At Home, part 8

We decided to take Howie and Gail to El Escorial and Ávila on Thursday before Thanksgiving dinner. Now that I knew my way around El Escorial, the tour went smoothly, and we drove on west to Ávila, the walled town of Santa Teresa, which we hadn’t seen before. “Ah-vee-lah,” Howie kept calling it, and I corrected him relentlessly--“Ah-vee-lah”—till we were laughing at each other.

The first thing I noticed as we pulled into the old part of the city was that there were plenty of empty parking spaces. “Ah, off-season tourism!” I sighed with pleasure. “This is incredible! The weather’s still great, the tourists are gone—we have the place to ourselves!” We entered a gate in the town’s walls and walked along the narrow streets.

There were churches to see, and we saw some of them, but the real attraction of Ávila was the wall that surrounded the town, still intact. Built around 1100, the wall had nine gates and 88 towers. And according to the guidebook, there was a man in a little booth who, for 100 pesetas, would let you climb a stairway to the top of the ramparts. There, if you were a kid, you could run around and have a great time, and if you were an adult, you could see some great views and even photograph them. So that was what we did.

It really was beautiful atop the wall. Buildings modern and ancient could be seen, as well as miles of farmland outside the city. We climbed small stairways to the tops of some of the towers. At one point Gail disappeared. Julie went down the stairs looking for her, and she popped out from the side of the tower, shouting “Boo!” Julie exploded into giggles, and suddenly we were all stalking one another, hiding and jumping out and laughing.

Then it was time to come down.

Somehow the stairs we had come up looked quite different to Lisa on the way down. Steep, certainly, and dark, and narrow. “I can’t do it,” Lisa said, miserable. “I think I’m going to fall down.”

She made some false starts, we coaxed her and offered to walk in front of her, and then Gail had an idea. “Do you think you could come down sitting?”

“What do you mean?” Lisa asked.

“Like this,” Gail demonstrated. “One step at a time, sit, go down, sit.”

Lisa tried it, gingerly. It took a while, but it worked.

When she reached the bottom, she was beaming and relieved. “I did it!” she shouted.

Back we went to the house, where we ate the militarily procured turkey, courtesy of Phil Douglas. It was a great Thanksgiving, and we retired sated and happy and full of excitement for our driving trip the next day to Barcelona.