An uncertain departure on Saturday night – the flight was oversold. But enough folks volunteered to take a different flight that we were finally able to get on our plane. We arrived in Madrid by 9:30 am Spain time, and after an hour or so of figuring out which terminals we were respectively in, made contact with Grant, and then Priscilla who arrived from England. Picked up rental car, and after an easy one hour trip, arrived in Toledo and checked into Hotel El Greco in the old city, right next to the El Greco museum.
Following the Don Quixote “trail”, we headed south from Toledo in the morning, The first stop was Puerto Lapicé, a small town where Don Quixote went after tilting with the windmills that he thought were giants. He came to an inn there for refreshment. Today, every restaurant in the town claims to be the one he visited. But only one has acted on that claim by establishing a small museum, and a well-stocked store of every conceivable Don Q related item.
It seems that not only every eating establishment in that town, but every town in the region makes some claim to Don Q and Sancho Panches, with statues, street names, and stores selling memorabilia. In Villa Franca de los Caballeros, the small town where we had lunch, his statue stood guard for us at our quiet restaurant (found on-line with excellent reviews, but warning of pesky flies and bees if eating outside – indeed the case!) on a lovely lake.
The last stop on the road was Campo de Criptana, with its many windmills on the hillside above the town. These are purported to be the very windmills with which he did battle, but numerous hillsides on our route also sported windmills, whether restorations or reconstructions.
Toledo itself lays claim to an important Don Quixote moment. In the city’s Cathedral square, Cervantes says in the book, he met a Portuguese Moor who sold him fragments of the Don Quixote tale in Arabic and subsequently translated all of it into Spanish.
Back in town that evening, we took a long walk along the river below the city. The topography of Toledo, high on a hillside, is typical of so many medieval towns in Spain. Its river encircles the town on three sides, deep in a canyon for a portion of that distance. Walking on the path along the banks we felt as if we were far away from civilization, until we climbed back up into the town and passed the extensive ruins of a Roman bath.
