31st March 2017. Ávila, Spain.

The plan for today is to move on to Ávila, as soon as I’ve dragged myself away from photographing the storks up on the towers beside us.

We watched a coach load of people wander round while we were having breakfast, I’m so glad we’ve been able to camp here, it’s great to be able to look out over the snowy mountains, the sky changes constantly.

Unfortunately we had problems with the drain in the basin so poor Darren spent ages trying to find the ‘U’ bend so that he could unblock it.  We ended up leaving El Barco de Ávila a lot later than planned and arrived in Ávila around lunchtime.  The car park we’d been hoping to park in beside the town wall was closed when we drove up to it but luckily we’d passed another one on the way up and that had a nice big space waiting just for us.

The wall around Ávila looked so perfect, it must have been cleaned recently because it looked like new, it’s nice to know how it used to look but it did seem a bit strange to see the old walls without their patina.  We had a walk around the little town, we came to an arched courtyard where a market was in progress and wandered in and out through the various doors in the town wall, it really is a most beautiful wall.  We eventually came back to a little square which had pink blossom on the trees and a sign for a cafe pointing into a building.  We weren’t expecting to see a courtyard inside the building, this courtyard had a glass roof on it, I wonder how they keep it cool in the Summer because it  felt quite hot already.

We only had a small meal which was a shame because we looked at the food brought out to the other people from the menu de dias and it looked really good.  The food we had was very good too.  I thought I was having an egg sandwich with salad and asparagas but when it turned up it was so much more than that, they’d toasted the bread and cut a circle out of the top slice of bread then placed it over a fried egg.  I have had one of those at the beginning of our trip in Spain and I’d been impressed then too, it was very tasty.  Darren had a nice thick burger which looked like it had been freshly made.  We were very full but when the waiter came out with the ice cream menu Darren couldn’t resist having pudding which we shared, it was well worth having.

Unfortunately we had to get to Segovia  which was another 1 and a half hours away and the afternoon was racing on so we went back to the van.

We carried on our journey to Segovia through more varied landscape.

We arrived in Segovia and found the aire beside the bullring  without a problem and there were still quite a few  spaces.  I think we might have had a problem getting the van into the parking spaces if it had been any busier and when it filled up later we were a little concerned that we wouldn’t be able to get out tomorrow if the other vans near us hadn’t left.

It had been a busy day so we decided we’d go sightseeing in Segovia tomorrow when we were less tired and just do a bit of blogging instead.

A short while later we noticed a lot of excited voices chattering away outside and when we looked out of the window there was a big group of little girls on roller blades, it looked like it was a roller blading  club.  The paved area outside the bullring appeared to make the perfect place for a relay race, they were having a great time, there was lots of shouting and laughing going on, when they’d finished that their teachers had them speeding along the road on the other side of the aire, it was so nice to see them enjoying themselves so much, somehow I can’t imagine anyone being able to do that at home.

I wish I’d taken note of the roads running behind and through the aire before it got too late to move on.  There were two roundabouts on the main road on the other side of the bullring which made the whole road set up into the perfect race track for mopeds and cars who played’ on it intermittently throughout the night, they were still going strong at 3 in the morning so I didn’t get a lot of sleep, still it makes a change from howling dogs keeping me awake!  We did anticipate this and watched a load of episodes of Castle until midnight, with our headphones on to blot out the noise!