Spain in a glass

Jo's first glass of sangria on Saturday at a cafe in Retiro Parque near the Palacio Velasquez. Finally the weather has cleared up and we're enjoying beautiful sunny days and wearing short sleaves, woohoo! For more photos click the image above. Off to Rome on Thursday evening for a quick weekend conquest.

Andy, out.

Semanas Santa!

Easter holidays in Spain start on Thursday and with the kids already on term break from school we needed to do something fun, and away from the apartment (which due to average weather has seen us inside a little too much). We hired a nice little Volvo S50 wagon (a diesel 5-speed), and once I had reacquainted myself with left hand drive, and driving a manual with the stick on the wrong side, we headed off to Segovia for the day on Thursday. On the way we made a side trip to a local castle called Manzarares el Real but didn't go for the tour as we had a lot to see in Segovia. A major goal of our travel in Europe is Castle-Crashing but the Alcazar (Al-cath-ar) was waiting for us in Segovia.Unfortunately is was pretty chilly and we hadn't brought our coats, making for a freezing lunch break in the main square. But once we had filled up and walked to the Alcazar castle that was soon forgotten. We didn't go into the cathedral or follow the aqueduct but that just means we have to go back, when the weather is warmer.A Spanish IBM colleague, actually from the Basque region, had invited us up to his holiday house in La Rioja (rio-ha) for the weekend. So after I had to hit the office for an hour or so we topped off our diesels tank and headed up the A-1 (E-5) highway towards northern Spain. The scenery is quite something, really varied with everything from close to moon-scapes to green valleys, snow capped mountain ranges and large wind farms and solar arrays. After driving in flat Ontario it was quite a change :-).La Rioja is a major wine growing area of Spain, a valley between two east-west running mountain ranges forming a wide valley with the Rio Oja (River O-ha) running through the middle and giving the area it's name. Almost every bottle of wine I have every drunk in Spain has the word 'Rioja' on it, and when you consider that wine is a cheap as water you know they have to be growing a lot of grapes to keep up with demand. We didn't have a GPS and I did my usual thing of using Google Maps for directions and then printing some detail maps of the main places we would have to change roads. It did take us a while to get used to the signage and sign placement which to us at least was sometimes a little challenging. And of course we completely missed an important turn off more than once and had to back track. I should have brought the GPS from Aus... if we do much more driving I'll be buying another for here, it's a marriage-saving-device that I don't it's wise to be without.But despite the navigational issues our good sense of direction (and Jo's patience) found us in the village of Alesanco, about middle of the valley with snowy mountains 15k's to the north and 10k's to the south. Aitor and Marta, with their kids Irune and Imar, welcoming us to the place they come to 'change the chip' in their brains. We drove with them to two historic towns in the region, both on the Basque (north) side of the river. The medieval fortress town of LaGuardia (The Wall) which sits atop a hill over-looking the entire valley, and is still fully populated and stunningly beautiful, was a real highlight. There are two churches in the town, at either end, and depending on your address you belong to one or the other, between which there is of course fierce competition for souls.The next day we drove to a skii hill (mountain) called Valdezcaray and enjoyed a flurry to remind us of Canada. On the trip back down the mountain we saw huge eagles circling nearby and parked atop a peak where a road led to an antenna array and gave as a great view back down to the town of Ezcaray and into the valley beyond. We refueled ourselves in Ezcaray with pork, eggs and chips, the kids favourite crouquetas (ham and cheese crouquettes)and getting them to all try the morcilla (blood sausage) which they enjoyed until they found out what it was :-).Aitor had arranged a winery tour, sadly in Spanish but he translated for us and it ended with the obligatory tasting and the kids sampling the grape juice and generally enjoying themselves after 90 minutes of kid-hell.On the way back to Alesanco we stopped at a local winery and the owner took us to his cellar, a 500+ year old dungeon, where we sampled the wine straight out of huge stone tanks. I bought a 15 litre cask of vino tinto (red) for 15 euros... the price is right that's for sure.Marta and Aitor were great hosts and we left them early Sunday with the promise of a visit to Bilbao, the main city of the Basque Country, at some point soon. The drive back to Madrid, sometimes at speeds over 150kph, was quicker than the trip up and not only because going home always seems that way, we also didn't make any wrong turns.

Andy, out.