leaving Spain

(written Sunday 12:00pm, spell checked Monday 6:00am)
Hello all,

I know that it has been a while. My only excuse is the lack of available Internet this past week. Right now I am in the Barcelona airport, waiting for our flight to Prague. So, I will try to do a quick re-cap of the week.
Ordesa National park is absolutely worth seeing:

We sapient 3 days hiking in and around the park on the GR11 trail, one of several hiking trails that go between Spain and France.

After Ordesa we went to one of Spain's Paradors, state run hotels that are usually historic land marks, but some are just hotels built in incredibly scenic places . We stayed at Parador Bielsa. When we got there we did a little hike to a waterfall and then I did a some more hiking on my own searching for an old hermitage and ended up here:

This is part of a huge valley at the top of a mountain--well, maybe not the top, but certainly quite a ways up it. The "farm house" looked abandoned and there were no more signs to tell me if it was the hermitage I was looking for, but the scenery was breath taking.

We left the Parador early Tuesday morning and thought it would be fun to drive through France on our way to the coast. The small towns are beautiful, but we could not stay on back roads the whole way. From the highway, France looks suspiciously like Missouri. We stopped for a quick lunch and gas at a large truck stop and the little one thought it would be fun to play hide and seek. Unfortunately, he didn't let any of us know and we spent a frantic 20 min looking for him. He was discovered by a very kind cashier who (despite the language barrier) did his best to understand why I was so distressed, then found someone to cover for him while he helped us look. The security guard was less kind as he lectured me about learning a country's language before visiting that country (I will choose to believe that he felt like a tool when he realized I was about to burst into tears because I couldn't find my baby in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language).

When we finally got back on the road again I was not in the mood to try to visit any of the tourist attractions that we passed on the way back to Spain (and we passed a pretty awesome castle which I really regret not stopping at).

For the last four days we have been staying at this pretty crazy hotel turned condos on the coast near Begur Spain. We had an amazing view from the apartment:

The building, itself had some interesting features like this piece of the mountain sticking out:

We walked all around trying to figure out how it worked and I think they put it there rather than built around it. There were lots of long dark hall ways and slightly absurd features that made our stay just a little more interesting. When we weren't at the beach swimming, we were exploring the building.

Well, that is all I have time to share with you for now.
Maybe more tomorrow
XO Lue Lue Ellabee


P.S. I almost forgot to tell you, I finished the shawl! I will show you pictures once I have the pattern written up (although I have no way to block it until I get home). But I have decided to name it Torla, after a beautiful stone village near the Ordessa National Park (it is also where I cast off).