Day 2: Segovia-Lugo-Rabade

We spent the morning walking around Segovia. It is a small city and the aqueduct is its main attraction. It is a huge and very impressive structure and yet you can‘t see it from almost any place in town.
We set out at noon for the 5 hour drive to Lugo. The highways are great, but once you get off the highway, you encounter gazillions of roundabouts, which are very confusing. Not only do the have the regular roundabout route, but also sometimes a road through the middle and separate sets of lights for each entry. Our GPS lady always gets confused at roundabout so at one point we went around the same route several time to finally be able to get on the highway.

At around 2 pm I needed coffee so we took the nearest exit of the A-6 into desolation. After driving 2 miles we came to a little town. We drove through the town and did not see anything moving - not a car, not a person, or an animal. It looked like a ghost town. Finally we saw a lady washing the sidewalk. We asked where we could get coffee and she said we were stopped right in front of a bar. It had no sign and looked closed. But there were 2 people in it (maybe they were manikins) watching TV on a big screen. The barman was there too so we got our coffee. Our next adventure was finding our hotel, which is located in a tiny village about 10 miles out of the city of Lugo. The name of the village is not in the GPS so we couldn’t get directions from the GPS lady. When we got off the highway in Rabade, we asked 2 gents but they never heard of the little berg our hotel is located in. The third person we asked pointed us in a direction. After driving on tiny roads, over single lane bridges we saw a bar and decided to ask. They told us ‘This is it”. Truly an old Galician stone structure converted into a hotel.

We drove into Lugo for dinner. What a nice town. It has a wall around the city like a 1/10 scale of the wall of China. The wall was built by the Romans in the 12th century and it encircles the historic center. It has a walking path on top which was filled with people for an evening walk or jog. We walked Lugo, had a beer at an outdoor café ( with hundreds of Lugosians) and then walked to dinner. Great dinner at a mom and pop restaurant Casa Rivas. It was recommended by our guidebook and turned out to be a real find. It has no menu so the owner and the cook came to our table and told us what was available (in Spanish, of course). The cook, who looked like the owner’s mother, insisted that we try her noodle soup so we did and it was delicious. She also said we could have fish and/or meat cutlets so we ordered both. Both were great. Since they had 3 kinds of pastries and we couldn’t decide which we wanted, he brought us all three. They were fantastic and we devoured them. We also had wine and beer, salad and bread. We were surprised how reasonable the price was.

We are now writing this blog sitting in the attic of this 16th century Galician house looking forward to starting the search for our own Galician home.