rtw with lucy

We have been traveling around the world and getting our guidebooks as we go, so we don’t have to carry around a lot of books. This was easy until we got to Europe, and then our supply dried up. We have a general guide by Rick Steves, but he advises you to buy a guidebook.

We knew of course that we wanted to see Barcelona in general and Gaudi’s architecture specifically, which is amazing by the way. But after we left Barcelona, we had a vague idea that we wanted to camp somewhere around Madrid, and I had heard that Segovia is nice. We stopped somewhere off the highway on the way there, as it was getting late. I had an idea that there would be camping grounds nearby, since there was a small lake, and a monastery nearby that you could tour. Sure enough, we found a really nice campground near the lake, and decided to stay for a couple of days since there was stuff to see around here. Then this morning we got up and diddled about what to do, and thought that we may as well go see the monastery as anything, though we knew nothing about it.

As we approached the monastery, we noticed a lot of campers and tour buses heading that way also, as well as a string of hotels and restaurants. Mind you, this is in the “middle of nowhere”. Then we pulled in and had a hard time finding a parking place in the huge parking lot. Apparently we had stumbled into a major tourist attraction. The admission price was 11,50 Euros for an adulto, and we decided to pay it, even though we still had no idea what we were to see.

We entered the park, and the dry scrubby landscape immediately turned green and lush. It was like an oasis in the desert, as I suppose it really is, and we could hear water running. The path took us to a huge waterfall, and it was amazing, and I was wondering if I’d be willing to be a nun to live in a place like that. Hmm, toss up.

The path wound round and round and took us by multiple waterfalls, and lush verdant hillsides and caves and cliff sides and many other features. The trail even took us into a cave that went behind a huge waterfall, so that we could stand on a platform and watch the backside of the cascade and the green moss rising up to the roof of the cavern, and raindrops falling in the cave. There were waterfalls
spread out over hillsides, and tumbling off sheer cliffs and thick green moss was growing everywhere, like a fairy carpet. We even found a waterfall in the shape of a peace sign. I’m not really sure how you would go about counting waterfalls, but there must have been more than a hundred.

We have been traveling around the world for almost a year now, and have seen many beautiful places, but to me this was the most beautiful place in the world. Somehow we had stumbled into heaven without a guidebook.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 9:48 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.