We're here & we're busy!

Our travels went perfectly (does that ever happen?) and we arrived in Lisbon 10 minutes early on Thursday. Will and Chris slept relatively well on the plane (definitely key!). Once we picked up our luggage, we drove for about 2.5 hours to our first destination, Salvaterra de Extremo. It's a small village near the border of Spain. It's white-washed buildings with terra-cotta roofs are really picturesque while approaching it from the countryside. Oh, and is there countryside! There are fields of olive trees, goats (everywhere!) and fruit trees anywhere you turn. Our bed & breakfast, Casa de Forna, is really more like staying at a friend's house. Jaoa, our host, and his wife Rita, are expecting their first child next month. The parents and grandparents live here, too, on the first floor, so soon there will be four generations living here! The second floor has 5 or 6 guest rooms and each have their own bathrooms (yes, little things make me very happy!).

Last night, Jaoa (who is a geologist by trade) took us on a nature 'walk' - well, honestly, it was more of a hike for this girl!! We walked to the Spanish border, which at this area, was a canyon of granite and shist. On the Spanish side, there was an old castle that was incredible. This doesn't do the castle justice, but it gives a pretty good idea of the scale.



I took other pics, but the internet connection is slugging along rather painfully, so I will show them once we get home.

Last night we joined our hosts for dinner in the garden. They also have a bread business, supplying area restaurants, so we had a wonderful meal of homemade pizzas. We are the only guests these couple of days, so it really is like being at a friend's house. (And they speak amazing English - we got really lucky!)

This morning, we drove about 25 km to another small village to meet Carlos and Vanya, our guides from the geological park where we were volunteering. The village was steeped in Templar history - which was like something out of a historical fiction novel, complete with a castle on the mountaintop directly above the church. VERY cool! So, after climbing (the perfect word choice!) through the village, we came upon this:



It was utterly breathtaking. And this doesn't even begin to do it justice. Our destination? One of those little houses at the very bottom! So we started out by splitting up - John and Chris went with Carlos and Vanya up to the castle and down the paths on the cliff...Will and I were to follow the trail markers through a few more houses and make our way down. (This was the so-called EASY way - HA!) Due to Will's recent sickness, we made it about 3/4 of a mile and had to stop. See, the trail marker started pointing up another hill...knowing this isn't correct, I leave Will under a shady orange tree and go off the trail to see if down is really correct. No trail markers, and yes, despite my dad's best efforts at teaching me, I got a bit nervous (stop laughing, Dad!). Will isn't feeling great, my cell phone doesn't work, and we're supposed to meet where?!?! So what does this city girl do? We turned around! Having no clue as to what I'll do next, we make it back to where we split up and I hear Carlos. They're on a hillside, so like an ugly American, I yell across this great divide to get John's attention (hanging my head in shame). John and Carlos came back, and Chris continued on with Vanya, working their way to the bottom.

This is the point where Carlos tells us we can drive to a point closer to the Fossil house. (Again, stop laughing, Dad!)We do so, and head to the Fossil House, where we are put to work promply cleaning hundreds of fossils. We had a lot of fun learning about them as we worked.

When we stopped for lunch, we headed to a natural pool in the gorge. The boys had an amazing time swimming among the locals. Here's a picture of them near the waterfall (the source of the pool).



I can't wait to get home to edit these, but it at least gives you an idea of how beautiful it was!

We had lunch at a restaurant near the park. There were definite communication problems (I ended up talking to the owner in Spanish and we were able to work it out), but we had a delicious lunch. John, Will and Chris had the wild boar (the house specialty) and really liked it. I went with a far tamer pork loin, but it was equally good.

We headed back to the park, finished up the remaining fossils that needed to be cleaned. At which point, we started out to hunt for more. We used a GPS to mark the spots of those that we found and documented its characteristics. We did this for about an hour (it was about 100 degrees - it was exhausting trying to hike in the heat!) and found three sets of fossils on the cliffs. We took some pics of them, but they really need to be edited.

It's nearly 8pm, and we're heading down to the garden to join the family for a barbeque dinner. Tomorrow we're heading back to Lisbon, so we will update as soon as we can!