Late Monday morning I began another long drive, from my hotel in Molins de Rei to the hotel I had booked in Fuenlabrada, a suburb of Madrid.

One thing I didn't expect in Spain, while the cities and towns are densely populated, the majority of the country is almost empty, agricultural land or just empty fields. Much of the countryside was very dry when I was there, similar to much of the western United States.

While traffic in the cities and even some towns was heavy, with the usual jams, roads between cities were, compared to the United States, lightly traveled. The toll roads were very expensive, there was usually a free highway essentially parallel to the toll road, but the free highway was often only two lanes, and you could easily get stuck behind a large truck struggling to climb every hill.

The photographs here are so typical of much of rural Spain.

While driving to Madrid, I felt I had a scratchy throat and was coughing up phlegm. I feared I might have caught something in crowded Barcelona, and that turned out to be the case.