Extremadura

Her little pueblo: Pasarón de la Vera

My last weekend in Valencia with my group...I ran away to Extremadura with my good friend María to her pueblo (little town where she grew up). It was a 6 hour car trip, but so much fun. On the way we hit a huge traffic jam near Madrid, so, naturally, we had a little fiesta in the car jamming to the Beatles and making people driving next to us look over with quizzical faces, all while eating our delicious sandwhiches of tuna and red peppers. Yes, we ROCK at multi tasking.
We finally got there around 1:30am, where we took a paseo (walk) through her town, which took about 10 minutes. It's pretty cute. Her family has an awesome house and we had it all to ourselves. After throwing our stuff from the car inside and our little walk, we hit the sack.

we be going hiking!

true hiker, zip off pants!

the result of zip off- must play with the bottom part

The next morning we woke up early (10am, hey, for us, this is early), drank some café, and headed out for a hike. Her village, Pasarón de la Vera, is a village in a valley, and one of the mountains lining the valley has a sweet tradition: when you get to the top, you take down the banner/flag of whoever was there last and put up your own. We went trudging up and up and up, on a path that was super old and disappeared sometimes completely, but hey, we made it. And wow. Wow. So beautiful.

the tippy top!!

our flag, which says "Anna- la americana, Maria- la valenciana, and together= Las Payasas! (the clowns, or super goofy people, whichever translation you wanna use)

wow. wow.

It was a drop dead gorgeous sunny day and we snacked on a sandwhich and just basked in it. Afterwards, we made our bandera (flag). Sadly, we couldn't figure out how to get the other flag down, so we just added to the collection. I think our flag was made out of an old potato sack because we forget something else. Classic. After hanging out awhile we headed back down to eat some lunch.

ummm...almost...

the plaza in the village, complete with a perching bird ontop of the tower

For lunch we went to La Garganta La Olla, another village next to hers. There we shared some plates and I ate the BEST cheese EVER in my LIFE. O man. Melted white strong goodness. Extremadura is famous for it's jamon (ham) and lomo (lamb) so we chowed down on some of the best I've had here. After stuffing ourselves we took a little walk around the town and then headed back to Pasarón, totally exhausted and smelly silly from hiking and strong cheese. Some of Maria's family was in town and we got ambushed by her cousin to go have dinner (we spent awhile in Garganta), so we both jumped super fast in the shower and went to another town to eat some pizza, where her cousin quizzed me on so many stereotypes of the United States that I had to try really hard not to laugh. My favorite question was if the firemen really opened the fire hydrants when it was a hot day so the kids could play in it. Nevertheless, we slept SUPER well that night.

wheeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!

The next morning we left before lunch to do some more sightseeing and went to another valley to the national park "El Infierno" (hell), where we attempted to climb another mountain but I had a little asthma attack because of the high altitude and all my allergies, so we cut our losses and just headed back to Valencia.