Castile-La Mancha, Spain

Saturday morning we left Madrid early to head to Plasencia in Extremadura. The drive, with Gabi and Anna, was quite a nice one. It's pleasant to see an landscape other than the ones you are used to in your own home. Once we were outside of Madrid, the landscape became quite beautiful. This was especially the case when we entered Castile-La Mancha.

We stopped briefly at a small town called Maqueda in La Mancha for breakfast. We pulled over to find a small bar/restaurant called Bar el Castilla (named such for the castle down the road).


The bar/restaurant was small, and only had two customers standing at the bar. We were greeted at the door by a scruffy looking dog, that seemed curious about us visiting.

Went inside and ordered a bit of food for breakfast and some coffees as well.


We had this absolutely delicious Manchego cheese with bread. How awesome it was to have such good food from the region it comes from!

We continued on after breakfast towards Plasencia, but not without seeing the Castle of Maqueda:

This castle apparently dates back to the 15th century and is now the residence of the Guardia Civil (the police basically) and was declared a national historic monument in 1931.

On the road again, we passed by groves of olive trees, herds of sheep, and all of the beautiful countryside. It was interesting to me, and maybe I was just not in the right place....but I saw none of the fabled wind mills from Don Quixote. I did however see, towards the outside of the state a very large collection of solar power panels (several fields worth, thousands of them), and I can't help but wonder how Don Quixote would battle the solar panels if that had been the case so many years ago!