Hiking in the mountains

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mountain stream

view of the hiking trail

Travel blog for July 30th:
Unfortunately the blog has been experiencing technical difficulties the past few days so I lost what I had been blogging the past couple days. To update, we went hiking in the mountains north of Madrid (about 1 hour) on Monday morning. We arrived early, about 9:30am to avoid the midday heat. We hiked for about an hour into the mountains and stopped in a shady area to have a snack (which Deanna had prepared for each of us and packed into our own little back packs ). We hiked back along the river and decided to stop and have a swim at a nice spot we had passed earlier along the way. At that time a couple and their dog had been skinny dipping there. At least the dog had fur. At any rate, the water was cold and pristine and it was a great place to keep cool. Lillie shot some footage of us romping around in the in the water and I’ve posted it here. If you get nauseated on rides I recommend against viewing it; the cinematography is very much “Blair Witch Project”.

While we were swimming many more hikers passed by on the trail. Some were fully decked out in Columbia and Patagonia but a lot of people were wearing their swim suits and flip-flops. One lady walked by in a swim suit top and warm up pants and was wearing plastic wrap around her waist and calves. I think she was trying to make a weight class for the wrestling team or something.

We headed home about 1:30pm and had lunch and siesta. The temperature was about 8000° C. After we woke up we went straight to the pool for a few hours, and then out for pizza. Tomorrow we are taking the train into downtown Madrid to see the Van Gogh exhibit at the Thyssen, and then shopping for shoes in Cheuca.

Note from Lillie: my video is awesome, its just sideways at some points.

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