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.