It’s been awhile, OH well.

And I thought coming home for a few days would be relaxing and all. Instead we were constantly running around trying to get ready for our next trip while also trying to sleep off the jet lag from our previous trip.

We made it out to climb at the Upper East Fork one day while we were home. Fun to get on some more new routes without having to travel very far though I will quickly run out, there is a pretty hard bouldery project though that will take awhile to do. Anyway, we had a good time climbing with Curran, Anna, Sondra, Matt L, Doug, Lance and Sarah.

I then left on Monday morning to drive out to the Red River Gorge. Along the way I stopped at Horseshoe Canyon Ranch. It rained most of the night while I camped and most of the morning as well so I headed into town to eat breakfast then back up. It was obvious that I was not going to get to climb but I still wanted to check the area out. The climbing looked really fun, lots of routes and bouldering to be done. I also got to see a fair bit of wildlife while hiking around looking at the boulders. A really kind of spooky, big black snake, several stick insects that looked like copper pipe and walked like robots, they are so weird when they walk it looks very unnatural, a big fat millipede though not as big as the one previously pictured and a few other less interesting critters.

The next day I drove to Louisville to meet Linda and Dylan at the airport with 20 out of 22 hours of driving out of the way. We figured that a few hours on the plane versus 20 hours in the car was worth it. Did some grocery shopping in Lexington on our way out to the Red and made it out to the cabin that our friends from Austin had rented by about 7 that evening.

Our first day out we met up with a couple that had a kid that was almost 4 and did a few routes with them at Global Village which we had never been to. Kind of a nice cliff but where it really shines is in the 5.7 to 5.9 range with traditional routes, there are several harder routes including a rarely repeated 5.13 with absolutely no chalk on it. In fact the 2, 5.12’s had no chalk on them either. We did a 5.11 that was pretty fun though.

On our way out at the car we ran into another couple with a 20 month old or so. Marty was the mothers name and I noticed that they had Idaho plates. Turns out that they are from Rexburg which is where Kyle and Emily, who babysat Dylan one night in August so that Linda and I could go on a date, are from. Naturally they know them so we traded juicy gossip about them in the parking lot.

At the end of our trip to Spain Dylan took a spill while running around in the driveway in front of the Alburgue. Here is the result,
We spent the last couple of nights in a hotel in the town of Sant Bois outside of Barcelona but pretty close to the airport. The hotel was called El Castell, and as it sounds was built in or more likely on top of and old castle dating from the 9th century. The website, since I did not take any pictures is, http://www.elcastell.com/ , you should check it out.

We spent one day in Barcelona, again going to La Rambla for a couple of hours and checking out a free museum that is run by one of the local banks. On La Rambla we saw these guys….
Which lead to this reaction from Dylan,
Here are some shots of where we stayed, the building
Dylan with Beatrice that lived in the house next door and loved to come over and play with him in the evenings.
And a shot of the entire town,
Here is a view of Barcelona from the National Art Museum, which is pretty beautiful.
This struck me as interesting, something seems to have been lost in translation,