Off To Spain

As many of you know we headed to Spain recently for Linda´s sabbatical. We met up with Matt to take us to the airport in the morning then stopped by ¨Mista¨ Claude´s place to have him join us. The flight to Atlanta wet smoothly, though Dylan did complain durring the landing that his ears hurt, but at least he was able to tell us. The layover in Atlanta was pretty long, 4+ hours which was maybe a little much. Then it was onto Barcelona which was a 9 hour flight and Dylan was trooper, he did really well, he fought taking a nap but eventually we got him to go down for a couple of hours. After that though once he awoke he was a handfull, luckily we only had a couple of hours left at that point.

Once in Barcelona we got our rental car, I´m glad we opted for the small station wagon.

Dylan naturally napped the entire way to Girona where the family that Claude stayed with while teaching lives. Upon arriving we pretty much ploped down and vegged out. We had a quiet restful night, followed by a lazy morning.

About 1 in the afternoon we headed out to climb at an area called Sederrna about 45 minutes away. It is a really pretty canyon with swimming holes and limestone cliffs on either sided. We headed for a cliff with 4 routes, 2 5.11´s and 2 5.12´s, Claude and I did all 4, though Claude fell on one of the 5.11´s and I took on one of the 5.12´s while Linda climbed on 3 of the routes. Dylan had a blast hangin out by some of the pools near the base of the wall, throwing rocks in and looking at the fish.

Then we headed to another wall that Claude had wanted to climb at before but lacked the fitness for since he was focused on teaching at the time and had not climbed in almost a year. It was a nice steep wall from 40-60 feet tall and the easiest routes were 5.12c. Being jet lagged and all we got on one of them. Claude nearly on-sighted it, then I flashed it and Claude gave it another good go but ended up falling near the top again. The holds and some of the movement reminded me of The Beast at Rifle, CO. All in all it was a good day out and everyone had a good time, even if it did not really show since at the end of the day we were all exausted from the previous day still.