Toldeo, Spain

Saturday, June 11th

Turn on your oven to 400 degrees F.

Now, expand it to the size of a city.

Walk in.

You may now perhaps be able to understand my day trip to Toledo, Spain.

It's the opposite of everything I knew in France. Not only surface-of-the-sun hot, but red and dry and bright.

It's a beautiful place to be sure, but I am learning just how much heat can affect me. I am simply drained of energy, listless. Excited as I was to go on this day trip, once I was in the city walls it was like trying to drag a dead whale around behind me.

Toledo, Spain 

I felt so weak, I actually had to sit down regularly to recuperate a bit of strength from time to time - this coming from a gal who can normally hike for hours at a time no problem! Bah.

I would then wobble to the next street where I would seek out once again the least-hot stone something or other to sit on while poor Alberto probably worried about having to call my family to explain their relative had up and melted in the middle of Spain.

Inside the city

We did enjoy a nice meal indoors where it was much cooler and where the people were rowdy and loud and even smoking despite the ban. They were all relatively old and the smokers probably couldn't care less they were breaking the law since they had been smoking for 50 years in the same restaurant before the ban came out. So sassy!

Anyway, there was, believe it or not, a river in this place, but I swear even the water looked dry. We found a nice path around it that provided some shade:

No really, look hard, there's water...

Well there was some shade anyway...

I was feeling a bit more alive after the walk, which is where the energy came from for the following photo, which also quickly left me after the effort of lifting my arms like that...

An adventure is an adventure no matter what the temperature!

Love,
Katie