Cold in Ávila
From Salamanca, I hopped on a midday train to Ávila, proceeding eastward, just ahead of a massive new rain front that enveloped Salamanca right as I entered the train station. Spanish trains are not known for speed, but the ride did buy me a couple of hours in Ávila before it started to pour there too.
Ávila´s cathedral hada large free exhibition of religious art, and, as soon as the rain started, all the tourists in the street (including myself), were suddenly overcome with a desire to see it. The crowd huddled under a tarp next to the entrance and bristled with umbrellas on all sides, resembling the shields of a Roman turtle formation. Still, the horizontal rain was merciless, and I was wet and freezing cold by the time I entered the cathedral.
Thankfully, the squall passed by the time I finished wandering through the 2.5 km of exhibiits, and I had a couple of hours to walk around the town´s medieval stone wall before it started getting dark. I found a hostal in the old quarter to spend the night, and shivered miserably under 4 blankets from an acute fever I managed to pick up there. People had warned me of Ávila´s harsh climate, and, perhaps, I was a little careless after completing several long mountain hikes without getting sick. In the morning, the fever was mostly gone, but I felt very weak, and did not manage to leave the room until noon. Still, by 2pm I was already in the next town on my list, Segovia.
Ávila´s cathedral hada large free exhibition of religious art, and, as soon as the rain started, all the tourists in the street (including myself), were suddenly overcome with a desire to see it. The crowd huddled under a tarp next to the entrance and bristled with umbrellas on all sides, resembling the shields of a Roman turtle formation. Still, the horizontal rain was merciless, and I was wet and freezing cold by the time I entered the cathedral.
Thankfully, the squall passed by the time I finished wandering through the 2.5 km of exhibiits, and I had a couple of hours to walk around the town´s medieval stone wall before it started getting dark. I found a hostal in the old quarter to spend the night, and shivered miserably under 4 blankets from an acute fever I managed to pick up there. People had warned me of Ávila´s harsh climate, and, perhaps, I was a little careless after completing several long mountain hikes without getting sick. In the morning, the fever was mostly gone, but I felt very weak, and did not manage to leave the room until noon. Still, by 2pm I was already in the next town on my list, Segovia.
posted by Dmitri Evseev at 2:27 PM
<< Home