That is my thought for today – 45 degrees outside of the car and 14 degrees inside with the AC fan running almost full speed! Yikes! That is 2 degrees short of the hottest temperature I have ever been in (Uluru, Australia formally known as Ayers Rock)! I did not expect this temperature in Spain, however they are experiencing a heat wave currently – it just keeps waving away!
So let’s get on with today! We left our hotel in Badjoz in plenty of time to go check out the walled city which we saw when driving into the city. We got parked and walked up to the museum which we found was free! Very nice – air conditioned and free! But no elevator… So I checked out the 1st floor while Andrew looked at the other floors and took pictures for me (which I will add to this day hopefully on June 12rh). As the rest of the fort was not accessible and the heat was rising (it was already in the low 30’s, we decided to get out of town and start the 3 hour drive to Huelva. The route that we took is below. Not wanting to backtrack and wanting to visit the lower part of Portugal, I picked Huelva as a place to stop for 2 days so that we could take a day and drive into Portugal. Then we will make the hours drive to Seville and stay there a couple of days. So that is why we took the more direct route to Huelva than the one that went through Sevilla, which was a multi-lane highway. Oh what a ride we were in for! It is a good thing that Andrew has driven lots of mountain roads as that was perfect for this drive. On the other hand, I had to hang on and was unable to knit or do anything during the drive other than take some very interesting pictures – of which half I had to delete! We went up, around, down and over some low mountains – sort of reminded me of a drive that I made with our friends Guy and Leah from Italy to Zurich crossing the Swiss Alps – although those were WAY higher and the road much narrower at times! I will let the pictures speak for themselves. The only sad thing is that we were passed, despite Andrew doing the speed limit (and being comfortable with it) by many vehicles and we ended up being delayed for about 30 minutes due to an accident involving one of those crazy drivers. We did make it to Huelva which is another University city and got settled in our hotel – another AC Hotel by Marriott! These are really nice clean, standard hotels that we really enjoy staying in as we know each time what type of room we will have and what to expect at their breakfasts (which include gluten free goodies)! We went out for an interesting dinner at 9pm a local restaurant and sat on the street and ate some hot tapas which we shared and eventually got back to the hotel at about 10:30pm. It was interesting to see the people change from being locals just wanting dinner to those going out for dinner prior to hitting the club scene! On the way back we passed by what we would use as a tennis court being used as a soccer pitch and quite a competitive game going on! Tomorrow: Drive to Portugal!
