Day 124: Spain Day 18

Saturday, September 24, 2016

I woke up and chilled.  It was the no-plan plan day.  In the early afternoon, we went to Jaca, a city about 30 minutes away from us.  There was a wallcreeper sighting there, and as we tried to figure out exactly where it was sighted, we ate some olives at a cafe with a sign reading: Keep Calm and Drink Gin Tonic.  Nice.  Well, Jaca was actually not looking very promising, so we decided to look for another place to search for the wallcreeper.  We chose a place near Siresa, a small town around 20 kilometers north of Jaca.  After driving around for an hour on twisty roads looking at beautiful, staggering rock cliffs and forested mountains, we dropped off a nice guy at his car.  He and his girlfriend had hiked for 8 hours and needed a ride to their car.  So once we dropped him off, we got out as a family into the grassy field dotted with cows and cars and surrounded by mountains.  We walked to the beautiful, shallow river and watched as it twisted through the grassy area that was melded into coniferous forest.  Then Vanessa and I saw a Dipper!  It's a cute bird that fishes in rivers and cocks its short tail a lot.  We had never seen one before, so that was great.

Then we drove back down to Siresa and chose a spot randomly to look for wallcreepers, having not found the place described on the world wide web.  It was a river with cave rock cliffs jutting out.  With dusk falling, we hurried up to a trail, detouring to the river for a couple minutes.  Vanessa and I went down and crossed the river to get a better view of a cliff face.  We scanned for a bit, and nothing.  So we followed our parents up.  A nice set of dimming cliff faces met us some minutes up a mountain.  It was beautiful, and below behind us we could see the small Siresa glowing with lights.  After a few minutes looking for wallcreepers, we realized that our search for them would remain fruitless.

We went back to Orós Bajos, stopping by a store to buy some pasta stuff for dinner.  Then, my awesome mom made awesome pasta: a jarred jamon serrano carbonara sauce with fried jamon and pasta.  And bread!