Where's Bertie? He's at the Aire in Badajoz, where we've been twice before, the last time being four years and one day ago.
Weather: Sunny start, some heavy cloud around lunchtime, then clearing throughout the afternoon to clear skies again. 20 degrees.
The maximum stay at the excellent Aire in Jerez de los Caballeros is 96 hours (rather than the more usual 72), and I'm sure we could have happily spent another day in the town. However, there are clearly more people wanting to stay there than there are spaces available, so we stuck with our usual 3-night limit and left this morning.
I'd considered four different destinations for today (and Badajoz wasn't one of them), finally settling for a place called Almendral, which sits a 2km detour from the main road. We'd driven about 1km of that detour when I called for an about turn. Before deciding to go to Almendral I'd checked out walking routes in the area, and had noted a couple that looked good, but as we drove in the landscape just didn't look interesting (flat agricultural land), and the village looked small. We would be getting slightly ahead of ourselves by coming to Badajoz today, but I'm sure there are other places we can happily stop further north instead.
So, why come to Badajoz for the third time? Because we like the place, and why not revisit places you like?
To our surprise there were lots of spaces free at the Aire here (four years ago I'm sure we must have arrived at about the same time of day, and we took the only space*). It's taken until tea-time for it to fill up.
Elevenses was our first priority on arrival (it being nearly noon), swiftly followed by lunch, then we sorted the laundry and headed up the road with it. Then we headed back down the road with it, having found the small and medium sized washing machines all to be in use. I'll go back at opening time tomorrow.
Dumping the laundry back at Bertie, into town we went instead.
Across the long old bridge...
...over the river, and with a view of the castle.
As I mentioned yesterday, we've not seen many Menu del Dia on this trip, so in a completely unscientific bit of research to see if it's just where we've been or if they're in decline in general, we thought we'd swing past the place where we ate last time we were here. All very well in theory, but I don't keep a note of the names of places we eat, so we were relying on our vague 4-year-old recollections of whereabouts in town it was and what it looked like.
After a few false starts we found it:
Permanently closed and up for rent. A covid-related business failure? We'll never know.
We walked quite a way around the town (putting pins in the map at the two places we did find offering Menus), seeing bits that I don't think we've seen before. We didn't do anything cultural, having toured the castle and the art gallery before.
A couple of things that caught our eyes:
A 'floral' display, but using brassicas rather than flowers.
We stopped outside of this shop and thought of Conrad.
(*When we first came to Badajoz, in Colin, Bertie's predecessor, the Aire was much smaller and brand new.)
Weather: Sunny start, some heavy cloud around lunchtime, then clearing throughout the afternoon to clear skies again. 20 degrees.
The maximum stay at the excellent Aire in Jerez de los Caballeros is 96 hours (rather than the more usual 72), and I'm sure we could have happily spent another day in the town. However, there are clearly more people wanting to stay there than there are spaces available, so we stuck with our usual 3-night limit and left this morning.
I'd considered four different destinations for today (and Badajoz wasn't one of them), finally settling for a place called Almendral, which sits a 2km detour from the main road. We'd driven about 1km of that detour when I called for an about turn. Before deciding to go to Almendral I'd checked out walking routes in the area, and had noted a couple that looked good, but as we drove in the landscape just didn't look interesting (flat agricultural land), and the village looked small. We would be getting slightly ahead of ourselves by coming to Badajoz today, but I'm sure there are other places we can happily stop further north instead.
So, why come to Badajoz for the third time? Because we like the place, and why not revisit places you like?
To our surprise there were lots of spaces free at the Aire here (four years ago I'm sure we must have arrived at about the same time of day, and we took the only space*). It's taken until tea-time for it to fill up.
Elevenses was our first priority on arrival (it being nearly noon), swiftly followed by lunch, then we sorted the laundry and headed up the road with it. Then we headed back down the road with it, having found the small and medium sized washing machines all to be in use. I'll go back at opening time tomorrow.
Dumping the laundry back at Bertie, into town we went instead.
As I mentioned yesterday, we've not seen many Menu del Dia on this trip, so in a completely unscientific bit of research to see if it's just where we've been or if they're in decline in general, we thought we'd swing past the place where we ate last time we were here. All very well in theory, but I don't keep a note of the names of places we eat, so we were relying on our vague 4-year-old recollections of whereabouts in town it was and what it looked like.
After a few false starts we found it:
We walked quite a way around the town (putting pins in the map at the two places we did find offering Menus), seeing bits that I don't think we've seen before. We didn't do anything cultural, having toured the castle and the art gallery before.
A couple of things that caught our eyes:
(*When we first came to Badajoz, in Colin, Bertie's predecessor, the Aire was much smaller and brand new.)
A range of different kit producers in that window.
ReplyDeleteI recall stopping and looking at their window display before, and I'm sure the range was more extensive then - but perhaps they've just dedicated the window to other stuff at the moment, with more models inside. We didn't venture in.
Delete