The Wet Bean and Cheese Part II: The Little Rascals

Spain Day 13-14:

Week two concluded with a family trip to a mountain range heading toward the Pyrenees. We drove about an hour and a half north of Malgrat to a small town where Marga's sister has a weekend home. It was a cool experience to get out of the city and see what the northern part of Catalonia has to offer. As you get closer to France there are some awesome mountain ranges and hiking trails that offer amazing views. Hopefully I'll make it to the Pyrenees one day, I'm not ruling anything out.

We arrived on Saturday morning and proceeded to cook lunch after exploring the grounds for a little while. I'm still getting used to eating lunch at three in the afternoon and dinner at 10. My body is wondering why there is a huge gap between breakfast and lunch but I think I'll get used to it sooner or later. After a lunch of chorizo, sausage, toast, ham and tomato I was stuffed. I took a nap soon after as I was still feeling sick and it was much needed. Later that evening Marga's sister and her family arrived bringing our head count to nine. Me, Marga, Joan, Llus, Ruben, Marta, Iago, Jana, and Pao. Because dinner is so late here in Spain, well late for me, we had a lot of time to use up before we ate so in addition to making conversation and practicing Spanish I got to play some games with the kids. We started a game of UNO and I lasted well over two hours, in fact the winner was just the person who had the fewest cards when we were too tired to keep playing.

Dinner was delicious as usual and after staying up a while to talk we were all tired so we turned in for the night and got some rest for the next day of travel and sightseeing.

On Sunday morning after breakfast we drove to Santa Pao and Besalu. The first town was a quaint little mountain getaway with a medieval look to it. We walked around for a bit and took some pictures of the buildings and the views. It was nice to get to explore with no worries about running out of time or needing to rush to be somewhere. Plus it's always a laugh when you have a funny couple like Iago and Marta in addition to four children under age 11.

After walking around for about an hour we drove to the next destination. There is a dormant volcano located near the town so we drove about 10 minutes further up the road and visited the national park area surrounding the crater. There was a short hike further up the mountain through some forest area to get to the actual crater area. Once there though the trail opened up and you could see where a past eruption had carved a path in the earth. It was really cool to see all the volcanic rock and the farms nearby that prosper because the soil is so fertile near sites such as these.

The rascals

After leaving the crater it was time for lunch. We drove to another town called Besalu and stopped at a little pizza place. I'm always down for pizza, doesn't really matter I can eat that stuff for days.