Sat 22 Sept

Left Madrid after an early morning shop in the local market , no English spoken but managed to get the items we needed to stock up ( through gesticulating and the odd word hazily and sleepily remembered ) Booked ourselves into a smart campsite perched on a hill called El Greco in Toledo ( Don Quixote country ) about an hour south of Madrid. Tragically , the 25 m swimming pool with stunning views of Toledo (a UNESCO World heritage site) , proved out of bounds , (closed since Sept 10!) Not great news as we have hit a heatwave (35 degrees in the afternoon ) and it's too hot for sight seeing , so we did the laundry, stayed cool with wetted scarves around shoulders ( me ) and beer (Andy ). We went into Toledo for a few hours in the late afternoon ( see later ) We decided to eat out at the campsite restaurant in the evening , which, whilst more expensive than most, ( comparable to the price of eating out in the UK ) was tasty, plentiful and beautifully prepared (goats cheese salad and grilled mixed vegetables- yum ..). Fewer flies and mozzies here and a blissfully quiet campsite, with slightly fierce reception staff , but hot ( and cold ) showers in the slightly worn washing but clean block, (with loo paper, soap, hand driers and sink plugs!) and best of all, no maintenance staff wielding chainsaws or lawnmowers on the go. No supermarket on this site, (garage 10 mins down the road sells bread). We are making sure that the next campsite has access to lake side swimming as this heat wave shows little sign of letting up... Re our late afternoon adventure, we caught the number 72 bus from outside the campsite, a 10 minute air conditioned bus journey 1.40 € each way (T is a Unesco world heritage site).  We visited an exhibition of Roman/ medieval giant catapults and battering rams (Andy's choice - a source of all modern engineering ) and then on to the enormous cathedral ( my call ) , second only in Spain to the splendour of Sevilla in Gothic architecture. There was a big wedding going on whilst we wandered around, with everyone dressed to the nines, the guys all in tight mid blue suits and sunglasses, it felt like we had stumbled onto a film set (from The Godfather, Andy thought). Toledo is famous for steel and the Crusades so there were lots of swords,  penknives, suits of armour in the shops, (and many tourists and their tour guides winding their way through the old Jewish quarter).   And so at the end of a long day, we sank gratefully into bed, me finishing off Rowling's 4 th Cormoran Strike book ' lethal white' (absorbing, uneven, meandering, and an irritatingly self-denigrating female lead) and Andy finished off Steph Penney 's Under a Pole Star (strong plot, lots of sex, woman centred adventuress) so take your pick ...

OTT cathedral

Battering ram

The centrepiece