boulder time

"Vivid Youth" (Pastels & Tenniscoats, 2009)

I love this song. It always reminds me of springtime and the outdoors and Williams.

Manzanares el Real

Jenn, Megan, and I went on a day trip yesterday to Manzanares el Real, home of a castle and gateway to the Sierra de Guadarrama. In just 45 minutes on Bus 724, we had left big city Madrid and arrived in the sandy, white pueblo.

A very upset Megan and happy me over the Santillana Reservoir

Entrance to the New Castle of Manzanares El Real

One of the castle's towers

The towers on the castle were my favorite part of the building. The entire pueblo seems to be sand and stone. It could last forever.

After our tour of the New Castle, we started on our hike in La Pedriza, the southern slopes of the Sierra. It was very tame at first because we walked along the Rio Manzanares with the crowds of people and their children and dogs. La Pedriza is actually crazy. It has a forest of evergreens on one side of the rio and rocky dryness on the other.

Walking along the Rio Manzanares

Jenn and Megan

Then we decided to take a shortcut back to the pueblo and that apparently meant hiking to the top of the mountain Cancho Losillos (?), which we were apparently unprepared for. We must have been a sight, three girls in super casual sneakers and little else among groups of men with all their technical rock climbing and hiking gear. We were also expecting more trail markers on the way, so we were very nervous the entire time. The view of La Pedriza was spectacular though, I had never seen anything like it outside of The Flintstones: the boulders fit perfectly into each other on the slopes, permanently defying gravity.

At the top things got much better, because the descent was psychologically much easier; we knew we just had to go down and could see Manzanares el Real from above the entire time. With my luck of course, things got super snaggy in the near bottom, as for some reason the trail disappeared right from under us and we had to do some improvised rock scaling all alone. It was really scary for me because I'm not used to Super Mario-ing on giant boulders. This was absolutely the worst part for me.

A view of La Pedriza on the way up

When we found the trail again, hidden between some boulders, I could almost kiss the ground because we had been in a bad way for about 45 minutes. I have to say this is the craziest hiking experience for me yet, not because of a height difficulty, but the fear and reality of getting lost on top of some boulders with no possible place to lie down, let alone shelter. The three of us got an adrenaline rush from our successful return to civilization (our emergence from the mountain into someone's driveway...oops), which quickly disappeared, replaced by dead fatigue on the bus back to Madrid. It was overall a pretty great experience, though, and now my host mom thinks I'm a badass.