It was a busy morning for me with my Laptop, and I occasionally dropped the hint to Sophie that it would be ever so helpful if she could perhaps check out any must see places as we were about to head in a Westish direction. She wasn’t having much joy with this, so we agreed we’d stick with my tried and tested, bish bash bosh approach, which has served us well for the last 50 thousand miles. This works by aiming in one direction and seeing what happens along the way. Whilst this has proven successful, I’m also acutely aware of the couple of times Sophie has done some research and we have discovered true gems of places, that I’d have never found.

So after lunch I programmed in my point and shoot route West that ended at a decent looking Park4night. Just before the point of departure, I don’t know what happened, but Sophie started rattling off a list of places to visit. They did sound potentially interesting, but slightly more North-Westerly than I was planning. Anyway, I convinced myself that I could perhaps adapt my route.

From where we were, there weren’t many East-West routes available, so we had to first drive South, then North, before getting to point pretty much due West of where we started. So after a couple of hundred km of mostly motorway driving, we at last found ourselves on the quieter roads of the Sierra Norte Guadarrama national park.

The first town on Sophie’s list was Pedraza, which turns out to be on the “One of Spain’s most beautiful towns” list. Before I found that out, I admit I was more interested in the rather nice looking Park4night I’d been aiming for there. The parking spot is below the hill top town. It’s very quiet, has a good solid, flat surface, and has great views of Pedraza, a mere stone’s throw away.

There’s plenty of space, which we have to ourselves, and the only minor downside are the half a dozen or so dogs which appear to live fenced in on their own in a property between us and the town. So far they’ve been fine with the occasional outburst, so we’re not overly concerned about our sleep being disturbed.