Covadonga, Cangas de Onís, y Ribadesella

Today was the excursion to Covadonga, Cangas de Onís, y Ribadesella.  It was a long day, but we saw many amazing things.  There was definitely a lot of history to see in these places, though our tour guides were pretty lame.  They're the guys who organized these trips, but they think we don't understand Spanish, so they try to speak in English and we end up learning nothing. It's annoying.


We left around 10:30am this morning from Oviedo and drove to Covadonga where there was an impressive church and an even more impressive cave and waterfall.  The mountains were beautiful everywhere.  There were the ones that must have been lower that were covered in green grass and trees.  And then there were what must have been Los Picos de Europa, which had snow on the peaks.  I couldn't get a picture of these since we only saw them through the bus windows and it was really foggy/cloudy today:

La Iglesia de Covadonga

Con las montañas

Las Cuevas y la Catarata

Me in front of the water fall!

Afterwards, we drove to Cangas de Onís, which only took 30 minutes.  This tiny town is the home of a reeeeally old Roman bridge.  It also used to be the capital of Spain for a very short time, back when Spain was only Asturias (According to Spaniards, when the Muslims were conquering Spain, they couldn´t handle the mountains of Asturias):

The Roman Bride in Cangas de Onís

La iglesia de Cangas de Onís

Again, we had a 30 minute drive to Ribadesella.  This town is on the Northern coast of Spain.  We walked up a steep cliff to a tiny little church and an amazing view.  It started raining a little bit at this point, but it stopped pretty quickly.  The first rain I've experienced in Asturias, which is very strange for the area.  Oviedo is known for being rainy.  Ribadesella reminded me of the fishing towns in the US East when it's off-season for tourists.  Since it was cold and rainy, we were the only ones there, other than the 25 locals that had ventured out of their houses:

The Fishing/Tourist Town of Ribadesella

Cliffs!

I had extreme motion sickness from the drive in the bus from Oviedo because there were so many turns and dips.  I used sheer mental power to not get sick on the drive from Covadonga to Cangas de Onís because that was even twistier, but shorter.  The drive from Cangas to Ribadesella was better and I was starting to feel better from the morning.  And the drive home was almost all high-way, so I was good - I was actually able to have a conversation with someone.  When I got home my host mother was asleep on the couch in front of a dubbed version of "Sister Act".  In fact, she's still there, haha.


I hope everyone enjoyed my week of intense blogging!  Now that everyone knows where I am, what I'm doing, and what I see, I will most likely be posting less often.  Also, if you want postcards and you don't think I have your address, email me!


*Besos*