We liked Madrid. We weren’t sure we were going to, but we did, and so we didn’t want to leave. We felt like we were just getting to know the city. But leave we must – we had a hire car booked and accommodation to get to.

We packed up and walked down to the car rental place. The woman that served us was really friendly and gave us some great tips on small towns to visit in the Pico De Europa area – which is where we were headed.

Car organised, now Steve had to navigate our way out of Madrid and their plethora of crazy ass roundabouts. We were also a bit worried about getting trapped in road closures – as one of the biggest Pride parades in the world was happening today. Apparently around 2 million people will come to the city this weekend – Madrid has a population of 3 million, so that’s quite crazy.

Anyway, we needn’t have worried – we were leaving early enough to miss the road closures and before we knew it, we were on our way – bound for Leon.

It was about a 3 hour drive to Leon. When we got there we couldn’t find our accommodation. The GPS wanted us to go up streets that we clearly were not allowed to go up and we drove around a roundabout about 5 times. We needed to find parking as the accommodation didn’t provide it, and as we drove around the sad looking streets, we were beginning to fear we might’ve made a huge mistake by coming here. We eventually found a car park that seemed close enough to our accommodation- we got an approached by a man who offered us advice in Spanish and then asked for money. We briefly toyed with the idea of moving the car again, but couldn’t face another trip around the roundabout. Besides our accommodation was apparently only a 5 minute walk away.

Luckily, once we found our street – we also found all the people and all the things and suddenly Leon didn’t seem as scary anymore.

Our accommodation was really nice too.

We had some life saving olives and snacks before heading out to explore.

There’s a bit cathedral in the town – as there seems to be in most Spanish towns. And lots and lots and lots of places to eat and drink.

We caught the mini tourists train around the town – a nice 30 minute tour of the city.

And we had a delicious dinner at around 9:30pm – not *quite* the locals time for dinner, but we are getting closer.

It actually got quite cool this evening and I had to get my cardigan! I know right?

After dinner we got ice cream.

It was quite late by now, so we tried to go to sleep. Unfortunately as we have discovered- Leon is a party town – full of Hens do’s and Bucks nights and god knows what else. People shouting and making random noises all night long. And then, just as they started quieting down…our neighbours came home and proceeded to scream, laugh and slam doors loudly….we didn’t get a lot of sleep.