Spain and Northern Ireland

Belfast has been great. The people are extremely kind, and the city and countryside is beautiful. Today we took a full day bus tour of the northern coast and saw castles, walked along cliff sides, and toured the Giant Causeway. Tomorrow we are taking the black cab tour of Belfast.

Check out those photos!

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Thank you to everyone who has been posting comments, I’ll try to answer a a few later on today.

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We are in London!  We visited Buckingham Palace, The Tower of London, London Bridge, Westminster Abbey, and took a boat cruise on the river Thames.  Today we visited Windsor Castle.  More updates later, limited internet access.

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We arrived in Seville, and it is truly a magical place.  Seville has been the apotheosis of our trip to Spain.  We spent last night walking around the world’s 3rd largest cathederal and heading out on a tour of resteraunts.  We saw Roman aqueducts, a minuet build by the Moors.  Today we took a tour of the old city and went down a street called calle de los muertos.  On this street hunreds of years ago, over 3000 Jewish people were killed. The street next to it is named calle de la vida, the street of life, because this was the street that many Jews were able to escape on.

Click on the pictures link under the blog roll(on the right hand side of the page) and you can see all of our pics!

We made it to Madrid!  Yesterday was an incredible day of  pickuping the rental car and driving to Montserrat.  We drove up the mountain, covered in a once in generation covering of snow, and marveled at the beautiful church and monastery tucked into the side of the mountain.

We toured the main cathederal, saw the black Madonna, and had some time for silent prayer in the beautiful chapel.

At 1: 00 the boys choir sang.  This choir has its roots all the way back t0 the 1400s.  It’s one of the oldest  practicing musical school for boys in the world. 

We then drove down the mountain, and made our way to Madrid.  The roads were great, and the scenery was very memorable.  Some of the countryside looked like it could be CA, but with hundred year old buildings, crumbling castles covered in.  We drove across flat plains that looked like the midwest, and big hills that looked liked eastern MT or WY.

We arrived in Madrid around 10:30, dropped off the rental car. We then took the subway to get to the hostel.  The subway system in Spain is outstanding.  We had to take 3 different subway lines to arrive at our destination, and each one was perfectly timed.

After checking into the hostel, we took a stroll by the art museum Reina Sofia and el Buen Retiro(a beautiful park).

Hopefully today I will get more pictures  posted, we’ve been having a few technical issues.

Just keep walking, just keep walking, just keep walking….I learned David’s motto when unsure of where we are…that’s right “Just Keep Walking”. I am sure we walked MORE than a  1/2 marathon’s worth of miles today. We revisited La Sagrada Familia, then metro/walk to Ramblas , which seems to be the local tourist trap and provides lots of interesting people to watch. We also wandered through St. Joseph’s Market. Then off to the waterfront to see the monument to Christopher Colombus. We also walked to visit the Cathedral, a Gothic church, as well as visited the Picasso Musem. For our dining pleasure we had a 3 course meal that in a mom and pop type resturant for lunch and was so yummy, then for dinner we had some tapas and that was very good and reasonably priced. From that point we took to wandering, and a few hours later we did manage to make it back to the hostel….whew….was this really only the first full day of this adventure?

We finally made it !  We cross the United States, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, and landed in London.  We were there for about 2 hours before we hopped on our flight to Barcelona.

The flight from London to Barcelona was my favorite part of the flight.  I was finally able to get a little shut eye, and flying over the snow covered Pyrenees between France and Spain.

Barcelona aiport is gorgeous, and it only took a few minutes to go through customs.  We jumped on a train that took us two blocks from our hostel. 

Right now we are cleaning ourselves up, and getting ready to find a nice meal.  Flying over Barcelona lets you see its beautiful location,  The snow capped Pyrenees are just off to the nort and west, and the beautiful Mediterranean borders it to the east.

Hopefully we’ll have lots of photographs to share tomorrow!

The check in process went super smooth at LAX.  It only took 5 minutes to get through baggage, and 5 minutes to get through security.  That is just about unheard of post 9/11. 

The plane was a 747, double decker, full packed flight.  It was a long 10 hour flight, but we made it into London, switched planes and took off across France and Spain.