Traveling Segovia to Madrid

Errand day

Emma woke up still feeling yucky so it's a good thing we had a super lazy day.  We managed to get out of bed by 10:00, then eat breakfast and a pastry by noon, phew.  While most of us were eating pastries, Charlie and Eric got their hair cut.   Segovia is so little they had no problem finding a barber within walking distance, incidentally he had been cutting hair since the age of 15.  

We drove the quick 90 minutes to Madrid and had to wait 30 minutes for the landlord to let us in.  Never fear - we had our Rook cards handy and we played on the steps of the apartment complex until he came.

After lunch of tapas that Stewart made for us (bread, Jamon, tomatoes and cheese grilled to perfection, cherries, and chips) Stewart and Eric drove to the Mission Office to get Stewart's Mission luggage that we have to figure out how to ship to SLC before we leave Madrid.  There will be a serious cost analysis that has to happen as shipping home the luggage will not be cheap (we'll deal with that Monday).

Sydney, Charlie, and I did the grocery shopping while Maren and Emma stayed home so Emma could get ready to tape her dance audition.  (We found out this week that she has to tape a dance audition for her Dance Company and it's due today - Saturday).  So we rolled back the carpet, moved the coffee table, and she took a Tylenol, gritted her teeth and practiced.

After dinner we spent an hour on the plaza just outside our apartment taping Emma while Spanish grandmas looked on and young kids playing soccer as Emma jumped, twirled, and leaped her Ballet, Jazz, and Contemporary dances to music Maren had downloaded from Apple Music that we then blared on a speaker Stewart had from his mission.  I'm sure it'll be the most memorable dance audition she does - hopefully the the Madrid scenery will give her an edge over the other dancers - at least it's unique and memorable.

Spanish hair cut

trying to put the luggage in the car

Madrid lunch - tapas

relaxing in the only room that had "A/C"

Segovia - A Palace and A Fortress and a Roman Aquaduct

El escorial * Alcazar * Roman Aquaduct

14,145 steps

We have been on the move for a solid week and staying up late and it showed this morning.  Gratefully we are in a lazy tourist town an hour outside of Madrid where people come to escape for the weekend (like a Park City).  The air is cool up here and the streets are quiet.

We drove to El Escorial today, about an hour from Segovia.  El Escorial is a Spanish Palace built by Phillip II in the late 1500s.  It is also the burial place of all the Kings since then, their queen, and all the children who died before age 7.  It's a big, boxy castle, with square everything - nothing like the French castles (or chateaus) of the same era.  The inside felt a bit like a prison or fortress.  We saw some El Greco paintings - apparently Phillip II commissioned El Greco's first painting in Spain, but El Greco wasn't appreciated here so he moved on to Toledo.  

We had a picnic in the shade just outside the Palace before heading home.  Emma wasn't feeling well so Emma and I got dropped off at our apartment while everyone else went to another Fortress, Alcazar that is just minutes from our Apartment in Segovia.  (Not only is there a fortress down the street, our apartment is right across the street from the really cool church in Segovia.  After we leave each location, we rank our accommodations - we've placed this one 2nd only to Normandy.)

Stewart made us an awesome missionary dinner tonight; beans, turkey, and a salad.  He's a funny kid that has always enjoyed cooking and Spain was a perfect place to grow that talent since most of the time he had to cook for himself - not very many dinner appointments.

After dinner we walked down to a Roman Aqueduct built during the end of the 1st century that is still amazingly in tact.  Until the late 1800s it provided water for the city of Segovia.  We also enjoyed the unique architecture of the city that was influenced by the Moors - very different from what we have seen so far.   (I'm really missing my Italian architecture - when I saw the aqueduct, I thought I was back home in Italy).

El escorial

Alcazar

enjoying Segovia

Roman aquaduct

Oviedo to Segovia

Oviedo hike * Lunch with member family * Segovia

13,522 steps

We spent most of our day in Oviedo with Stewart as our guide. It was wonderful hearing his mission stories and him pointing out all his memorable places.  We climbed to the top of a nearby "mountain" with a statue of Christ on top for a grand over-look of this city.  Kind of like the Ensign Peak of Oviedo.  Stewart pointed out the interesting points of the city from this bird's eye view.  Oviedo sits in a valley surrounded by green mountains.  This area of Spain is gorgeous. It's green with jagged mountains, rocky on top with green everywhere else.  It's cool with a sea breeze - Oviedo is only 30 minute from the coast.

At 1:30 we had a lunch appointment with a member family that Stewart befriended while in this area.  A complete member family with 2 daughters, one of whom is a return missionary from Chile.  You could feel the spirit of the Gospel in their home with the picture of the Savior on the wall.  We had a marvelous lunch of green salad with tuna, bread, jam, tortilla (eggs & potatoes), and a thin fillet of chicken seasoned, breaded, and sautéed in butter.  Every bite was wonderful.  We had brought a watermelon and soda to the lunch, so those were added as well.  We enjoyed playing Uno with their family afterwards.  It's a bit weird that an entire family of 3 working adults can be home in the middle of the day for a 2 hour lunch on a Thursday.

We left Oviedo late and had a hard time finding our apartment in Segovia because of the closed roads in the middle of town (very common).  As we looked for our apartment I felt like I was back in Italy as Eric squeezed the car through tiny streets, bringing the side view mirrors in tight so they wouldn't hit the side of the buildings as we drove down the "street".  This was Stewart's first introduction to this kind of old style Spanish town. Even though he's been in Spain for 2 years, the areas he's served in have been suburbs with apartments, not old town city centers where the tourists hang out.

We arrived so late all the grocery stores were closed so we had to have dinner at the nearby cafe.  The kids are exhausted, we've had so many late nights recently and we've been traveling a lot.  I knew when we planned our trip this week (and the week we traveled from Italy to France) would be hard because of staying only a couple of nights in each city.  It'll be good to land in Madrid for 5 days on Saturday.  If the heat doesn't kill us there we should be able to recuperate and regroup.

Looking out towards Oviedo from hike

Lunch with member family

Segovia