Montserrat

Good morning my lovelies,
Yesterday we packed up, rented a car, and drove up to the Montserrat monastery in the mountains. This particular monastery has been around for nearly 1,000 years (you have no idea how exited this makes me). Since the monks here have always encouraged pilgrims, there are several amenities here for visitors. Like a restaurant and hotel. We are staying at the hotel, Hostal Abat Cisneros, which has been amazing for several reasons. The first of which is the view of the monastery from our rooms:

 The second, and probably more important, is  you can go on a really long hike with out worrying about getting back in time to catch the last train to the parking lot. Given that my sweet loves a good hike and I love really old buildings/ ruins, this is the perfect place for us. Montserrat has at least 10 different hiking paths to everything from monuments to small churches built in the 1500's.
We went on a sort of rambling hike in the general direction of one of the farther churches. We only had a vague idea of where we were going. But, we did get to see many cool ruins, most of them were of hermitages. The number, size, and description of the hermitages made we wonder if I misunderstood what a hermit was. One of the hermitages was big enough for 20 hermits.

We wondered for a few hours, and experienced some amazing views:

I am quickly falling in love with this country. Especially since there is a bus from Barcelona to Montserrat.
On our way down the mountain we took the stone steps from Pla dels Ocells. There are many, many steps; after step #250 we stopped counting. There are many awesome views from these stairs. My favorite is this one:

My love decided to show our little one how to use the camera, his pictures are not too bad.
After we got back to the hotel (8:30pm), we had a good shower, a good dinner, and were in bed by 11. We learned that first mass is at 5:45, and vespers is at 7:45. When we finally did drag ourselves out of bed this is what we saw:

Rain. Well, it was actually a really good thunder storm. It was beyond amazing, watching the lightning flash across the sky and then listening to the thunder echo between the mountains. At one point the bells were ringing at the same time as the thunder and the thunder was louder.

We have now headed farther into the country side to the town of Torla, just out side of Ordesa National Park. The next couple of days will be full of hiking through the park. Wish us luck.

Thanks for checking in,
XO Lue Lue Ellabee