It's Friggin' Freezing Mr. Bigglesworth!

Well friends, life goes on, and so should we. SOO, today I shall tell you about the peculiar town of Segovia.

The drive was surprisingly uneventful up until we stopped for gas on the outskirts of Madrid. While the girls were buying only the bare essential, Make-peace and I discovered thus far one of the most curious contrapments known to man. A Pet-Washing-Machine!!

Apparently you're supposed to just kind of throw your cat, dog, ferret, or squirrel in, close the door and watch it get a heart attack/drown. At this point I felt that something was definitely awry, to say the least. My next sign was the fantastically dark horizon filled with ominous clouds and the fact that the uphills got so steep that our loyal C3 maxed out at 80km/h. I suddenly remembered what I wise Canuck once told me about European cars and their small engines. I started to think about some swear words that I hadn't already used 25 times on this magical trip, but before I could think of any my attention was needed elsewhere. For the car made a beep and a digit 3 C was blinking on the dashboard. I blinked a couple of times to find the 1
on its left side but it wouldn't show. Through a logic-defying thought process I managed to convince myself that the number was actually the current outdoor temperature. And soon enough it was snowing. Well..

We watched the thermometer manically as it went from 23 in Sagunto to 1(!) as we closed in on Segovia. Our feelings went from confusion to disbelief, followed by mild fear and finally amused hysteria.

Upon arrival to the mountainous town (which we later found out is meteorologically the COLDEST PLACE IN ALL OF SPAIN) I got out of the car to consult a city map, which was a horrible idea since it was now officially freezing and I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Additionally, it didn't occur to me that we were in Spain, hence that map was going to be like trying to tell someones fortune from a pile of guano. And so, we had to drive around the city for 45 minutes looking for a hotel, which with the snow, the one way streets and the narrow uphill passages and alleys made it resemble a scene from the movie TAXI, only with an infinitely crappier car. But as the good book says, seek and thou shall find. And we did. An affordable hotel with big rooms, a nice concierge, and most importantly HEATING. YATZY! We decided to celebrate this by going to dinner to a nice local restaurant. The concierge was happy to recommend a traditional tavern close by, in which the king himself had dined more that once. And sure enough, as we entered the restaurant, on their wall of fame there was a picture of the king Juan Carlos together with the owner of the restaurant. And he (the king) was smiling, so our hopes were pretty high. Even the recommended house wine was outSTANDING, and the international menus had less than five typos per page, so we couldn't wait to get to the food. (Make-peace is just marvelling at my beard, which was at its prime then.)

We couldn't translate everything and Make-peace was like Ray Charles in the Louvre, so we went with the waiter's recommendations. You guessed it, BAD IDEA!!

I don't even want to know what it was. The brown things are some kind of peas or nuts, and the white things are fat. Not even meat with fat like usually in Spain, just plain fat. The other stuff, I have no clue. So we concentrated on the wine and the desserts, which weren't half bad actually. Later that night, to our great surprise, we discovered that Make-peace was fluent in Norwegian.

The next day we donned every piece of clothing we had brought with us and headed out. The town had originally been a medieval fortress, so it was bulging with old buildings and historical monuments, highlights being sub-zero temperatures,


a giant cathedral,

a roman aqueduct,

and an actual, real castle.

Initially the slightly nippy weather brought a bit of a smirk on the faces of our happy campers, but the castle itself turned out to be remarkable.

It even had an artillery museum, which we had to rush through in 10 minutes though, because the castle was closing, but that didn't mean we couldn't take ingenious photos on the way.

I also experienced a small personal triumph. While having breakfast on the last day we got a parking ticket, but I chased down the parking attendant and came up with a story so mind-boggling, that she ripped the ticket apart on the spot and APOLOGIZED!

So there you have it, Segovia, DONE. Next time, TOP 4 Beard Styles.