Avila

We had another good nights sleep in the free car park in Plasencia and I slept like the dead. We woke up at 7:45am and it had been a cold night of 9°c and I had to light the fire for the first time on this trip to take the chill out of the air while we had coffees.
At 9:45am we took a walk back to the via verde to try and see the vultures but it wasn’t warm enough and there weren’t any so we took a 9km walk for nothing.
We got back to Wanda a midday and then took a 100 mile drive to the walled city of Avila which took 2 1/2 hours and we arrived just before 3pm.
We have had to pay for this aire as it’s right in the outskirts of the medieval city and it is cost €12 but that includes hot showers and toilets.
I’d already checked on google maps to see what the sights would be here and it looked like a lot of churches, convents and monasteries and once we were inside the walls that’s exactly what it was.
This town is most famous for being the birth place of mother teresa of jesus and there is a church named after her on the very place where the house she was born in used to stand. We didn’t go in the church but we did pay the €2 to enter the catacombs which are now a museum dedicated to her. Even after the museum we couldn’t tell you why she was a saint.
Avila is a large walled city with a lot of nothing inside and I would think most people come here to walk the ramparts which cost €8 each and to visit the cathedral which was closed when we arrived. It didn’t matter to us. This was just a secure stop on the way back through Spain and we knew that some of our stops on the way home would be like this.
As the sun started to set the temperature dropped and the sky turned a fiery red and orange. By 8pm it was just 6°c outside and it was set to get to 0° by the early hours. This will be our coldest night yet.Read more