The Adventura de Sierra Nevada

So last Saturday I was supposed to go hiking in this place called Caharros in an excursion organized by people at my school, but they wrote down the wrong meeting place. So at 750 in the morning, there are four of us sitting there outside CLM waiting for our guide person to show up and by 830 no one has, so we are like, okay, whatever. So we turn to leave.

Now this entire time, I have been talking with this girl from England in a mixture of Spanish and English. It turns out that I know more spanish than she does, but she is more comfortable in the language, as she is also fluent in French and English, and 25 years old compared to my 20. And she still wants to go walking as she calls, and so do I. I already have my bag lunch of an orange the size of two of my fists, and two sandwiches, and two bottles of water. So when she says she wants to go the Sierra Nevada and go walking around, I say, ¨Can i come,¨ and she says sure.

We first try to go to the Oficino de turismo porque nosotros queremos mas informacíon, pero it wasn´t open yet. So we just catch a bus to the bus station and look up the information for getting Sierra Nevada. After I show her how to put the thing in english (click on the lovely british flag. Thank you Ingleterra) We buy our tickets and wait for the bus. Its about a 45 minute drive, and as we go up the mountain we see it goes from no snow, to lots of snow. And Angela (the girl from England) had never seen a ski town or resort area before or even that much snow. It was piled in some places up to my shoulders. Me, i was impressed by the snow, but thanks to our blizzards this past winter, i wasn´t all ¨oh my god snow!!!!¨

So we walk around into the town and eventually find the tourism office and he gives us directions to a place that might have walking trails. Of course we never really find it. Instead we trek up the mountain following the road. We see a lot of people sledding and we go walking on the snow for a bit. There were mounds of snow from the snow plows that were like minature hills to go climbing on it was pretty awesome. We then continued to trek up the hill and then down a hill, and then up the hill again (we went onto a different switchback after we failed at finding the other tourism office).

Eventually its about two o´clock in the afternoon and we decide to sit on a dry spot on the road and eat our lunch. She eats something vegetarian in a plastic tuperware box and i wolf down two sandwiches. I then decide to walk without my shoes on because my feet and shoes are soaking wet and I´m a bit worried about frost bite and the road is warm from the sun as well as dry.

We continue our adventure. We see beautiful trees covered in snow and some really interesting tracks that I originally thought were deer tracks, but upon closer examination realized that they were more like paw prints. We made it almost to the top of the mountain the Sierra Nevada. When we started coming down, we saw that there was a little trail in the snow about 20 minutes from the town. (We had a total of about 7 hours to kill inbetween leaving the bus, and our return home). So we went walking down to what is probabely a gift shop in the summer and a place for people to ride bikes. It was really pretty and I liked being off the road. We then followed the trail which i think was made from people cross country sking. It followed the road pretty closely and was quite fun to walk on because we got walk under the trees. It was really peaceful and beautiful.

We then ran into a group of people that we think were filming something or doing some sort of special effects. We weren´t entirely sure because niether one of us understood thier spanish, so we had to climb back up a small steep hill to the road, similiar to how roads are in the US, there is a steep drop off beyond hte guardrail.

We think walked back into town after waiting a few minutes for Angela to feel better (she felt sick for a few minutes for some reason). In town we went to bar or cafe and Angela got some tea and I ate my giant orange.

We then caught the bus and came home.

It was a fun day, and I got really sunburned. But twas an adventure. And I soon as I figure out how to post pictures somewhere, I will.

love, Liz

photo link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=165217&id=536555856&l=1ac3f6742d