1405 Barcelona

El stuff-upo monumenticio.

Well I said to Steve on the morning of the 13th that a lot of things could go wrong today so we'll need to keep our wits about us and our sense of humour. We had planned to go from Salamanca to Madrid and then Madrid to Toledo and back and then on the night train to Barcelona. This involved changing from one train station to another in Madrid. Long story short, what could go wrong went wrong and we got as far as Salamanca then I queued for about 40 minutes to find out how to get the ticket for the other train station and then again to pick up the tickets - this ate into our time too much. We had from 12:38 until 13:50 between trains but obviously we should have allowed for more than 2 hours as we also wanted to leave our luggage in a locker (which by the way is not in my phrase book) so that took ages to find - Madrid train station is as huge as a city. Because we'd blown our budget for the day, we sat around the Madrid station minding our luggage for 9 hours until the night train left and I had a minor dummy spit mainly because of the money down the drain. The Prado was just up the road too.

The train ride from Salamanca goes through really flat plains where mostly grain is grown but not broadacre farming. It seems that the farmers were doing their second plantings. Suddenly the land changed to hills and lots of huge rocks as we travelled towards Avila again. This part of the journey reminded me of the drive from Cooma to Bullocks Head Flat back home. It is much higher here so the temperature dropped and many of the trees were just getting their spring leaves. The journey took 2 hours.

Spain has invested heavily in wind energy with turbines on most high ranges.

The night train was not pleasant as expected as we were sitting up. When I went for a walk at about 4 am it was amusing to see how creative people were to try to get as comfortable as possible. A woman took the cake. She was lying across two seats but the arm rests in the centre didn't fold back so she was curled around them with her stomach touching the arm rests and the rest of her body sort of hovering in space. I went back to my seat and gave it a try but reverted to my upright possie soon after.

Stayed at Ona Barcelona Hostel for AU $199 for 3 nights.