Back from vacation

2008-07-29

I more or less executed the plan listed in my previous post to the letter. I flew to Spain, spent a few days at Christian del Rosso’s place in Madrid and took the opportunity to benefit from the relatively mild weather (32 degrees or so) to see most of Madrid’s major touristic attractions.

After that, I went back to the airport to pick up the car from the rental agency and then drove around 3500 km in the next few weeks. Main goal of this post is to document the places I visited since I am otherwise likely to forget where I’ve been in a matter of weeks. Been there before. Secondary goal is to serve as a nice itinerary for west side of Spain if anyone plans to go there.  Which is of course highly recommended if you can handle the lack of beaches and the associated mob of beach tourism and associated bad food, service, and prices.

So, I first drove to Zamora. Zamora is a little town in Castilla y Leon and I stayed here two nights. A bit disappointing after the good things I read about it. Worth a visit but not worth staying there, which I did. Nevertheless, I enjoyed myself there. I did a day trip to Valladolid. On the way there, I stopped for a drink in Tordessilas. A small unremarkable place with a nice Plaza Mayor on which a wacky event was going on involving a lot of Seat 600’s (the Spanish version of the Fiat 500). The whole square was full of them.

From Zamora, I drove to Plascencia in the Extremadura. I deliberately skipped Salamanca to save it for later and decided not to go up North to Leon, mainly due to the weather. Plascencia is nice but my usual strategy of walk into a hotel and get a room broke down, hopelessly. For some reason all of the good places were fully booked. This is the first time this has happened to me in Spain. After five hotels I gave up and drove a few more kilometers to Caceres. Here I got lucky on the second attempt. I stayed here for three nights. I did some daytrips to Badajoz (nice drive over an empty stretch of road through very beautiful and very empty Extramadura landscape). On the second day I drove around Caceres a bit and visited the Wolf Vostell museum in Malpartida de Caceres. Considering I was the only visitor, the museum was a bit overstaffed with at least five people monitoring my every move around the place. Entrance was free and the museum mildly interesting and absurdistic.

Next stop: Trujillo. I walked onto the plaza mayor, spotted the hotel that the Lonely Planet recommends on that square whilst sipping a coke and booked for three nights. The hotel was excellent and so was Trujillo. From here I visited nearby Guadelupe and Merida.

From there I drove on to Zafra, booked a room in a hotel for two days and then sat down to have lunch on the inevitable Plaza Mayor. As I was eating it occurred to me that the place looked familiar. Then it occured to me that I had been here in 2003 and after that remembered that I actually stayed in the same hotel as well and quite possibly even the same room. Talk about deja vu. Must have been the heat, normally I’m not that slow. From Zafra I went to do some sight seeing in some small villages around it: Jerez de los Caballeros which has a nice Moorish castle and Frenegal de la Sierra which has a nice bullring/church/castle combined into one multi functional building.

From Zafra I drove to next place of interest which is Cordoba, almost 180 kilometer down the road. This is a very empty country. Cordoba was nice and I booked myself a room in Hotel Boston for two days on the Plaza de las Tendillas. From Cordoba I visited a nice castle in Almodovar del Rio and the extensive ruins of some Moorish attempt to create a new city next to Cordoba.

By now it was getting time to move in the direction of Madrid to pick up Christian. So I drove back the way I came and followed the road to Badajoz where I ended up staying three nights, despit the heat (35-40 degrees). Main feature in Badajoz besides hotels with air conditioning is that it is nearby Elvas across the border in Portugal, which is quite nice. I ended up making two trips there to visit no less than three museums. Combined with the modern art museum in Badajoz, that made four museums in two days. I was the only visitor in each. But they had air conditioning. Badajoz itself is a pretty large but isolated community but worth a visit nevertheless.

From Badajoz I drove north to Avila. On the way I was tempted by the Sierra de Gredos but decided that it was a bit too much off the beaten track for me. Only small villages to stay in and not much to do at night. I did have a nice lunch in some restaurant. Avila is touristic since it is close to Madrid. The hotel had a room but only for one night. Since I was planning to visit Segovia on the second day anyway I stayed there for the night as well. Again a nice town to see. The nice thing about both places was that there is plenty of wind which makes being outside tolerable even during the hottest moments of the day.

Then I drove to Madrid to pick up Christian. We spend a night bar hopping in Salamanca. Had lunch in Avila on the way back and the endured 37 degrees of heat in Madrid by going to the pool and then having some tapas in the La Latinas neighborhood. A NSN colleague joined to show us the good places.

Then back home :-(.

I’ve pretty much seen most cities of interest in Spain now except for Valencia, Bilbao and places in the north west coastal area. The latter three due to the weather which is usually not so good there and Valencia is in the middle of nowhere with nothing of interest worth mentioning in the Lonely planet for hundreds of kilometers around it. Unless you love beach tourism (hint, I don’t). Some day probably.

I also have about 600 photos that need to be sorted through, edited and in some cases stitched together with Hugin. So that is going to take some time but they will eventually be posted.