Vitoria, Spain

The next day we went into Vitoria. The Capital of the Basque country. We will be going back on the 4th or 5th for their fiestas to see all the excitement. We spent the day hanging with my cousins but then in the afternoon we went to a type of bull fight but where the bull doesnt get killed. Its a portugese style fight that places like barcelona are starting to adapt.

There are the bull fighters that do leaps and bounds avoiding the bull. At one point after tiering the bull out one of them hopped on his back and took a bow. One bull charged and hit the fence so hard his horn went right thru the fence. One of the bulls did get a horn in one of the guys legs but the rest escaped without too many scratches. It was very entertaining and some of the stunts quite amazing. It is also interesting to watch them pray and ask for saftly many times thruout the event to crosses around their necks or just bowing their heads.

Granon, La Rioja, Spain

We took our first day in granon easy we went to the saturday market in santo domingo and bought some fruit for the week. The place we are staying is a two bedroom apartment style place downstairs from the owners. Its called una casa rural. Very nice has a full kitchen and plenty of space. We later went to the garden of my uncle and picked beans, potatos, carrots, and zucchini. The bean plants were humungus. They are a spanish bean they say versus the french beans we see in the US. Id say they were twice as tall as Quinn. I think joe and quinn ate as many as they picked.

Montserrat

Next day we went to MontSerrat. A monistary in the mountains outside barcelona. There is one main one and hikes to a number of smaller ones. We hiked to one and will have to go back a diffrent year to do others. The way to the top was a train first then we took a cable car practicly strait up it seemed. You could see for miles all the way around. After here we took the long drive into Granon. It was about 5 hours over toll roads. I couldnt image what it would be over a regular road. Speedlimit around here is around 120km/hr not sure what that eqates to in the US.

Barcelona to Cordona

In Barcelona the main thing to see was the architechure called modern by Gadi. Boy is it weird. Anyway his buildings are all over the city so we took a hop on hop off bus all around. So after the day of going around Barcelona and seeing a very diffrent city we headed for the hills. It was a nice drive except for the golfball size hail that was hitting the car. At first i thought a car had thrown up a rock but then it started coming over and over again. The trees along the side of the road had leaves flying down everywhere. It was very diffrent weather than phoenix. Finally we reached our evening destination an old castle turned into a hotel by the spanish goverment. I think they are non profits and always historic places. It was very nice with breakfast included. Not your standard holiday in breakfast. There was wine, hams, cheeses, muffins and other baked goods. It was very yummy.