We left our campsite yesterday morning. I wish I’d gotten a picture of the animals when they were crowding our motorcycles, but usually it was so funny I would forget to grab my phone.

You can see the unpromising sky, as well.

I had planned our route in the morning, but while we were drinking coffee, I was reading some local news via Facebook. In one of the areas we were going to be passing through, roads in Portugal were closed due to crazy amounts of SNOW.

So we changed our route a little. We still needed to go that direction, but instead of taking it easy along smaller highways, we took the main highway, and hightailed it to Spain.

It rained the entire way, but nothing too horrible, and we stopped in Ciudad Rodrigo, just across the border, for lunch.

It was a charming old walled town. We were quite happy to return to Spanish eating times. It was also nice to be able to communicate easily with the waitstaff again.

Unfortunately, it all went downhill from there. On the road south to Caceres, we went through such heavy rain and mist that we couldn’t see ahead at all. I have the TomTom, which shows me the shape of the road, and Dick could see my bright yellow bag. A line of cars followed us, and since none of them tried to pass us at our creeping pace, even in the straight stretches, I’m sure they were having almost as hard a time as we were.

The rain lightened back to normal about 100km outside of Caceres, and we stopped for gas. The gas station attendant was shocked we were on our motorcycles, and several of the cars who had been following us also stopped, and said various things along the lines of, “I wouldn’t want to be you!” No one grumbled about our speed.

We got into Caceres, but the host of the apartment we had reserved wasn’t there. I called her. “Oh, it was raining so heavily I thought I should wait a while before coming over!” “Yes, I said. We’re on motorcycles.” She actually hung up, and was absolutely in a panic when she arrived, fluttering around and talking a mile a minute. Her accent was really hoarse, and I really struggled to understand her. She seemed to go off on tangents a lot.

Eventually, she left, and we collapsed for the night, not even going out to the corner shop for something to eat.

I slept about 12 hours.