which Toledo is famous for. We walked around, looking in shops for awhile before heading back to the hotel. We left just as the sun began to set, lighting up the city and surround hills. Hannah and I had a room together for the night and never found the thermostat, spending a chilly night when we couldn't find extra blankets either. Cristian later told us (in Spanish of course) "Come on guys, it's a four star hotel! You can call them and tell them anything you need!" But we got a laugh out of it and it was only the beginning of our Temperature Adventures we had in the next few days.