Chasing Castles

Life feels cleaner after a good rain. The dust has settled; the temperature has gone down. When I left Lupe's house in Córdoba on Saturday morning, the city was actually cool. (This is saying something, since it has the highest average summer temperature in Spain and Europe!)

The land changed as I drove the three hours north to Mérida. Mountains gave way to broad, flat plains. I saw a Roman tower behind a gas station.

In the middle of the plain, an enormous rock pile suddenly loomed up. To my utter delight, a castle perched precariously atop it. I did not realize just how precarious it seemed until I drove around it.

I found out later it was the Castillo de Belmez, built originally in 1245 and last used by the French when they were attempting to overrun Spain (Napoleon=idiot, remember?).

I thought about going to see it, but I had a lot I wanted to do and I needed to be in Sevilla to turn in the car that evening, so I kept going.

I've discovered that there are few things that make me happier than driving through unfamiliar territory without the fear of getting lost.

 I could thoroughly enjoy sailing along at 90km/hr. I began passing through fields upon fields of solar panels - small wonder! The sun was beating down and there were few, if any, clouds to be seen.

Once I passed the solar panel fields, I began to go past acres of sunflowers, all pointing toward the sun.

In Spanish, the sunflower is called a "girasol". "Girar" means to turn, and "sol" is, of course, the sun. They are sun-turners! It's an apt name.

Of course, I was stuck behind a slow-moving vehicle for most of this, but once I went around it, the sheer emptiness of road stretching out in front of me was simply glorious.

I was driving along happily when in the distance I saw another hill fortress, this time looking like a crown. I determined I was going to go find it.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw a small brown sign with an arrow pointing toward the castle, with "Roman theater" written on it. Naturally, I immediately turned off the main road onto a winding road toward the hill and the castle atop it. My GPS proceeded to have a panic attack.

The road led steadily toward the castle, winding up and up the mountain and right through the small whitewashed town of Reina.

It was a sleepy Saturday morning; the only stirring inhabitants of the town were three women. They looked at me curiously, but without much interest.


My quest for the castle ended rather ingloriously and abruptly. I simply could not find a way to go farther.

As I backed my car back down what turned out to be a sheep track and did a 3-point turn on the side of a mountain with a steep drop no more than a yard behind my back tires, I reflected that this whole situation probably counted against the promise I had made to a friend to "not do anything stupid" while in Spain.


After heading back through the still-sleepy town, I headed off to find the Roman Theater. This detour turned out much better.

A bored and sweaty security guy emerged from his air-conditioned trailer only just long enough to not answer my question of how much the theater cost to see and merely tell me it was "that way". He then immediately went back into the trailer. I therefore assumed that it was free.

The path to the theater was lined with fences to keep sheep in. It was an intensely hot day by this time - 11:45 in the morning! I felt like just lying down in the shade like this poor sheep.

A word about this Roman theater: it was completely deserted and remarkably intact. I could climb down the steps, stand on the stage, go "backstage", and explore as much as I liked. 

                     




There was a Roman town in the field nearby, and I could see plainly where the foundations of the buildings were. An informative sign told me in good Spanish and Google-translated English that the town had been mentioned by Pliny and Ptolemy; that the Emperor Vespasian had been involved in the planning of the city; and that centuries later the hill fortress had been made by the Moors, using Roman stone.








I only spent about half an hour at this fantastic spot, but it was absolutely worth it. It isn't every day that you get to have an entire Roman theater all to yourself. Well, as much as you can have it "all to yourself" when you're sharing the space with about a hundred sheep and one completely uninterested security guy.








To be continued...

Pray God We May Make Haste, and Come Too Late

I blame Shakespeare for the title. We finished off Saturday with Richard II at the Globe Theater.

But we started the day with Westminster Abbey. We went through the entire thing and wrote down every name we recognized - page upon page. We saw Milton, Shelley, Keats, Shakespeare, Churchill, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Oliver Cromwell, Mary Queen of Scots; Henries the III, IV, V, VI, VII, LCXYZIIVZX (just kidding); William Wilberforce, William Pitt the Younger, Isaac Newton, etc.

There were a whole lot of people there. Most of them we didn't even know; had never heard about. A lot were in Latin, which didn't help us a bit, but I am so glad we went.

After Westminster Abbey, we went to the Churchill War Rooms, the extensive basement where Churchill directed the war. I had thought that the war was directed from a bunker system, but it was actually just a semi-reinforced basement. It is surprising that the Germans never bombed the place. But they didn't, and the war went on, and finally the war ended.

In keeping with the war idea, we went to the RAF museum next.

This was not the highlight of our trip, as I snapped under the pressure of trying to see everything we wanted to see in London and spending a great deal of time (I thought) in an exhibit geared mostly for kids and not seeing the RAF planes and history I wanted to. We had made it all the way back to the road when we decided that we really wanted to finish out the museum, regardless of time constraints.

It was a good thing we did; they had an entire hangar filled with planes and objects from World War II. We were able to go inside the flying boat (which is, essentially, the bottom of a boat with the top of a plane). There were medals and uniforms - including a manequin of Goering wearing his uniform. We even saw the remains of a crashed Hawker Hurricane (a British plane only in service for 12 days during the Battle of Britain). It was a fascinating place.

By this time, we were hungry and tired, so we went back to our hotel via Tube (the strike was only for Thursday). We minded the gap between the train and the platform, changed at Embankment for the Victoria lines, and arrived at our hotel again, footsore and looking forward to taking off our heavy backpacks. We walked around the block to the Queen's Arms, a small pub nearby.

In the interest of having the whole British pub experience, we had no alcohol. But we had bangers and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes), fish, a cheese platter, and something called "Sticky Toffee Pudding with Honeycomb Ice Cream." You can imagine the deliciousness of that last one.




We'd already seen Richard II at home on DVD to prepare for coming here, so we didn't feel rushed to get to the Globe and spend 3 hours standing on blistered feet. We managed to get there right when Bolingbroke overthrows Richard - about 10 minutes before the intermission. We were groundlings - people who stand in the yard, the space around the base of the stage. The people who stood in front of us left at the intermission and never came back, so we got front-row "seats." In fact, I put my arms on the stage and rested my chin there.

 After Richard was killed and Bolingbroke did his spiel about how much he loved him though he wished him dead, the play ended with a curtain call. We left before the mad rush of the thundering hordes out the doors of the theater. We took a picture of St. Paul's and Tower Bridge all lit up at night, stopped off at Westminster Station to run up the stairs and take a picture of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, and went back to our hotel.