Travelling along the back roads of Spain toward the north coast

We are taking the roads less travelled and seeing little villages,  The pretty hilltop village of Pedraza de la Sierra, about 37 kms northeast of Segovia was recommended by Lonely Planet.

The Castillian square in the middle of the town has been formed little by little over the years.  It is irregular and somewhat ramshackle.  There are boards around as next week there is to be a bull fight in the square as part of the festival to be held in the town.





The only visitors we saw were Spanish.  Not a foreign tourist in sight.  Unfortunately, these towns are close enough to Madrid that the madrilenos (Madrid residents) use them as weekend escapes and thus the prices of accommodation are high,

It also has a castle.

A wonderful deep gorge on the way towards Sepulveda.

We stayed the night in the small, insignificant town of Sebulcor where we managed to score a somewhat reasonably priced room for the night.  We then managed to persuade the owner of the local cafe to serve us dinner earlier than 9:00pm, the usual time for a Spaniard to eat the evening meal.

Our lodging place.

At times like these, we whip out our trusty little portable  mechanism for making a cup of tea.  A little immersion element that we can stick into a cup of water which comes to the boil in a few minutes.

We ended up having a most wonderful meal of hot vegetables topped with generous servings of anchovies.

Followed by what we thought was going to be the local dish of roast pork but which in actual fact was a giant beef chop for two, done to perfection.  The owner's aunt emigrated from this town to Perth so he was kindly disposed towards Australians.