Today was our main hike in the Ordesa Valley: Cascada de la Cola de Caballo. We wanted to get an early-ish start, but we also need to hit the grocery for some extra water and snacks, and it wasn’t clear when those options would open up. So we headed out at 8:00, found an open cafe for some breakfast, and then found a grocery that had just opened. From there, it was on to the shuttle into the park, and we started the hike promptly at 9:30.
The trail was pretty popular (the shuttles started running at 6:00 or 6:30 AM), but not so crowded as to be unpleasant. It was described as a 6.5-hour hike, and we took several intentional detours on the way out and back and were back in about 7 hours. And about 30,000 steps (we finished the day at close to 35,000 steps, which, considering 10,000 steps is the general guideline for a daily target, and most people don’t come close to that…we all were happy to sit down).
For dinner, we drove a few miles down the road to Broto and wound up having a pretty delicious meal before returning to the flat and calling it a night.
It’s the last night in Spain for this trip, so let’s recap the vocabulary we got comfortable with through regular use:
“La cuenta?” — “The check?”
“Tarjeta” — “Card” (as in…we’ll be paying with a credit card)
“Tinto de Verano” — a sangria-like drink, but a bit less sweet and, allegedly, more preferred by locals than sangria
“Media” — “medium” (as in… a “½ ration” or the smaller size of a dish that is offered in three sizes: tapas, media, racion)
And lots of total standards: sí, no, gracias, bueno, el baño, uno/una, dos, tres, jamon.
Other miscellaneous reflections:
Masks on public transit (trains and buses) and that’s pretty much it: 95% compliance
The refuse/recycling system: large, color-coded dumpsters placed all around in the streets (yellow = plastic and aluminum, blue = paper, green = glass, gray = everything else). I don’t think we fully mastered the method for keeping things sorted in a flat
Getting accustomed to just walking up and sitting down at an open table at a restaurant—the only exception seemed to be if a “Reserved” sign was on the table, and that seemed to just be their way of getting you to find a hostess so they knew a new customer had arrived.
An interesting/memorable experience of the day:
Benton: Turning around and backtracking on our intentional detour on the return from Cascada de la Cola de Caballo. We were finding ourselves on a pretty narrow path cutting across some pretty steep slopes, and the topo map in AllTrails indicated things were going to get even steeper. Lucy may be part mountain goat, as she was totally fine with the trail, but she went ahead and did some scouting and returned to report that, yeah, Benton likely would not want to continue much further. Tim played the role of supportive and nonjudgmental parent (meaning: he did not have to admit one way or the other if the narrow trail would make him nervous).
Tim: Holding up the lensball for a picture at Cascada de la Cola de Caballo and almost immediately getting “stung” on the finger…only to realize that the lensball had simply concentrated a bunch of sun on a very specific point…which was where his finger was. We actually held the lensball up to the paper map and quickly scorched a little portion to confirm the phenomenon.
