I Love 4 Day Weekends

My schedule here is going to spoil me. I only have class Monday-Wednesday and only have one class on Tuesday. My only homework other than studying for midterms and finals and writing my final papers is just a review of the movie we see each week in my movie class. I think I'll be able to handle this. So I want to make sure I take advantage of all this extra time. There is so much I want to do while I'm here and I want to make sure I use my time wisely. Today, to celebrate our 4 day weekends, my friend Daven and I traveled to Parc National del Montseny. It's a huge national park that is only about an hour outside of downtown Barcelona by train. We paid 6 euros for the round trip. Daven had picked this town yesterday after we decided we wanted to go hiking. He had picked it kinda randomly and we weren't really sure how to find the trails but we decided to go with it as an adventure. When the train pulled into one of the towns at the bottom of the park, I was already impressed.

This picture doesn't do it justice at all but I promise it was adorable. We didn't see a lot of people out all day but the houses are almost all built into the mountain and are beautiful. Then we found a map of the park and managed to make our way to one of the trails that left from the town.

                                      

It was one of the best hikes I've ever been on. Daven gets so much credit for finding such a hidden gem. It took us two hours of uphill walking to get to one of the peaks of the mountain. The hike up was great. It was a little hard because of the incline and how narrow the path was but I loved it. When we finally got to the top, the view was incredible. My pictures don't capture it well at all. Daven got some amazing pictures from his IPhone but we'll have to stick with this for now.

                                   

It was amazing. There was fog covering the top of all the mountains but you could still see valleys and nearby towns. I also saw a man herding sheep not too far away. At the top, there was also an old, deserted church. It seemed to be in great shape for how old it appeared to be. We had no idea it was going to be there so it was such a great find. We walked all around it, trying to find a way to get in, but just settled with our view of the outside.

                               

We sat and ate lunch there. Then we headed down the mountain. He didn't see a single person in the entire  three and a half hours we spent on the mountain. That has never happened to me but it was incredible. We sent about another hour walking around the town until we found the other trail. We're saving that for next week. Good work team. Today also starts a big festival here in Barcelona (http://www.bcn.cat/merce/docs/en/program.pdf) so I have high hopes for this weekend.