La Vida de los Hubers: My Mum's Visit Part 1

We've been looking forward to Grandma's nearly 2 week visit during the last half of February for a long time. We had a well anticipated trip to the Southern part of Spain planned for the last weekend she was here but the first weekend we took her on a couple of day trips.

Before our first day trip, we watched Morgan and Mason play "futbol" on Saturday morning. Mason has been playing on Morgan's team due to the fact that they don't have enough players.

As you can see we are some of the few here to watch as usual.

By the way, it was Kamree's idea that I sat on her lap.

Cuenca

The first day trip was to Cuenca which was an extremely rainy day.

We parked at the bottom of the city, and therefore we had to hike up a bazilian steps to get to the "Enchanted City".

Yahoo, we finally made it up to the back entrance!

The city Cuenca from across the bridge.

Another view with the convent on the left, the bridge in the center and the hanging houses on the right.

Castle of Chinchón

Circuses seem to be everywhere here including next to castles. On our way from Cuenca we stopped at this simple 16th century castle/fort in Chinchón. This castle is a replacement for one destroyed by an artillery bombardment in 1521. The early 16th century saw the destruction of a lot of older castles that weren't designed to deal with modern artillery. The designers of this new castle, built in the late 1500's, kept the artillery threat in mind.

In 1808 during the Napoleonic Wars, the Polish Brigade attacked Chinchón and set off a giant explosion inside the castle. You can see the partially ruined towers in this picture from the explosion.

Manzanares El Real

The next day after church we drove up to the Manzanares El Real Castle.

We have been here a couple of times so I won't say much but I will post a few pictures.

This is taken from the old castle walls with the old graveyard on the right and the new castle in the background.

A closer view of the very very old graveyard with several empty stone caskets.

Waterfall Hike- Two days later....

My kids really wanted to go for a hike/walk and we love the waterfall walk since it is scenic all the way there and back. We packed a lunch and as soon as the kids got home we took off. Morgan had soccer in two hours so we had to move quickly to make it back in time.

We mistakenly walked on the wrong side of the river when starting out our hike which was fortunate as the path past the bridge was flooded and we would have had to turn around. It seems like we have had almost daily rain for the last several weeks which has caused lots of flooding and mud. The side we took was extremely muddy and we all took our turns murmuring about it. It was at the point of taking this picture we realized we had to take the mucky way back as well.

It's been awhile since we last took this hike so I had to really think which road to take. We luckily choose the correct one here but missed a turn later which cost us some precious time.

An quick hour later we made it to the waterfall. The bottom of the stairs was flooded so we couldn't get any closer. It worked out since we only had an hour to get back which gave us no time to enjoy the waterfall anyway.

Sala Cantares/Flamenco Show

In college, I took a class on Spain and did one of my oral presentations on Flamenco. Ever since moving here I had really been hoping to see some live Flamenco, so when I saw an opportunity I bought my mom and myself some tickets to a dinner/flamenco show in Madrid for Christmas.

After getting back from the waterfall hike we were looking forward to the bus ride into Madrid to go to this show. The bus stops here,.at this landmark and from here we walked to the show that was about a block away. Unfortunately it took us 45 minutes to get there as we followed Google map's directions and walked 1/2 hour farther than we needed to.

We made reservations for the earliest show which was at 6:30 and we were uncomfortably the only two in the audience. (We are always being reminded that we are the only ones in Spain that eat before 9.) The food was really good, but I worried that we wouldn't get much of a show since it was just the two of us. They seemingly held nothing back as they were quite impressive and the show kept going and going until we snuck out.