Our Riad is beautiful, exceptional service and in a way similar to the Hotel in Seville, where it is three or four ‘houses’ joined together to create the whole Riad, we are very well looked after here, our every wish is catered for. They make up your room twice a day and it is beautifully cool and soothing after the madness outside.

Yesterday when we arrived we hit the streets and headed straight for the Souk.

It is an assault on the senses, smells, sounds (didn’t want to taste, anything) and sights all ‘in your face’. We looked at carpets and negotiated to buy two, one for the table and one for the floor, I enjoyed a mint tea with the Rug man and Trevor did the bargaining, it took a while, they thrive on this and the man was very pleasant, finally we arrived at a price that we were all happy with and they packaged it up for us.

We thought we had the exchange rate right, but was relieved when we got back to the Riad to check that we did indeed, phew, could have been more expensive than we thought lol.

Ironically, this Riad has the best internet speed and connection out of all the places we have been so far!

After the stress of the bullfight, we had a nice drink and dinner in the centre of Madrid.

Today we left Madrid and travelled to Granada, off to the Alhambra Palace tomorrow and on to Seville, where we have to surrender our wee car.

 Hmmm Bullfighting, we had no idea of what was involved ……. We certainly do now! Here is a website that pretty much explains it in layman’s terms.

 We got the bus and stayed on it for most of the afternoon, until it got too hot and we had to get off and find a drink spot.

Just by chance we happen to be staying in the Remuera of Madrid!! (Actually Remmers would not be this flash). So funny it is very, very upmarket shopping etc, the cars and people are very sophisticated and dress immaculately (you should see how they dress their kids) – here is us slopping around in our jandals – so funny, hence we don’t spend much time in the area but get the metro to the more basic areas, lol. Off to a Bull fight now, and tomorrow hit the road again to Granada.

Arrived in Madrid at 7pm 31 degrees!! But we have noticed that Segovia and Madrid’s heat is not humid, its more like ours – so whilst its hot it is very bearable. Will probably stay here for three nights, getting sick of all the driving and just need to stay put for a couple of days, we loved Leon and Segovia, so hopefully Madrid isn’t too much hustle and bustle.

Today we woke to rain again and we were up, packed and on the road by 8:30am heading to Leon. We wanted to go to the massive caves near there so decided to go on the way to Leon, rather than going through Leon and on to the caves. Hmm Miss GPS had us way up in the mountains, very remote, got to a little village where the front door of the houses opened onto the road. There were a mother and son (elderly) leaning outside their house and we stopped – absolutely no English and our Spanish is non-existent, I showed them a picture of the cave in our guidebook and I managed to understand that we were to keep going along the road, we eventually found it (and discovered that we had taken a very remote road instead of the more mainish one).

The past few days we have had dodgy internet but are all good now. Okay what have we been doing. The next morning in San Sebastian was raining so we decided to go for a drive to Bilbao, taking the scenic route. Trev’s driving improved heaps with not too many whoopsies, the coastal road was very narrow, think Skippers road but sealed! Went through a lot of wee villages and ended up at the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao. Amazing building but no exhibitions currently on that particularly interested us.

We took the motorway back to San Sebastian, found a nice little restaurant and kicked back. I am totally loving the Spanish wine – when you order a white wine (just getting the house wine) it is so nice, and no headaches either – I’m totally into that!!

Picked up our wee car today (a diesel mercedes :D), after extensive mucking around and trying to find out how to start it, it had no gear stick, and there was an annoying message that keep popping up and beeping that it had sensed poor driver concentration and to stop and take a break ggggrrrrr!!  I have never been so scared in all my life – Trevor’s perception of how much room he has on my side of the lane whilst passing other vehicles is pitiful – seriously, I spent most of today trying to steer the car with my body weight, I am not being precious about it – he got tooted at as well by other drivers!!!!

Had numerous toll gates to go through – very educational, one we went to the credit card window and when we put our card in it spat it out and said something in spanish on the display, we had no idea what and the bar didn’t rise up and let us through, so we pushed the attendant button and waited for the attendant to arrive, he put our card back in the right way up and off we went! One we had to give an operator cash and she couldn’t get us to understand how much we had to pay, Trev threw me the wallet and I was 10c short she kept saying the spanish word for 40 but I had only given him 30 after her repeating it 10 times and me not being able to see the coins without my glasses we started laughing and I told Trev to give her notes, but in the end he held out his hand with about $10 in coins and she took what she needed – we were laughing hysterically for a while – and that didn’t help keep him in his lane either!!

And on top of all this, every time he went to indicate he would use the lever on the right side of the steering wheel and shoved the car into neutral!!!!

We couldn’t believe the amount of wind farms and acres of solar panels.

The hotel we are in now is very beautiful and our room is about 10 times bigger than the last one (mind you it woud need to be its about 10 times more expensive as well) but the internet connection is playing up so photos not at full quality today.

The view from the Hotel is stunning, today when we arrived in San Sebastian, it was around 24 degrees, so the coldest day we have had so far (I even put a cardigan on when we went out for dinner tonight!) – the forecast for the next two days is for rain – lol, looks like it was just as well Trevor went to the beach yesterday.

Our last full day in Barcelona, its doesn’t get any colder, a hot 28 degrees (I reckon its more than that!!). We went off to the market this morning amazing array of food.

Then Trev went off to the water front. I had planned to visit a couple of galleries and/or museums today but unfortunately a lot of the museums and galleries are closed Sunday and Monday 🙁 so I had a mooch around Las Ramblas for a few hours, had a look at a couple of churches, had lunch in a beautiful Placa (pronounced platha) which is the equivalent to the Italian Piazza’s.

Resting my feet at the moment, kinda glad we are driving tomorrow so my body gets time to recover. (man I sound old) Tonight we went back to the Placa and had a lovely tapas dinner with lots of entertainment goin on around the square.

There is heaps and heaps of graffiti around the city, not on buildings but all the shops have roller garage doors on them and the ones that are closed show the graffiti – its totally amazing.