No horses today, just travel. Louise texted me just before 6:30 a.m. to say she was already at the gate in Berlin. I left for Charles de Gaulle shortly after that. We met up at Terminal 4 of the Madrid airport, the pickup point for the group, and enjoy greasy sandwiches and beers while we spent a nice couple of hours chatting.

We easily recognized the other riders by the size of their luggage. There were two Germans, two Brits (both couples), two Australian women, two American women, and two other people, including my friend Joe, who had gone ahead earlier.

The taxi driver spoke French to me, I guess Maria Elena told him I spoke it, so we got the group out of the airport and into two taxis. After about an hour of driving we stopped in Avila, a very lovely and very old city in the mountains west of Madrid. Louise and I visited the cathedral, which was so old (13^th century) most of it wasn’t even Gothic. It had a beautifully carved altarpiece, I guess you call it, on one end of the wooden choir structure. 

But that broke up the magnificent sweep of the church from entrance to the rear. Still, the proportions were beautiful, very tall and a fairly narrow central nave. The arched ceilings were in some kind of local stone that they called bloodstone and were indeed red and white.

Then it was on through more rocky-mountainous roads to the Paradores, that Spanish hotel chain that is owned by the government. This particular one, the first ever, had been the king’s hunting lodge way back when; lots of oaken beams across the ceiling, Maria Elena gave us a tour.

There’s a great view looking across the valley out the back side, where we had dinner of venison, in Louise’s case, and steak in mine. Plus appetizers of, of course, that yummy Spanish ham.