We've never been city dwellers. Jean and I have lived our whole lives in small towns or the 'burbs. But Spain's two great cities, Madrid and Barcelona, have so much to offer that we have spent the greater portion of our visit in one or the other.

By now, sirens and rushing people, aggressive drivers and jammed restaurants started getting to us, so we wanted to take off for someplace less crowded. We considered the great tourist destinations: Toledo, Segovia, Cordoba. But we underestimated the crush of Europeans who travel during May. Checking online, we were unable to find a single hotel room available in any of those cities. We thought about just going to one and gambling on finding accommodations, but we were hoping to get away from crowds, not join them.

Time for Plan B. We drove down to La Mancha, the stony, bleak plains (at least, that's how Miguél Cervantes described them) south of Madrid. There we got the peace and solitude we were looking for.

They grow wheat and raise sheep and goats here. Agriculture is still comfortably small scale although farms appear to be larger than the family holdings in France or Japan.

Where fields are too stony, grapes and olives grow. You find such crops in the most pleasant places in the world: Province, Italy, Greece, California.

Speaking of California, the state flower is the California Poppy, and in certain parts of the countryside, you can see vast fields of them, glowing yellow-orange in the sun.

In Spain, wild poppies are red.

These are the same poppies that grow in Flanders Fields. My Dad bought paper versions of them on "Poppy Day," in remembrance of soldiers who died in the First World War.

The flowers took my breath away: such intense color, and so much of it.

Cervantes wrote about the barren, windswept plains of La Mancha. I couldn't find them. After 400 years, La Mancha has been made to bloom.