Teresa's Excellent Spanish, UK& Croatian Adventure: Granada, Spain, July 27, 2011: Waterfall tour

My unofficial tour guide, a Brit who has been in Spain for 2 years, takes the group of us on our 6 hour hiking and mini-waterfall tour. Grabbing a quick breakfast, and then grabbing Rob because we have Alhambra palace tickets timed for the evening together, we take off for a local bus to the countryside where we hike all the while admiring the beautiful landscape.

I meet some cool people on my tour: Denise and Andrew, cousins from Florida whose American Airlines and Delta employed parents give them the blessing of free standby travel. I found their close sibling relationship very heart warming.

I also met Marina, a 2^nd year teacher from Toronto, who I bonded with over her broken camera.

Marina is freaked out with the "Indiana Jones" tensile bridge" which our guide clearly instructs to all: "Only 4 people on this at a time!" (To no surprise, someone doesn't hear it!) The ends are fine, but the wooden pieces are widely spaced and one could certainly step into nothing if not careful. The middle of the bridge is particularly shaky. I try to be as reassuring as possible to all- including myself! You gotta love the element of surprise and danger- mostly when you've survived it though!

Marina later declared, “ My camera breaking was the best thing that ever happened to me!”


!” when we decided to be each other’s Sports Illustrated photographers, an inside joke you will get once you look at our pics! A set of brothers from Florida, with six pack abs at that (sorry hard not to notice), a med school student, and a bunch others, it was definitely a fun group to hike and explore with!

After hiking along cliffs using climber’s handles to scale the walls, we make it to the end, where some of us take off our shoes and take a dip into the cold glacier fed stream.

. A pool gathers under a mini water which create more picture taking opportunities! Marina gives me her impressions of trust and honesty in a relationship, while I encourage her to highly value great sincere loyal guys who truly love her (because they are rare in life), which currently happens to be her boyfriend of 9 months whom she met on Lava Life.

I tell her that limited life experience (aka youth)sometimes makes it easy to take a good thing for granted. I also tell the Florida guys a story and they liken it to, “ That’s a “guy lie”...do you ever watch Jerry Springer and the guys on that are like: ” Well, I bought you a pair of panties because I was thinking of you and that’s why you found those under the couch...really babe!” Hilarious!

Everyone thinks that I am under 27 because, well, they themselves are under 27. I guess being enthusiastic about adventure, jumping into waterfalls, laughing and joking around are all good measures of youthfulness whatever your age!