Driving around Extremadura

Guillermo, Fernando and I took two drives around Extremadura.  While we more or less enjoyed the drives while we were on them, after the second one, we decided it was just too hot to be going out in that dry countryside where we didn't see much wildlife and the landscape was just too brown to be very beautiful.

The first drive we took was to the Tajo Park area.  The Tajo river had been dammed up in the area we visited so, even though it was pretty, it wasn't very likely that we'd see birds along the shoreline.  We walked down to the water, saw a ferry come in and then walked back to our car.  It was quite hot.  Then we drove to another lookout point and sat in the shade a while and enjoyed listening to some birds called Bee Eaters.

Another day we drove to a park called Monfrague.  Again, it was hot, dry and we didn't see much.

I should have taken a picture of all the steps we had to climb to get up to the remains of this castle - all in a blazing sun.

A view from up there on that castle

Sitting around in a little oasis up on top

From there we drove to some wetlands which looked so promising BUT, the blinds to sit in to observe any wildlife were locked.  We tried our best to see into the water from the ground but the vegetation was too tall.  We could hear things in there, but just couldn't see anything.  And it was SO hot.  So, we left, drove home and decided no more driving around to the various parks in the area.  Eva didn't join us on these two drives as she had a lot of work to do on her paper for her PhD.

Our visit to Marvao, Portugal

In the late afternoon we drove to Marvao, Portugal.  We can see Marvao from the balcony of our bedroom and at night it is lit up on the top of the mountainside.  It looks so nice from our balcony so every evening we would go outside just to see it.

It's a cute little town and we had wonderful views from up there of the surrounding countryside.  We tried to find Salto del Caballo when we were up on the castle, but without binoculars (we forgot them in the car), there really was no good way to be sure that what we were seeing was really the place we were staying.

Entering the town of Marvao

Walking up to the castle

View from the castle - looking towards the church in the town of Marvao

In the inner castle wall

There were some beautiful gardens up there in the castle.

Life for a while on the Spain/Portugal border

On July 22, we drove from Madrid down to an area of Spain called Extremadura.  It's pretty hot and dry in this region.  The place we were driving to was a town called La Fontañera and it was supposed to be right on the border with Portugal.  We didn't know it at the time, but we drove right past the place we were going to stay.  There was no sign on any of the buildings there with the name Salto del Caballo (the name of the place we were going to stay),and there was no sign that we had now left Spain and were in Portugal.  So we reprogrammed the GPS putting in latitude and longitude points and that was how we finally found our place.

Salto del Caballo was a real find for us - it was a little oasis on the edge of a very small town.  A town that only had a few residences and not one business of any kind (although we did see some guy always working in his garage so maybe he did machine or car repairs for the community).  The rooms in Salto del Caballo were quite rustic but that was part of the charm of the whole place.  Since we had no food with us and there were no restaurants or even a store in La Fontañera, we drove to a bigger town in Portugal called Castelo de Vid.  We found a nice little outdoor restaurant and had an enjoyable dinner there.

The little patio outside of Salto del Caballo where we often grilled meat and vegetables for dinner.

Another grilling and dining area on the same patio

We loved taking walks in the area around our apartment.

So that there could be a picture of Guillermo on the walk too, had to put the picture that shows Eva taking a quick nap on the walk.  ;-)

One day we took a drive to Elvas, Portugal.  

This is a wall inside the walled city.  Like a second line of defense.

View from the town.  It was quite hot and dry.

The amazing aqueduct of Elvas

Guillermo and Fernando are there waaay in the background

A picture of our rental by one of the arches of the aqueduct.  It was a Citroen and the best rental car we've had so far.

A town on the way back to La Fontañera.

The countryside in Portugal

The road we took back to La Fontañera.

Soon we'll be with Fernando and Eva again!

Guillermo and I caught a train from Bilbao to Madrid today.  The day didn't start off too good because when we turned the rental car in, we noticed too late that something had come off from under the front bumper and was just hanging there.  Of course the rental company noticed that and charged us for it.  Must have happened when we parked too close in to some curb somewhere.

Then we took a taxi to the train station and didn't have too much time to spare before it was time to get on the train.  It was a nice 5-hour long train ride.  The countryside was beautiful for the first hour or two with nice green mountains everywhere and low clouds.  But soon it changed to sparsely covered hills and then to just dry rolling countryside.  The temperature sure went up, too and by the time we got to Madrid, it was quite hot!  It had been so nice and cool in Bilbao!!

The train station in Madrid that the train arrived at made things difficult for everyone with their luggage because none of the escalators were working.  We tried getting in the line for the one elevator but there were tons of people already waiting.  We had no choice really but to lug our stuff up two flights of stairs.   We had to leave my suitcase at the bottom of the stairs by itself while we took the rest up and I felt so sorry for Guillermo when he went back down to carry my suitcase up.   That suitcase - it feels like it is holding bricks!

We lugged all our stuff over to the taxis and he drove us to the apartment we are going to be staying in for the next 3 nights.  It's a quite nice place - very spacious with big windows.  It will be a comfortable place to live for these next 3 days.

We spent the rest of the day resting a little and then going out on the metro to the OTHER train station in Madrid to enquire about rental cars.  Then we took the metro back to a stop fairly close to the apartment and walked back the rest of the way - stopping to get a little bite to eat and pick up a few groceries.

July 20
Guillermo and I left early in the evening taking several metros to the airport so that we could be there when Fernando and Eva arrive.  They are arriving today!!  YAY!!  Their plane got in around 9:30pm.  How nice it was to see them come out of the arrival doors.  We picked up some water and stuff there at the airport and then started on those metro rides back to the apartment we were renting in downtown Madrid.

July 21

Today was their one month anniversary.

We had lunch at a good Basque restaurant downtown and in the evening we did the tapa crawl - something I had been wanting to do!  We started around 10:30pm and went walking in a section of Madrid that has a lot of tapas restaurants.  Here we are at one of the places.

It was a lot of fun!

It's been rough in Spain finding a place to live

Bilbao is where we spent most of our time.

July 16th -We left the town of Vitoria with not that good of an impression of the place.  Perhaps we were just on the wrong side of town, but at least the hotel we finally found was decent enough.  We drove on, driving through Haro where we thought we'd look around a little because we had seen an apartment advertised online there.  We found the general area where the apartment is, but since we weren't able to talk to anyone, all we could do was walk around.  It looked nice in Haro and there are wineries all over the place!  We decided to drive on and actually decided to go to a McDonalds in Logroño so that we could send Fernando a message.  We had looked up the address of that McDonalds so the GPS led us right to it.  We spent a lot of time there on the internet,  had lunch there and when we left we decided to drive straight to Bilbao and spend a night there since we wanted to visit Amorebieta and that is real close to Bilbao.  The GPS led us to our hotel, the Artetxe, and we were surprised at how cute the place looked.  They gave us a nice room, but the smell in the room was so bad that we asked to be moved and they did so - putting us in a smaller room but at least it smelled good and was on the ground floor.  We found out there was a Carrefour grocery store nearby so we drove there to get something to eat for dinner.  This was the view of Bilbao from our hotel.

July 17th  Today we drove to the airport in Bilbao to return our rental car, but in the end, decided to keep it until we leave Bilbao so that we could drive out to Amorebieta which we did today.  We also dropped laundry off at Carrefour, to pick it up later in the evening.  So, we drove out to Amorebieta today and found the drive very interesting and very pretty.  We first had lunch at a restaurant outside of Amorebieta called Boroa Jatetxea in the Boroa section of Amorebieta and it was a great find.  The setting was beautiful and the food was delicious!

Arriving to the parking lot of the restaurant

The parking lot

There's the restaurant tucked in there in the trees.

About to eat our delicious dessert!

Some scenes from around the restaurant

After eating at the restaurant we drove back into Amorebieta and tried to find out any information we could on Yznagas in the area.  We didn't have much luck.  We even waited for the church to open its doors so we could ask the priest if they had records from the past, which they didn't.  Anyway, here are some scenes of Amorebieta.

More than 500 years later, someone from the future is visiting the place of our past.

The church that we visited in Amorebieta

Downtown Amorebieta

Some signs around Amorebieta.

The Basque language is interesting.

Basque on top, Spanish underneath.  In English it says, Dogs are prohibited on the premises.

This was a street sign.  Basque names are amazing and some of them make the name Yznaga seem so easy.

This name is also in our past - Zubiar.

It is a sign for a music school

July 18th
Today we drove our car INTO Bilbao - that was a scary prospect since Bilbao is so big.  We programmed Bilbao train station into the GPS and ha-ha, right straight from our hotel, the GPS wanted to take us straight down a cliff.  GPS's - sometimes they are more Guessing Position System - you have to stay alert with them and sometimes figure things out for yourself.  Our hotel was really in a good position because it wasn't too far  from the train station and we didn't have to go TOO much into Bilbao, but still, we had to navigate some city streets.  We made a left turn one time into a bus lane on a one way street and did not know how we were going to get out of that one, but Guillermo made a u-turn right there in the middle of the street and then we were fine.
We parked at El Corte Ingles department store, walked to the train station and bought our train tickets to Madrid for tomorrow.  Then we decided to have lunch so walked around looking for a nice little place to eat and happened upon a sidewalk restaurant called El Globo.  We had a great meal there out in the open air and considered ourselves lucky to have been able to find so easily such a good place to eat.