Some pics... finally

Our new cats



Zoey.... I put a sticker on that air conditioner



Cool Graff



More same place in Barcelona



Some dude



This is me driving the Fiat with a red bull



Cool snails we saw along the way down the Spanish coast. Click on it to see the detail.



Cool effect I did with my camera, yes the nose ring is real.



Another cool effect... ¨Thats my girl, so pretty¨



One of my faveriot Salvidor Dalí paintings



Nice day in Barcelona



Cool stencil I saw



SPAIN!!



Far away church at the first hostel we stayed at



Kids chillin at a skate park.

Looking Up

Many of you may know but some might not N8 loves any form of tobacco and or nicotine. I have always loved chewing tobacco, but I don't really like what it does to my mouth. I found snuss in Denver before I left, which is spit less chewing tobacco that comes in little pouches. When I got to Sweden I found out that snuss is Swedish. So I bought a few cans upon departure and have been enjoying it regularly. The other day I noticed I had a loose tooth. One of the ones right in front. When I looked at my gums I had a small bump that was white at the tip. When I pushed it, puss ran down my tooth. Very gross!!! People have been chewing this stuff for years and only two weeks for me and it is already rotting my gums. Shit. So I stopped and have been brushing my teeth many times a day. Let's hope it goes away. Shit.

Sorry to be a bummer in the last post, I was just worried and board.

The card is woring again thanks to Ms Scout W. Thank you for your help. We got a chance to go into town today and did it up right. We got some prepared food from a restaurant, used a computer for couple hours and hit up the grocery store. Very successful. I was able to dump my cameras memory card onto cd's and we e-mailed multiple farms in Croatia and Thailand. We both decided when we are not wwoofing we don't get the real culture of the country we are in. In Barcelona we had no idea what to do with ourselves so we pretty much did nothing and didn't meet anyone. Not so much our idea of traveling. Also we don't really like staying in hotels and hostels. So if we can, we prefer to wwoof. We have already received a reply from a farm in northern Thailand, and it sounds great.

As far as our plans, (well see if we stick to them) we have a farm lined up the day we get off the island in Malalaga Spain to pick mangos all day. The day we're done with that we are going to try to see Mr. Leonard Cohen in Granada, then were off to France to meet a friend in Paris and see some of Zoey's aunts friends in the alps. That's about where we are now. Still hoping to squeeze in Portugal and Morocco. Guess its in Gods hands.
Cheers!!!

Beautiful La Palma

The island of La Palma is really something else. I have never been on an island before and it is so beautiful here. It is hard to tell where the sky stops and the water begins. We landed here Thursday afternoon and caught a bus out of Santa Cruz headed to our new home for the next two weeks. We transferred busses a few times taking us about two hours total to get here. The ride up was amazing. La Palma has this huge elevation climb approaching the center of the island, so the roads were just two lane highways with sharp switch backs. The hills are covered in massive banana plantations, something I had never seen before.

The directions to the farm were pretty straight forward. At one point the directions said to get off at kilometer marker 91 and walk 500 meters to an old cement road, that was a bit tricky, but we managed. The old cement road was a beast. It was the better part of a kilometer with a vertical grade of maybe 10% or so. With heavy backpacks it was quite the trek. We arrived tired and hungry to meet the neighbor of the woman we would be wwoofing for. She showed us around a bit and told us the other wwoofer would be home soon. A young lady from Barcelona showed up a little while later informing us that she would be leaving in the morning to return home. So very quickly she gave us the rundown on the place.

Turns out all we have to do here is feed the animals twice a day, and water the garden, only about two hours of work a day. The lady who owns the house and animals has been gone for quite some time, so the information has been passed down from wwoofer to wwoofer. No one has ever meet her, and we only talk to her via email. There are no pictures of her in the house so I'm not even very sure she is real.

The animals are fun. There are eight icelandic horses here and one of them is a baby. Icelandic horses are just very small horses. Seven to eight cats live here, most of them are kittens. There are three chickens and a bunny all living together in a hen house. The four dogs are all of small breeds with lots of energy. We also have a baby turtle in the living room.

The land we are on is small and rocky and has two houses. The horses have a good size area to live in but not really anywhere to ride. Zoey and I don't know how to ride but wish we could because they don't get any exercise. We don't even know how to go about walking them.

The water system is quit intriguing. There is a natural spring that the system is tapped into with two main tanks one for drinking and one for everything else. This is really the only thing I can learn that interests me while I'm here.

Other than that we have been staying at the house all day with nothing to do. There are some movies to watch and I have been downloading podcasts from Adam Carolla and 60 minutes on the blackberry. We are stuck because we are pretty much broke. The banks won't take American travelers checks, they have to be euro checks and we hardly have any Dollars to trade in. So we don't have any money for the bus into town or groceries. The bank card of Zoeys has been frozen for about a week now, and there is no way to really call Nevada to see why. At least we have a return ticket back to Spain. My cameras memory card is full so I can't take any pictures. Bummer. So we are hitch hiking into town once a day to try the card at the only atm only to return with an empty grocery bag.

Lucky for us the house has some pasta we have been living on along with some dried beens and lentils, but we were told that since the work was so light we had to buy our own food. The land offers squash, onions, some chard, some lettuce, small carrots, and some other fruit that is not ripe yet. We have been crafty with what we have, but it is hard without oil and butter and what not to cook with. But I do think I leveled up on my gathering skills. So we hope everyday the account thaws and we can eat and replace what we have eaten already. There are almond trees here so lunch has been about 50 almonds or so a day for me. I know all things happen for a reason, but what I should be learning is still a mystery. Any bible verses I should meditate on? (I only have a new testament with me)

We are still in good spirits, but awfully board. You can only pet a horse for so long, and we feel bad sitting in front of the tv all day.

Tomorrow is Monday, and again we will try to get some money. I will let you know if we do.

Canary Bound

We left Granada still with hopes of getting to the Canaries. Got some bummer news when we found a computer, the price of the ferry we were hoping to hop from Cadiz to Santa Cruz La Palma quadrupled in price over night. We were looking at 1900 euros. That's about $2580. We would have booked them earlier but the website had some glitch that prevented us from buying them, and we thought we could just go get them. Whatever. Last minute round trip plane tickets were much more affordable, but still kinda pricey. They leave from Madrid, seven hours away from Cadiz. We hope they let us have the tickets, the concern beeing that the booking site didn't like the credit card, or the price was too much for an American card or something. UGGH!!!!

On a better note, we are almost to Cadize and the road trip has been so much fun. Since we drove down the coast, when ever we needed to take a break from driving, we just went to the beach. We drove for a whole day in our bathing suits and wet car seats. Too cool! We slept two nights in the Fiat, one night at a rest stop, the other on the beach. The second night zoey was super tired so I took a 40 to the beach and sat and watched the water crash toward me. The beach was kinda empty except for some people watching a kung fu soccer movie on a make shift movie screen. Dad knows the film. Anyway... I just sat there amazed with the water. So loud. So beautiful. The moon was full and the tide was busy. I can see how people fall in love with the ocean. Not that I love her but I do think I have a crush on her.

Last night we meet a man on the spanish wwoofer site that has a ruin that he is in the process of building up. The house was maybe built 100 years ago with no one in it the last 20 or so years. He and his wife are from England and he works in the Caribbean as a landscape engineer. We just had the night there and it was so nice not to sleep in a car for a change.

Today we drove down to Granada and spent the day (with the bummer news) and I drove through the Sierra Nevada mountains around the city. The climb on the mountain was very steep, and the road was super narrow. I had fun. Zoey Liked the view more than the ride up.

Inout is the name of the hostel we stayed at for two nights in Barcelona. The price was right. Right around 80 bucks for two nights, breakfast included. The hostel was nice and not to far from the downtown area. I have never slept in a hostel before, and that was a little different. The room we got has 5 bunkbeds with up to 10 people sleeping in one room and a shared shower and toilet. Every bunk has it´s own locker that is about 7 feet tall so our bags fit unpacked just fine. The first night, the room wasn´t full so it wasn´t too loud. Still people coming in after your asleep is very distracting. The room is very hot and Im on the top bunk, so probably hotter. Barcelona is hot in general.



The hostel is on protected forest land and the grounds are very beautiful. There is a resturant that serves all three meals, has a laundry facility, four computers with internet and more showers. The food, beer and wine is super cheep there. It´s nice to find some where cheeper than Denver to eat and drink. The staff are mostly all handicaped in some way, but it´s nice they have work in such a big city. The down side to the hostel, and I imagine most, is I´m kind of old to be here. There was some youth retreate of maybe 30 french teenagers running aruond. Teens are rude enough, but French teens are the worst. Baby frogs is what we started calling them. I guess my expectations were to meet other travelers that gave a shit about where they were and down for a conversation. Oh well... You get waht you pay for.




Barcelona has been one of the coolest citys I have ever seen. So beautiful, very cool people. I Had a realy great time there.



We decided to go to see the Salvador Dalí Museum in Figueres. So we rented a car in Barcelona and drove up there. The drive was nice and took about two hours. Oh yea... I forgot to say that the car is a brand new Fiat. Silver. Fast.



The Dalí museum was prety fantastic. It was everything I would have expected from Dalí. He has been one of my faveriot artists since I was a teen.



We left that night and hit the coast and begain to drive south. We are hopefully following the coast all the way to Cadiz. Now I am in Granada, at a cafe. Hopefully I will get some mor pictures up and or get a computer to play on for a while.

Thank you Rosinhil \ We landed in Spain

So due to the amount of people that I am around everyday, I find it hard to make time to write often. We are ending our time here at the first farm. I think its going to be tough to find a farm like this one. I got the opportunity today to teach some off the others how to fly stunt kites like the one I have. The wind here around 6 pm is perfect to fly in. Earlier this week I was asked to fix some bicycles. So I gave them a list of things we needed and Zoey and I went to work. It was a nice change of pace to do something I love, instead of weeding all day. Not that I dislike weeding, but you get it. Kites and bicycles. Heaven.
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Ok we are now in spain. The flight was on ryanair, this british company. They have their own airports and shuttle service, keeping the price way cheap. The airports are all 60 to 100 miles from the main cites. Zoeys ticket was like 20 bucks. Mine for some reason was a bit more. But the flight was good and was just about 3 hours. Everyone clapped when we landed. Not sure if that is a ryanair thing or if people are that happy to be in spain. We are doing the hostel thing the next three nights. We have a shared room with others tonight and tomorrow, and got something a bit nicer for my birthday.