Valencia, Spain

The Drive

We finally made it to Valencia Spain.  The kids and Brent had Wed-Fri off since Wed was Spain's labor day, and Thursday was a Madrid holiday Dos de Mayo which they celebrate the rebellion on the 2nd of May in 1808, by the people of Madrid against the occupation of the city by French troops, provoking a brutal repression by the French Imperial forces and triggering the Peninsular War.

     We left early Wednesday morning for a 4 hour drive and thought we would beat the traffic, but by the time we reached Madrid we realized we hadn't.  About 3 hours into the drive we had made it about an hour outside of the city of Madrid still in stop and go traffic.  It was unbelievable, and set us back several hours taking a total of about 7 hours.  The kids did fairly well, Kaiya read an entire book (Lemony Snickets) and we had time to catch some great shots along the way.

Just a shot of old castle ruins.  We were researching castles along our route to see if there was one we could see on the way and found out that there are over 2500 castles here in Spain.  We then knew our chances were good!

We took a close up of the castle on the right in the following photo.

We wish now that we would have stopped to explore this one, but didn't see how cool it was until we got home and looked at this close-up on the computer.

Here is a bunch of "bull".  It's hard to tell how big these are in the picture but if you look below the bull you can see the tops of the trees and maybe that will give you a better idea.  These large metal bulls are all over the sides of the highways reminding us we are in bull country I guess.

This is the Minglanilla castle which we did stop at and explore a little.  It didn't seem too old, and we haven't been able to find any information regarding it.

This was one of the stairways to the walls of the castle. 

This Embalse de Contreres lake was breathtaking which made me very glad I wasn't driving.

WARNING: There are 8 posts included in this trip.