¿España?

So, I am in Spain. I think the last time I wrote, was at the end of Ireland so let me fill in the details. We met up with Craig and Jose in Amsterdam for New Years, that was awesome. The hotel we stayed in was crazy. It was right in Dam square, which is where the main celebration was held. It was raining though so we ditched the party and went back to the hotel and roamed around at like 10pm on New Years eve. We found this room in the hotel where there was a ton of food out for a party or something but nobody was around, so we ate free lasagna and pasta salad and sodas and bread and tea and all kinds of great stuff...for free. As midnight came around, me Brian, Howard and Danny were all running around frantically trying to find a way onto the roof to watch the fireworks. We had to break through a fence and climb down a ladder to find the roof but we found it and it was amazing. They shot off fireworks from several different places in the city. It was great. After New Years, we started what would be a three day journey to spain.

We reached Madrid after the longest train ride of my life. First from Amsterdam to Brussels, Belgium, then from Belgium to Paris. We slept in Paris on the hard floor of the train station(even harder now since my thermarest has a hole in it), and took an early train to Madrid. We figured that we would just be able to sleep in the station again seeing as how we had tickets for the next morning, we thought wrong. Funny story really, we met up with 2 other groups of American travelers in the same pickle as we and we all romped around Madrid for a while. We found an abbandoned building, sort of like a booth that you might see at the fair. It was carpetted, so we all sat down and stayed warm playing cards and chatting till morning. The next day we caught a train from Madrid to Malaga and then from Malaga to El Chorro.

El Chorro was beautiful.


We basically woke up every day for five days and romped around finding new places to climb. People from all over the world travel here for the world class climbing. We met several people from Norway, Finland, Germany, Spain, USA, all trying to beat the winter weather and climb some beautiful rocks. The third day, we walked across the caminito del rey, which you can see in the picture about half way up the cliff. Basically, its an old walkway that was used when they were damming the river through the gorge. It is pretty old and has holes in it so walking accross it (and getting to it) was a bit nerve racking. We left there this morning and are headed out at 3pm to find our way to Greece. Right now we need to go grocery shopping.