Oranges

Im not surprised that I've been eating the most consistently great oranges. I am surprised that a couple of these were oranges I picked up off the ground (under orange trees of course). They're like big sweet tangerines and now that I think about it maybe they are!

The app on my phone says that I walked 37km today which I don't think is true. The step counter seems as accurate as any and it counted just under 47,000. Either way it was flat as a pancake and I feel pretty good.

The most of the recent towns have been surprisingly lively given their size. It's all vineyards and olive groves around here. Some fields have both olives and vines interspersed. I never knew Extremadura was such a wine country. A good 20-30% of the vineyards are freshly planted. I don't know if that's a normal crop rotation thing or not. Maybe Extremaduran wine is becoming more popular.

I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. Merida is only four hours from here (Torremejia) and is the biggest city since Sevilla (or is it Seville?). The remains of a Roman theater are sulpposedly some of the best preserved ruins anywhere outside of Rome itself. Take a look https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9rida,_Spain.

The Via de la Plata marketing department claims that this entire route follows a Roman road from south to north. As are most people born on August 22 (according to 'The Secret Language of Birthdays - (hey Lauren, why is that!? ), I'm really into ancient Roman history. Back 12 or 15 years ago I was able to buy old Roman era coins that had been stashed in ancient coffee cans and then dug up by European farmers 2000 years later. I have a couple hundred of them. If they weren't in my storage unit on Long Island I was going to bring a few of them and leave them on the side of the dirt roads. It would make someone's day to find one of those, right?