Nearly Done With Burgos, On To Madrid!

Well, Burgos has all been a bit tomb-laden for me and so I gratefully hail Nathaniel's imminent return to the diligence and the open road.  He's headed for Madrid, which has an unrivalled collection of paintings...but not much else, he claims.  Before we reach it though the diligence, the road, the inns on the road and our fellow-passengers are all going to get a welcome mention.

But first, I thought my faithful reader might like a graphic depicting the route so far.  Here it is.

Literally no expense has been incurred in providing this.

From Burgos Nathaniel will travel due south to the capital, Madrid, and then take in Toledo before making a rapid three-day excursion up to Valladolid and back (route shown below).  This all represents quite an adventurous journey.  Travel was not just tiring but potentially dangerous, because apart from bad roads and rickety coaches, there were bandits.  He had no bottled water, no air-conditioning, he couldn't phone ahead to confirm anything, he was sketching as he went, and must have been making notes continually before composing his lengthy letters to Mrs C-----r.  Whatever else we can accuse him of - a tendency to mansplain, a weakness for tombs - idle he is certainly not. 

The completion of the above route will bring us to the middle of the book, and also to the end of the fourteen letters he wrote exclusively to his unidentified lady friend. It will not bring us to the end of his travels though, because he actually made an earlier trip to Spain in which he sailed along its Mediterranean coast to Cadiz, and then explored the southern interior.  Why he chose to write up his two journeys in reverse order, I'm not sure.  Perhaps it allowed him to describe Spain diagonally from north to south, as a future tourist might choose to explore it.