Last weekend we made one of our many frequent visits to my father-in-law's (Juan) village, Mijares. It is only about 100km away from Madrid (which should take an 1 1/2 hours to get there but took pretty much 3 hours due to the volume of traffic) but is a truly beautiful place, as it is situated in the mountains to the west of Madrid, and is part of the province of Avila. Going to the village has a couple of advantages...
- It is far cooler than Madrid at night which means that you can get some sleep (which is something that is almost impossible in Madrid. When you do sleep you wake up in a big ball of sweat).
- You get to relax...
To give you an idea of the view from Juan's house, check out the following :
While there this time I helped (or best put attempted to help) to harvest potatoes from my Juan´s allotment. Juan was born in the village and has various land around the area in which he has olive tree's, chestnut tree's and various other fruit & veg. Over the past couple of years I have helped out where I can and every year there is the ritualistic (and back breaking I can add) collection of the chestnut's and olives.
Another advantage of going to the village this time was that Mayte's cousin has purchased a bloody great big plastic swimming pool. The beast of a pool measures 6m x 3m x 1.2 m... it was great.
The only problem was comming back to Madrid last Sunday. Saying that, things have cooled down a little at night for the past 2 or 3 days, so sleeping is possible again.
