Spinning into Spain

Serpa, Portugal to Aracena, Spain

Day 9 - Tuesday - June 21
Our last day in Portugal. And we were finally getting at least the basic words down and knew how to say "Obrigado" with some confidence. The birds started singing like crazy at 5:45 so we got a pretty early start.

We had seen storks every day but this section of road had a nest on almost every power pole for a couple of miles. It was quite the sight.

If you enlarge the picture you can see one of the storks flying through the olives/ hay field.

Good bye Portugal, Hello Spain...it was pretty low key for a national border. We also crossed into the Central Europe time zone.

Hopefully these signs are indicative of better signing to come.  We had a hard time finding street names in all the towns in Portugal.

This is Rosal de la Frontera, just a few kilometers from the border. In hindsight we should have stopped here for the day. We hadn't seen the weather forecast or seen a profile of what was to come.

Lunch in Aroche was followed by a nap and waiting for the huge slice of watermelon to take effect.  It was really hot and had been mostly uphill so far. The GPS said we only had 10 miles to go to Cortegana.

It took us an hour to go 4 miles and we decided to take another hour break, hoping it would cool down a bit. There was more shade at least but it was still all uphill.

We arrived in Cortegana after 6pm pretty wiped out and famished. There were no restaurants open and  the hotel would not be serving tapas until 9:30. Cortegana was NOT one of our favorite places. We did check out the weather and it was supposed to be more of the same for the next week......105-110F!

Day 10 - Wednesday - June 22
There wasn't anything open for breakfast in Cortegana either until we reached a gas station on the main road (N433). A little bit of downhill was followed by about 5 kilometers of a 7% grade. We had to take a lot of breaks and it was already getting pretty warm. In Galaroza we actually checked into the bus but it had already come for the day. A local assured us that there were no more 7% grades in our near future so we pushed on. He was right and the riding did get easier though not the temperature. The cicadas are now speaking Spanish.

We reached Aracena before noon. Of course the castle is at the top of the hill........they are all at the top of the hill...............it is the Law of Castles.

This was on a little church where we had stopped to figure out our location.

The bullfight ring.

The motel had large display of metalwork but this motorcycle was the most elaborate.

Might as well take advantage of all this heat!

We checked out the bus station and tomorrow's schedule then did a little more touring around town on the way back to the hotel.

We actually took a dip in the pool after dinner. We also watched the swallows dipping in the pool. The heat is just too much for these 2 wetside-cool-wet spring Oregonians so we'll be doing tomorrow's ride on the bus.