I saw Africa today! Awesome adventure.

I am so exhausted. I just got home from being gone all day today, and my face is burning and totally red as a tomato. My friend Alan and I climbed the second tallest mountain in the Sierra Nevada, Pico de Veleta! It was unexpected too, so I was wearing jeans and bad sneakers. Haha. 10,000 feet at the top! And the 360 degree view so far in every direction, and we saw the Mediterranean and past it, Africa!!! I have officially seen Africa for the first time!

So a couple days ago my friend Alan and I were at our campus and noticed out the window that there was snow on the Sierra Nevadas, the mountain range close to Granada! It had rained hard the night before, so it snowed in the mountains! We were both really excited and decided we'd get to the mountains this weekend and have a snowball fight.

So, this morning we left and took a bus to the Sierra Nevadas. One hour, climbing through beautiful country. Everything is very dry here, and I really miss big green forests. A lot. But there were a couple small trees, which is more than the city of Granada has, so I was excited.

The bus stopped in Pradollano, where the ski resort Sol y Nieve (Sun and Snow) is. It was a tiny town of just hotels and ski rentals and a couple restaurants. We passed some cows, and Alan said "oh look! wildlife!" haha.

Alan and I got off at the top bus stop, and started climbing up. A ways up we hit the first snow patch, and I ran up to it, made a snowball, and pinned Alan before he knew what was coming :). We also decided in the future we're going to bring huge paella pans and use them as saucers and slide down the snow on them. They would be perfect!

The landscape was gorgeous. Huge, clear view of all of the valleys around Granada, and off in the distance many other mountain ranges, growing lighter the farther they were. We found this awesome abandoned and destroyed astronomy tower, that was torn apart and graffitied, but we climbed into it and up onto the roof and it was awesome! I will post pictures of this adventure soon, stay tuned. :)

I hadn't researched hikes or anything and so I knew absolutely nothing coming in to the day, save that the bus would only take an hour to get to the snow! We ended up hiking all the way to the top of the peak in our jeans and bad sneakers. We hiked through all the ski slopes that in a month or so will be covered in snow and skiiers. And I did something I have always wanted to do but never could in the states because of stupid liability stuff: I climbed to the top of a chair lift pole, all 46 ladder rungs, and stood on the top! So awesome! Duncan, I thought of you climbing it, and our small addiction to climbing random things. :)

It was warm when we started at the bottom, and we hiked pretty steep slopes so we were warm hiking. But at one turn once we were pretty high up, the wind hit so so hard and it was freezing wind chill. That was the strongest wind I think I've ever been in! It was incredible. You couldn't even hear yourself talk! Insane. As we climbed the view just kept getting bigger and bigger, it was unfathomable. We finally reached the top, and had a complete 360 view all around! And we realized quite unexpectedly that we could see the Mediterranean, and past it land! Way far away! I was just incredulous when we decided the only thing it could be was Africa. WOW!! The whole hike took 6 hours and was about 7 miles I think, and it was just wonderful to get out of the city and get into the wilderness and see so far in every direction.

Oh, and funniest thing. At the bus station this morning we left in time to catch the 10:00 bus, and so when we bought our tickets at 9:45 we were way confused when she passed us our tickets for the 9:00 bus. Huh? We looked closer at the tickets, and realized everything was an hour early. We realized her computer must be off an hour, and decided that was confusing and just downright unprofessional. I mean, luckily we were on top of it and knew what time it really was! We got to the mountain and hiked all day. Our return ticket was for the 5:00 bus. We left the peak at 3:30, and by the time we were near the base it was past 5. I wasn't too worried because I hoped there was another bus, and if not we'd figure something out, but I assumed we'd already missed our bus. We got down and the bus was there! I asked the bus driver when it was supposed to leave, and he said 5. What the hell? It was 5:40 already! Alan and I just looked at each other, totally perplexed. Finally we thought well, maybe it's daylight saving time? I mean it is a Sunday, and it is fall. But neither of us had heard anything about it being today. When we got to the bus station in Granada and I saw the big clock in the station and it read an hour earlier than my watch, we finally gave in to the fact that we had in fact been wrong, and it was in fact daylight savings day. We were lucky, if we didn't have that extra hour we might still be stuck up in the Sierra Nevadas right now!