And spent most of that time in a town outside Madrid called Villa Del Prado. It calls itself La Huerta De Madrid, which means Madrid's market garden. It also happens to be where my mother came from and where quite a lot of my family still lives.
I will not bore you with family shots or stories. Suffice to say it was wonderful to catch up with them all again. I will though show you a few shots of their market gardens.
Some silver beet
Some tomatoes which they can grow as they have two layers of plastic roofing....the first keeps the frost off and allows the tomatoes to grow in the quite cold conditions of a Castillian winter.
Some radishes
And some lettuces
It was quite interesting to see the level work to produce marketable quantities of veggies, also the level of automation. My cousin switched on the sprinkler on quarter of one of his hothouses when he saw the radishes were getting a bit dry using his mobile phone.
Of course I also checked out the rest of the town, by the river
And from a nearby hill where I was almost gored by a wild boar, well ....there was one on the path up the hill and it was a scary beast.
I also spent a lot of time wandering the town finding old haunts like my grandmothers old house, and the mile post I sat on as a two year old, though then there were only wheat fields behind it then....
In all I was soon a local and on first name terms with the barman at my cousins favourite bar......just around this corner for a quick drink and a tapa, which here just come with the drink. In fact they heard I liked morcilla so cooked me up a serve one day. Ahhhhhh......the good life.
Country life has its attractions! But family has even more. The final dinner will be hard to forget.
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