Burgos.

Happiness: hot shower and clean clothes, after hot mint chocolate with churros and minty breath from brushing teeth. Neat, how simply being clean changes everything, huh?

Day tripped to Burgos today (World Heritage Site!). Burgos is not the best place to day trip from Leòn: The bus leaves at 11:40 (mine left late) and arrives after 1:30 p.m., when everything is closed until 4:00 p.m. (in Spain things tend to close between 1:30 and 4:30, plus or minus half an hour), and the last return bus is at 5:40 p.m., which doesn't leave much time for visiting things, especially if you end up, like I did, trekking to the Museo-Monasterio de las Huelgas Reales, clear on the other side of the city, with a tour guided-only visit that is supposed to last 50 minutes but lasted 1 hour 20, and return busses from museum to downtown running only once every 40 minutes, it being Saturday. (Trains are worse: they leave Leon later and return sooner than the busses). Kind of sucks a bit, huh?

Did manage to visit at least the open/free areas of the famous Burgos Cathedral, which is supposedly one of the 3 finest in Spain, but in my opinion (or perhaps because I didn't have time to visit the "pay for" things owing to the bus schedule), not too extraordinary, especially in comparison to the one in Leòn, with its breathtaking 1800 square meters of stained glass windows.

So, all in all, a rather tranquil day (apart from the running the km or so from across town to the bus station to catch the return to Leóen after fidgeting and acting antsy during the whole of the guided visit). A neat thing I noticed about the ALSA busses (ALSA is the national bus network here in Spain) is, not only are their Supra class trips rather neat (you get free food and any drink you want and movie and they give you candies and chocolates and a set of nifty headphones to keep plus a nice keychain/neck mobile phone hanger thingy that looks cool and is not very obviously an advertisement to the casual onlooker), but ALSA has a nice bus route that runs from Irun in Northern Spain through Madrid and then south all the way to Morocco´s Agadir (ferry, I take it)! How cool is that?

Anyway, day was nice and warm, for a change.