Dumping Madrid and going to Toledo was one of the best things we had ever done. This was a picturesque old town sitting in the remote Spanish hills. Narrow, winding, catacomb streets, a castle and a cathedral with an interior that was out of this world.

The town was full of shops selling all sorts of swords and various other dodgy looking weapons. This reminded us of where we had heard of Toledo before: it was where one of the guys' swords in the film Highlander was made. A little bit of useless trivia there.

The weather was obviously following us from England as it eventually started, so we headed back to Madrid to wait for the train to Lisbon. This journey was a total and complete nightmare. Every seat had been reserved and most of the inter-railers ended up trying to sleep in the corridor. This would not have been too much of a problem, except that these two macho idiots (police, security guards, Nazis, we weren’t sure exactly) got on and proceeded to literally throw people off the train. This continued even after the train started to pull out of the station, but stopped when one girl ended up rolling along the platform and obviously hurting herself. They then proceeded to march up and down the train. Word was passed along ahead of them and when they reached you, they expected you and your back-pack to be against the side of the corridor so that they had a clear path to strut past. We weren’t about to say anything to them since it was safe to assume that they wouldn't let some skinny inter-railer show them any sort of disrespect, and would quite happily beat any of us to a pulp with their batons, rather than risk denting their oh-so-important macho image. Oh I would just love to have met one of those bastards in England.

Needless to say we didn’t get much sleep.