Valencia, Spain

We safely arrived here from Rome on Monday. Sunday night we all pulled all-nighters due to an early morning flight and the Spain vs. Italy game (Spain won... Which made for a relatively quiet night in Rome. No worries, we still found ourselves hanging outside the colosseum for a while, which was nuts. We just laid outside of the incredible building talking... and dozing off. It was surreal to think that we were sitting outside of the place where gladiators fought and the people we read about in the New Testament walked.)

When we got here on Monday, we had our first real "hiccup" of the trip, which is pretty good. Basically, we couldn't find our hostel and spent 2 hours calling around and looking things up online at an Internet cafe. We finally found it (thanks Newt!) and the place is great! It's a 7 bed apartment, complete with a kitchen, washer, living room, tv, bathroom, and dinner table - perfect for our last country together.

To keep with the trend, we took a long nap when we got to Valencia (after we found the hostel) then woke up to go see the city. We walked around for a while and went to city center then back to the apartment to play cards and hang out and go to bed.

The next morning, Gramps (Hutton) made us omelets (sooo yummy) and we headed out to the beach. The beach was (nearly) perfect - perfect weather with sand instead of gravel and the water wasn't too cold. Fabulous. I even went for a run along the beach... Seriously, could not be better. The only thing was, it was a nude beach. Totally fine- we just minded our own business and acted like it didn't phase us at all.

After, we went back to shower and found ourselves watching the Spanish Animal Planet channel for a while until Cloud (Kyle) convinced us that we should go walk around again. So, we did. We found a cool park place that had these art-climbing structures. After, we went back to the apartment again and played games/hung out and were off to bed.

Something about Valencia that you should know, the smells as you walk along the street are rarely pleasant. I often find myself holding my breath and hoping the by the time I breathe again the putrid odor would be gone. More often than not, it isn't but a minute before the smell returns.

Another thing, on a more positive note -Valencia has beautiful skies! Not only do they look like they were painted, but it feels like they are only 40 feet above us. It's incredible. God did a pretty good job... Between the beach and the skies, I'm fond of this place. It's definitely a different experience here from our other places. Valencia is a pretty random place to go... We aren't really sure of the history of this place... All we knew is there is a beach and Ryanair flies here. But since it's the end of the trip, we are all pretty much fine with just chillin here.

The NEXT day was FOURTH OF JULY! Yeah!..... Except we are in Spain and no one cares. The boys decided they wanted to see more of Valencia and the girls opted to just go to the markets, shop around a bit and then head out to the beach. We spent most of the day just lounging around and enjoying the sun and very salty water. When the guys came back they taught Smills and me how to body surf.. Ha. Then we all had a Fourth of July picnic on the beach. It was cute. After which we played with a volleyball, Barton injured nearly everyone, Sarah and I climbed a rope tower and the guys sang God Bless America to Heather. Nearly perfect. It's just sad that it was our last night together.

This morning was an early-ish morning (we actually slept last night, though.. So that's good). We finished packing up and said "bye" to Bart and Kyle (they are working at a summer camp in Austria for the rest of the summer) and are now on our way to the airport. The best part is... Sarah, Heather and I are wearing our matching shirts we bought yesterday.

Now we are in London to hang out for a couple of days before we all make our way home to the States.

It's been such a great trip! I'm going to miss traveling and traveling with these people quite a bit.

If I do anything cool in the next couple days I'll post it.. Hopefully I can get enough wifi to post some pictures. (I'm doing my best, mom.)