As mentioned before, Huermeda is a tiny town. First you turn off the highway, and see this set of signs. The one on the right, in the back, is warning you that cars wider than 3.5 meters cannot fit through all the streets.
You cross a little, narrow bridge into the main plaza, then wind your way up a hill on the only street that goes up. Fortunately there were plenty of signs pointing to our casa rural (sort of the Spanish equivalent of a B&B), whose sign was clearly visible from the plaza.
As we wound our way up through town, we came to this intersection and debated whether to drive up here. In small town Spain it's often not obvious what is a street vs. an alley, and you get the feeling that you'd get different opinions from different people.
We found out that was not a driving road, and had to drive back down to the plaza and back around to find a place to park, then we carried the luggage up and around this corner to the Casa (it's just as steep but not as far as it looks).
The hotel was called Casa Rural Teo, and was pretty large for a casa rural. We were on the second and a half floor, and once again we had a separate room for the kids - sweet! Cielo liked having her own reading light so much she wanted to pretend to read.
Casa Rural Teo had roof access for the guests, and since it was perched so high up on the hill it had some great views.
Because of the hilly terrain, the building is spread across multiple levels. This picture of Alison was taken from one roof back at another, lower one. In the middle of the picture is the little bridge you pass over coming into town, and that's the river Jalón it's passing over.
We said second and a half floor - the place was really kind of a 3D maze. Here's an example stairway.
Vernon tried to make a movie of the route from the front door to our room, but bashed his head horribly on a hobbit-height lintel in the process.
One thing we noticed at this and other hotels in Spain was the frequently presence of a unipillow on a two person bed. I guess there's some efficiency appeal here, but it's not very configurable.
Huermeda, like everywhere in Spain, had grapes. Here's are another couple of twisty little roads:
Spain doesn't hold a candle to Istanbul for cats, but we did see a couple in Huermeda. They were not as bold as the Turkish cats - probably because Huermeda is too small to have any restaurants.
We saw the same guy later, guarding 'his' road.
As mentioned earlier, there are no restaurants in Huermeda. There are also no grocery stores - one day we were surprised to hear a van driving up the hill and honking its horn over and over. It wasn't a crazy person, it was the bread and dairy delivery truck. Dozens of people came out to meet it and pick out what they wanted for the week. But if you don't know when the truck is coming, to eat you have to drive to the city of Calatayud, about 4 kilometers away.
Calatayud's main drag is a long boulevard split by a very wide promenade in the middle. You can take a seat at any (available) table and staff from the restaurant that owns it (the restaurants are across the streets either way) will come out and take your order.
Most of our interaction with Calatayud was eating at these little tapas places on this street (see the Dining in Spain page for more) and getting lost driving around (see the Getting Around in Spain page).
One other cool thing about Huermeda was that this church tower was occupied by a phalanx of storks. We didn't have a big enough lens to get a close picture, but you can see their gawky bodies on both roofs here.
