The reason for the empty highway leading to the town became obvious as we wandered around the completely empty town. It's a much prettier, more historic town than Arenas de San Pedro, and much, much quieter. Since the town is built on a hill we thought it would be a great place to grab a beer and enjoy the now sun-filled view, but the town didn't cooperate. We finally found one bar that was open, but it was indoors and very scruffy. So we enjoyed our beer watching Spanish game shows with the town drunk until our driver showed up and took us back to Madrid.

The rain stopped during lunch, so the second half of the walk was much nicer. In a burst of creativity, Somchai decided to take advantage of the sun and start a new artistic photo series of the flowers of Spain. As you can see, the series got off to a great start, with about thirty photos of the wildflowers lining our walk. As you no doubt guessed, the series ended with the walk, so it's now a photo series of the flowers lining a highway outside of Arenas de San Pedro.

We stopped midway for lunch, where we got to get off the highway for a bit and surround ourselves with nature. We came across a handy (though wet) picnic table and had our lunch. Doesn't Somchai look like a happy camper?

When Spain first joined the European Union it was much poorer than the rest of the neighborhood, which meant it was entitled to heaps of development cash to help it catch up with the rest of Europe. A large portion of this bonanza went into building roads, and Spain now has probably the best maintained and underutlized road network in the world. A couple of kilometers outside of town the houses and what little traffic there was petered out, and we had the road all to ourselves.

Armed with lunch, we started on our ten kilometer walk, which we thought would be on a trail but ended up being just an underused road. The town was too small to have proper suburbs, but there was still enough modern civilization along the road to rob the hike of any charm. It also started to rain, which certainly didn't add to the ambiance.

116. Arenas de San Pedro

Monday started out very badly. We planned on going hiking in the mountains around Avila. We woke up to the usual overcast skies but decided to go anyway, so took a 2 hour drive with Manuel to our starting point, Arenas de San Pedro. This was a busy, not very attractive town, but seemed mainly to serve as a base for hikers. There were a few old buildings on the busy main street, and we decided to explore the castle ruins. Unfortunately the castle was under heavy renovation, and I got stuck talking to the construction foreman for about an hour, but eventually we pulled away, and ducked into a nearby shop to get a bunch of jamon serrano and other picnic provisions.