EUROPE- Part 1- SPAIN

What a blessing to be able to spend some time in Europe this summer. It has taken us this long to write about Europe because we could write many pages. Every day was great. Europe was Europe. Those that have been there know what I mean. Those that have not, try to get there sometime. It was a wonderful place to visit.

We spend time first visiting Dave, Beth and Lucas in Madrid. They have been there for a year and a half, so it was great to see them, and to see Lucas for THE FIRST TIME!!!! Man, he is such a cute kid. Fun. He smiled at people, and everyone loved him. I was expecting people in Madrid not to be very friendly, but I was wrong. Lucas broke the ice, and people on busses and trains loved him. It was perfect.

We saw a few cities close to Madrid, Segovia and ChinChon. Segovia was a beautiful medieval town that still had a 1st century Roman aqueduct and the castle, Alcazar-what they modeled and named the Disney one after. We felt like we were in another time. In Chin Chon, we ate, and wondered around. It was cool, the next weekend they were having a bullfight, so the small town was getting ready. At first we were bummed we would miss it, but as we thought more, we were definitely OK with missing out. We heard bullfights aren't very pro-animal rights and they can get pretty ugly.

We then went to Barcelona, which was AWESOME. We loved it. The coolest city in Europe. It had everything. It had a beautiful main street, great buildings, tons of cool stores (John is writing this, I even liked the stores.). Little food places, lot of small meals and coffee shop type places we loved, There was an awesome very green part of the city, an awesome park. We took a bike tour and discovered it. And, in this huge city, is a real beach!! I have never been to a big city that has a beach. It was great. Beautiful beach that we enjoyed a ton. Our most memorable part, was when we single-handedly stopped a pickpocket ring. Check out our Barcelona pics. They were very cool.

Europe 09-Spain