Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is our big driving day and our chance to see a lot of the region from the car.  It is about three and a half hours from Cáñar to Arcos de la Frontera so we have budgeted most of the day for car travel.  We have no plans today at all except to drive and settle into the guesthouse.  We will be staying at the Casa Blues when we arrive.  Another AirBnB find.

It took a little while to get everyone ready and to get moving but we did not do too badly.  It was after ten when we left our village, well within our target window.  It was a nice morning for a drive.  The clouds from last night had all burned off, which made us very happy, as Dominica had been very concerned that we were going to have visibility issues this morning.  But everything was clear and sunny, no issues at all.

The little car, once out on the A44 headed north up to Granada, really shows just how underpowered it is.  On many of the hills it is all that our little Opal Corsa can do to hit two thirds of the speed limit!  The Corsa is only seventy horsepower, so very, very anemic.  The Corsa is Spanish made, though, even though the badge is German.  It is assembled is Zaragoza.  At least the fuel efficiency is good.

We drove up through Granada, our first time seeing our “local” city just under an hour away.  It is not far at all as the crow flies but between averaging under thirty kilometers per hour as we go west and then often only hitting eighty kilometers per hour on the highway due to the car’s lack of power (and being fully loaded with four people and luggage) as we go north on the highway we just cannot get there all that fast.  If we did not have the crazy mountain roads right here and could open up to one hundred and forty on the highway like everyone else we could be there in twenty or thirty minutes easily.

Granada was beautiful.  We got to drive right through it.  It is in a wide, sprawling valley against the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada.  The city was much larger and much more modern than I had pictured.  Tourists get such a skewed view of foreign cities with only old towns or selected areas being shown.  Granada is a very modern city full of modern amenities.  We are very looking forward to exploring it soon.  It is close enough that we have no plans to weekend here but plan to take morning trips up to see it.

The drive to the west was very interesting.  We had a good idea of the landscape between us and Granada, no surprises there.  Going west we went through a couple different mountain ranges.  We took the A-92 to the west, which meant that we drove all of Granada south to north and most of it east to west and out through Santa Fe.  Really gave us a good view of where the real Granadians live and work.  Very nice.

Driving in Spain, out on the “real” roads that people actually use, is a dream.  The roads are so smooth and well maintained, speeds and reasonable and the civil engineering and planning that has gone into them is so much better than what we are used to.  Gas stations are tiny but far more common so you are never worried about finding one or having a crowd; and they are so easy to use with little offshoots from the highway where you can just pull over and get right back on.  They have little mini-markets in them like in the States so drinks, chips, candy kind of stuff.

We had to get gas in Spain for the first time today, which proved to be extremely easy.  One thing that throws Americans off here is the price of gas, a bit more than in the U.S. but it is also surprising that the “low octane” gas is 95 octane and the high is 98 octane.  So you have to think of it as better than the best gas you can get in the U.S. and adjust the price expectations accordingly.  Normally in the U.S. you can only get 92 octane just anywhere and 93 is the super high stuff that only a few places sell and both are quite expensive.

The entire drive was beautiful.  All kinds of mountains and gorgeous farmland.  Little villages on hills.  The only real city of any size that we passed near was Antequera which is not very big and the highway does not go right through it.  It was highway driving most of the way, but the highway is not all that big.

We turned south and got onto the smaller roads in the Pueblo Blanco region of Cádiz and wondered slowly through the country, often the only car around, through some really lovely areas and got to see many of the famed white villages including Estepes and Villamartin.  So gorgeous.  It was a great drive.  Andalucia never ceases to be beautiful.

Arcos de la Frontera is the largest of the famed white towns, a city of over thirty thousands.  It was well past three in the afternoon when we arrived and nearly a quarter till four when we got up into town and pulled over to look at maps and try to discern how to get to the guesthouse.  Town is a little hard to navigate normally but we arrived with many of the streets blocked off for the Semana Santa processions!  That was not good.  We had hoped to have avoided that and thought that we were scheduling around all of that.  No such luck.  We were stuck in horrible traffic and dealing with police directing people at every turn.

After a stressful half of an hour trying to navigate town with no clear idea of where we were to go I found a municipal parking garage and just planted the car in there to wait until the procession was long over and the streets would be free.  Much of the street parking was lost to the procession too making everything very difficult.

We came out of the parking garage right into a big public park with a terrace restaurant right in the middle of it.  Perfect for us.  There was a tiny playground right there so that Dominica and me could sit and relax with some food and the girls could play on the playground.  The sun was out and it was quite warm which was the only nuisance.  And, of course, we were stressed about finding the hotel and figuring out what to do.  Driving and parking in new cities is always a bit stressful.

We probably sat at the restaurant for two hours or more.  We only got a small meal, an half kilo of fried assorted seafood which sounded brilliant but was, of course, a horrible idea because it was European style seafood, not what we were thinking at all because we were stressed and not thinking properly, and so it was whole fish dropped in a fryer with heads, tails, bones.  A huge pain to eat.  Not what we wanted to tackle while being stressed.  At least we had all of the time in the world.  The fish was at least pretty good, once we got to it.  And thankfully there was calamari mixed in too.  Luciana ate some calamari.  Liesl ate a little of the fish and some calamari.

It was getting late, like after six when we left the terraza restaurant, got in the car and made a run at finding the hotel again.  We had gotten some information from the proprietor while we were at the restaurant so had a better idea of what to do.  It was still pretty tricky and we ended up driving around the other end of town trying to figure out where to park and gave up by parking down by the river and lugging the kids and the very heavy bags (but not the luggage) up the entire hill of Arcos de la Frontera from the water level all the way up to the top of the city!  That was not fun at all, especially when attempting to navigate not knowing our way around.  We were hot and tired very quickly.  The girls did an amazing job of climbing the hill, we were so happy with them.

We got lost a few times and at one point actually stopped and talked to a family in their doorway to see if they could give us directions.  Thankfully they went in and got their teenage daughter who had some idea of where things were and then her dad explained how to get there, which we actually understood.

We finally arrived at the Casa Blues guesthouse at about seven, only five hours later than we had originally been hoping.  There was a major disaster going on at work so my normal meeting which would have been at seven was cancelled.  I had to get signed in and get right to work, though.

Casa Blues was really nice.  Lots of common space to relax.  The room itself was very small but it was all that we needed.  No reason to have anything more than that.  The guesthouse sat right in the middle of the city, right on the hillside with unfettered views to the entire north.  Very nice, indeed.  And there was a small terrace to sit on in front of our room, a huge open space with views on the main floor and terraces above that we didn’t even use.  Internet was only available on the main floor common space, though, that was one negative.

Dominica and the girls relaxed in the room for a while. I sat up in the common areas working all evening. Not super fun but it was what we had expected.  We had not had any plans to do anything fun tonight.  We were just getting to Arcos de la Frontera today so that we could have a full day here in town tomorrow.

At nine thirty, once worked had settled down some and now that we knew where the guesthouse was and where we could park I walked down the big hill again to get the car and move it closer.  This was a bit of an adventure on its own.  I had to drive up the hill into the old town dealing with the tight cobblestone streets and had to parallel park on a steep hill with only enough room for one car to pass with cars close in front and behind with a stick shift.  It was a bit challenging.

Then, once parked, I had to get the heavy luggage and lug it up the hill.  Not just up the hill but over rough stones which make it very hard to pull even with its wheels.

Everyone was hungry and I had seen some restaurants open with people sitting outside while I was out getting the car that seemed like they would not be too far of a walk from the guesthouse.  It took a while to convince everyone to give it a try and to get ready.  So it was well after ten when we made our way down the hill.  Of course, it was too late and everything in that part of the city had closed up.  (Had we known our way around, there were lots of restaurants available up the hill but we were not prepared to do any more exploring at this time.)

I had seen a pastry and candy shop on my earlier walk so I left the girls on the higher street and walked down there to see if that was still open.  Thankfully it was so they came down and joined me and we got a bag of candy, some chips and a few cakes to eat for “dinner.”  We also got ice cream to eat on the walk back up the hill.  The girls really, really loved their strawberry-vanille ice cream push pops that they got there.  They talked about them all weekend.

After walking back up the hill, especially from all the way down again where we had to go to get the food, we were pretty tired.  So we sat our on the terraza in the common area and ate.  Then the girls got ready for bed and I worked for a while yet.  The girls were out and about all day today so were looking forward to some quiet time with their iPads.  They played some games on them down in the room for the rest of the evening, which was not very much.

Was in bed before one.  Lots to do tomorrow.

Today was an up early and take a hike kind of day.   I was up long before Dominica or the girls and so I took the chance to explore town.  I grabbed the Nikon AW100 and my phone and started walking the higher streets in town, those above the Plaza Santa Ana.

It did not take long to discover that we are truly near the top of town already and the majority of town lies below us on the hill rather than above us.  We have previously seen most everything that was higher than us and there were only a few little side streets left for me to discover.

After exhausting the options on the upper side of town I went out to the main street, which has been under heavy construction since before we arrived – the old generic street is being turned into one of these gorgeous new Alpujarran style streets with smooth concrete on either side for the car wheels and an attractive center channel made of large stones cemented together to channel the water down.  Much of town has been redone with these already and the GR7 leading far to the east of town is being built that way as well.  Going up the hill on the main road I could that the road was made with an underlying grid of rebar to make it not slide down the hill.  These are seriously well made roads.  Nothing like this in the US.

I continued up the road until I arrived at the last house in town, an English guesthouse high up on the hill.  From there there was an obvious mule path leading to the west, into the ravine that runs alongside the village, so I took that.  For the first bit the path was solid and “wide” as mule paths go.  It is very obvious that this path is still used, probably my mules as we see them doing this and can always hear them, quite heavily.  It made for a very pleasant walk.

I made it far enough that I discovered the old waterfall, dammed up hundreds or possibly thousands of years ago.  No one knows who changed the water courses in the Alpujarras.  Many assume it was the Moors but it could easily have been the Romans and at that point we are really just guessing.  Also possible, but no one mentions it as it is so unlikely, that it was the Vandals – after whom the region is named.  Al Andalus, in Spanish called Andalucia, is the Moorish world for “Land of the Vandals” as this was a Vandal Kingdom prior to the Moorish invasion.  The dam on the waterfall is what creates the acequia system that feeds water to the farms and the village.  It is amazing how extensive and complex the waterworks are in the region.

I stood in the waterfall itself, the dry bed where the waterfall once fell long ago.  The rocks are still there, as if the river had just been there.   But the riverbed is now a mountainside covered in plants.  But you can tell, if you realize where you are, that a waterfall used to be there and for a very long time.

I walked on a ways until I came to a farm with a farmer out working in his orchard with a goat.  Then I turned around and returned because I wanted to learn more about the waterfall which I could only see from a distance below the dam on the mule path.

I found a farm path going up from the mule path so took that and it wound through some interesting cuts that could easily have been in Hobbiton (in the Lord of the Rings.)  Very scenic with meadows and fields far up the mountain.  I got some great chances to look down on Cáñar from above.  Gorgeous.

I stumbled upon a field that had its fence moved in such a way that I assumed that it had been opened long ago and left that way.  There was a hint of a trail through the grass so I decided that it was open for use – especially as the field was abandoned to the grass and was now just a high meadow.

Walking through that field yielded no results, it was just another field, like many which ancient stone walls holding back the terrace above it.  When I turned around to leave the field I noticed that the change in sunlight direction exposed some really interesting shadows on the stone wall!  Could it really be…. a hidden ladder made of stone!  It was placed directly behind a tree and from the approach there was no way to see it until you looked from the other direction. I even went around to check and it really could not be seen until you went all the way around and saw the shadows that it was casting.  How neat, just like out of a fantasy novel.  The ladder was just small stones sticking out of the ancient wall, no supports on the outside.

Up the ladder led me to a dry meadow with little growing in it.  Exploring that led me, finally, to a vantage point near the waterfall allowing me to see the waterfall and the dam.  I took some video.  It was well worth exploring those fields!

I returned to the farm road and continued climbing it up the mountain.  I could feel the air getting colder and thinner as I climbed.  It was high enough that I was breathing a little heavier, even when resting.  I found some extremely high fields and meadows very, very far up.  I wonder how it works to farm this high up, must be extremely challenging getting equipment up here and food back down.  I can only imagine that much of it is done with mules.

I came upon the water tower for the village which isn’t actually a tower at all, since it is on a mountain.  But this is where the emergency water supply comes from.  There was a small road there that only led to a nearby farm and nowhere else.  Very odd.

There was a large orchard, high on the mountain.  And then I climbed up, scrambled up actually, into some fields and went as high as I could, up to a honey farm – there are many flowers up here on the mountain including poppies growing out of the stone walls.  I was many bumble bees while working my way up the mountain.

That was as high as I could go.  I had to turn around and work my way back down the mountain.  By the time that I was back at the house I had done about three and a half miles of mountain climbing!  A very good morning.  I got a lot of pictures while I was up there.  The views were really spectacular.

Once back home I showered and got to work for the day up on the terraza.  It ended up being a very busy work day and I worked well into the late evening.  A long day, but I was feeling good from my awesome morning walk.  Very glad that I did that.

This evening, as the sun was getting low, we could see big clouds rolling into the Alpujarra Valley off of the Mediterranean to the south.  It was really neat, and I got some pics that kind of show it, because the cloud layer was hundreds of feet beneath us but very high above the villages down in the valley!  So it was more like being in an airplane seeing a cloud layer that you are flying over.

Tomorrow is Good Friday and so Semana Santa is in full swing here in Spain.  This evening was one of the processions through the village.  Dominica and I managed to make it to the window just in time to see them go through the Plaza Santa Ana on their way to the lower parts of town.  Since the church is right beside us, this is where they are starting the procession.

We could hear the procession as they sang, the echoes going through the tiny stone lined streets for some time.  Then, from the terraza as it was now day, we saw them assemble far down at the bottom of town at the little “park” where the GR7 leaves town to the east and then slowly walk east up the GR7 to the miradore (observation deck) that I discovered out there a few days ago.  The candles and singing off in the distance but very clear was really neat.

By this time the clouds had come in and filled the valley.  It was like a sea had rolled in.  It was so beautiful.  The moonlight made it really look like a misty ocean and the villages high on the mountain were just perfect for the clouds to come right up to the base of them so that they looked like little seaside villages on the shore.  The illusion was so good that we couldn’t even figure out where our own village dropped off.  The buildings just below us looked like they were on a shore and you could not picture the precipitous drop that was actually right beyond them.  It was unbelievable.  One of the neatest sights ever.  Órgiva and Los Tablones, normally clear as can be in the valley right below us, were gone completely.  Swallowed by the “sea”.  Even some of the villages high on the mountain were gone. Only those near our height remained.

Tomorrow is our big driving day.  We are getting up on the early side and driving all of the way across Andalucia to Arcos de la Frontera near the coast.  This is one of Rick Steves’ must see locations on his three week whirlwind tour of Spain.  It is the largest of the famous Pueblos Blancos, the “white towns” of the region.  And the title “de la Frontera” means that it was a Christian town before the fall of Granada and earned the title by being on the contested frontier against the Moorish empire of Al Andalus.  Arcos de la Frontera was one of the very first cities of this region to be taken by the Christians and actually stood here as a Christian outpost on the frontier for roughly the same amount of time prior to the fall of Granada in 1492 as the United States has existed!  Now that puts some perspective on the city.  It was Moorish for a long time and Roman before that and Christian now for nearly nine hundred years.  No wonder it has earned the right to retain “de la Frontera”, with a history of being there longer than some of the older, modern empires!

History in this region is so dramatic.  Everything is so old!

Our drive tomorrow is about three and a half hours and this is our first time venturing out with the car from our little area between us and Malaga and a few local villages.  That will be an adventure too.  So by tomorrow night we will have a much better feel for the whole of Andalucia.

Luciana was the first one up today.  She came down the spiral staircase into the “cave” of basement and said “I snuggle you?” and climbed into bed to snuggle me for a while.  Eventually she got up and told me she wanted me to go upstairs with her so that we could hang out while she played on the iPad.  She’s so cute.  Liesl slept in hours longer than Luciana did.  Luciana was up around nine thirty.  Liesl was definitely not up until after eleven.  They both had gone to bed on the early side last night since they were in their own room where the iPads don’t get a WiFi signal.

Last night, before going to bed, I discovered ants in the kitchen.  A lot of ants.  Turns out that it was our recycling bag that was hanging near the kitchen table.  What a mess.  I cleaned that up, got rid of all of the ants that were there and went to bed. That explains the ant that Liesl found in the guest bedroom yesterday.  Thankfully these are tiny, black sugar ants.  They don’t sting or do anything.  They are just looking for sugar and don’t hurt anything.

When we got up to the kitchen this morning I told Dominica about the ants and then we found another spot where ants had come in.  This one was really weird.  One of the power receptacles in the kitchen had ants streaming out of it going for some treacle sitting on the lip of a can of golden syrup on the counter.  What a mess.  We spent all morning getting the kitchen cleaned so that there was nothing for the ants to go after.  That was a major project.  We pretty much got them to back off, though.  Dominica did a lot of work.

We have nothing planned for today, it is a down day.  So I was on the terrace nearly all day.  Liesl had homeschool for the first time since getting to Spain.  Time to get her into the groove again.  That was a bit tough as Liesl really did not want to do school.  It was a bit of a fight but eventually Liesl calmed down and did really well today.

It was a very slow day, but very nice.  The family spent part of the afternoon up on the terraza with me.  And they spent a lot of the evening camped out together in the guest bedroom each of them with their own iPad.  They are three peas in a pod those girls.

I had tuna pizza for the first time today – just something frozen that I picked up at the market a few days ago.  It was actually quite good; I liked it a lot.

One of our neighbours from down the hill and a friend of the owners of the house in which we are living stopped by to say hello and to offer assistance if there is anything that we needed while we are here.  They are British ex-pats and live here full time and can introduce us around town.  So I spent about half an hour talking to Mike and learned a little about town.

We had meant to spend yesterday in Lanjarón but we all slept in far too late.  So we tried again today.

Dominica got very little sleep last night, she had insomnia again.  I got more sleep but not great sleep.  I tried sleeping upstairs in the guest bedroom after the girls had begged me to sleep up there with them but between it being way too hot, the bed being full of bread crumbs and Luciana pushing me out of bed I did not sleep very well either.  But far better than Dominica.

But we were all up at a reasonable time this morning, got the girls ready and headed right out for a day in Lanjarón after I worked for a little while.  The drive there is not as bad as to most other places in the region except for Órgiva which we drive through, basically, on the way to Lanjarón.  If we were walking it would be far better.

Lanjarón is a village of nearly four thousand people and it is the gateway to the Alpujarras region.  Nearly everyone passes through it when entering the region if they are coming from Granada, as most do.  We missed it because we took the backroads from Malaga which was not the right way to do it anyway, we have discovered.

Even with getting up early and getting moving we were not into Lanjarón until after noon.  We had no real plans other than hoping to find the water museum but we failed to find that so it really did not matter much anyway.  We got into town and parked down on the main driving street that runs along the valley’s edge.  Then we unloaded from the car and the four of us walked up into the city.

It was a warm day, about eighty degrees, and we did a lot of walking.  About five miles or more (my pedometer for me personally had me at nearly six and a half miles for the day in total.)  I cannot believe how well the little girls handled all of the walked.  They were exhausted by the end of it all but they were troopers and just kept on walking.  I am so proud of how well they did today.

We walked up the hill to the main street which has very little traffic, it is mostly wide sidewalks.  We were still on the eastern side of town.  We walked most of the length of that main street right through the village which was a very nice walk.  The town is loaded with fuente (fountains of drinking water) every two blocks or so which is awesome as a visitor.  You can get a drink and cool off nearly anywhere and tons of people use them.  The girls thought that this was great fun and stopped at every fuente that they came across.

The main street in Lanjarón is extremely lively with all kinds of shops (sadly many are for the tourists), restaurants, ice cream parlours, hotels, apartments, cafés, bars and more.  There were people everywhere walking up and down and sitting out on the street with coffee or whatever.  Lots of activity.

This is a town much more focused on the tourist trade than our village or Órgiva but it felt like a town where a lot of people really live and work as well.  There were lots and lots of traditional houses and semi-modern apartment buildings that seemed really interesting.  We immediately decided that this might be a perfect kind of place for us to have a home in Spain because of the location and the number of services available in the village.  In Cáñar you have to leave the village just to buy cereal or most staples.  That’s rough.  Here you would practically never need to leave town.  You can walk to anything that you would want and there isn’t just two bars but a plethora of eating, drinking and activity options.

We walked for a ways and the girls were a bit tired and hungry.  We had been looking at a lot of restaurants as we went and found a stretch on the western side of town that looked really promising and decided to stop at one called La Palmera which turned out to be an absolutely perfect choice.  It was a crepe and sandwich shop, we all chose crepes.

Dominica got a vegetable crepe that was very good.  The girls split a honey banana crepe that was also quite good.  I got the Bretón which is hard to describe but was basically a mushroom-stuffed crepe in a rich red sauce almost like a marinara with cheese.  It was absolutely amazing, the best crepe I have ever tasted.  It was heaven in a pancake.

After lunch we all got ice cream from the same place.  The girls both got vanilla.  I go nugget.  Dominica got half strawberry and half lemon.  I think Dominica won on the ice cream selection.

From lunch we walked on through town all of the way to the west end where there is a large municipal park running alongside the road that ends in a playground that we had promised the girls.  They played there for at least half an hour, maybe more.

While they were at the playground I investigated the area there and found that the municipality has been working on a major park expansion at the west end of town that is really quite impressive.  It is large, has an artificial stream running through it that is really cool, has amazing views and really expands the village’s walking area and makes for an amazing entrance into the village on the road.  It is the kind of thing that you expect to see a real city do, not something that a village would do.  I can’t believe the amount of amazingly nice and appropriate projects like this that I see going on in small towns around this region.  It is amazing.  You would never, ever see anything on this scale in the States.

The walk back to the car was hot and long.  We did manage to stop at a small market and pick up cereal which we ran out of this morning so that saved us a trip which was a major score.  Everyone was pretty tired.  Both girls fell asleep instantly in the car even with the crazy driving that has to be done to get back to our village.

We got back home and Dominica and the girls were done for the day.  Dominica immediately retired to the living room and read for a while and was in bed by ten it having been roughly six when we got home.  The girls just went into the guest bedroom and watched “The Engineering Family” on YouTube until they went to bed.

I set up on the terraza and worked from there all evening until after one in the morning.  Lots of work and lots of uploads to be done.  Plus posting.

It really was a great day.  Saw an amazing village.  Got a lot of exercise.  Ate amazing food.  Took a lot of pictures and videos.  Got some fresh air.  Had fun with the kids.

We did not figure out until this evening that this past weekend was the switch to daylight savings time in most of Europe.  So we moved from UTC+1 to UTC+2 which surprised us and today everything was off.  I didn’t realize that time had switched until I went to join my afternoon conference call and it was an hour away still.  Very confusing.

We had big plans for today but Dominica had insomnia last night and we did not end up getting to bed until rather late so we gave up on the idea of doing anything at all and just called it a quiet day at home.  It is sometimes difficult for us to just relax while here, we are in Spain, after all.  It feels like we are on vacation and we need to go out and do things.  Go somewhere, see something, make use of the time.  But obviously we can’t be doing that all of the time.  We need to settle into a life here. This is our day to day life, not a vacation.  We have to get over the feeling that we always need to be doing something and be content to just sit at home, work, do school or whatever and go to bed.

One thing that is very handy is that we have absolutely no desire to watch television or anything like that.  It is so hard to do that that there is effectively no chance of us falling into that pattern.  We have nothing to watch and no easy way to watch it.  So that is very healthy for us.  I am glad for that.

Our landlords told us today that they decided to upgrade the Internet access here since we were having so many problems.  So the ISP is supposed to be coming out sometime this week in order to upgrade the physical equipment here at the house so that we can move up to better speeds.  We have WiMAX coming to the house now but they need to put in a better antenna for the faster speeds so a technician needs to come out.  We are very hopeful that that will fix a lot of our problems.  Our connection is so rough now.  We are having a terrible time getting things uploaded and it is hard for the kids to watch YouTube or do anything.  It makes working very hard.

The girls pretty much entertained themselves all day.  I guess that they needed a down day too.  Dominica spent most of the day reading.  I camped out on the terraza and was basically there all day.

For lunch I cooked a pizza in the oven for the girls.  For dinner Dominica made bocadillos con patatas, cebollas and pimientos.  That was really good.  Liesl and I had gone to the market to get fresh pan (bread) for dinner and new clothespins so that we could do more laundry.

We got the girls into bed in the guest bedroom around a good time.  Luciana put herself to bed at nine thirty.  Liesl we put to bed at ten thirty.  They are enjoying the guest bedroom much more, I think, because they can easily snuggle and watch YouTube together.

Quiet night for us.  Dominica sat in the kitchen reading.  I sat on the terraza working until it was quite dark.  I love the lights of the little villages around the valley.  It is very nice being up here late at night.

Surprisingly, town never gets quiet.  I can hear people yelling and talking and playing around town even as it approaches midnight.