Las Alpujarras: Off-road hiking & aggressive crickets

So it seems I'm about ten days behind in my blogging....that's alright though, just a sign of having a good time and cleaning too many toilets! Anyway, I started this post last week so I'm just gonna let it flow as I started it (aka when I say "this past weekend" I really mean June 30th - July 1st....forgive me) and I'll hopefully catch you up to speed with another post or two in the coming days.

This past weekend, I decided to take a vacation from my vacation, so I sat down and actually did a bit of research on where I might go. The fifteen minutes of Google searching reminded me not to go to grad school any time soon.

First night in Capileira.

I decided that since I had three days off from my toilet cleaning job, I would hop a bus for a casual weekend trip to Las Alpujarras in the Spanish Sierra Nevada mountains. The area is dotted with teeny tiny little picturesque villages and I chose Capileira, which is one of the highest in the region. Population: 559. 

What's incredible about the area is that there are three traditional all-white (talking architecture here) villages that you can hike between: Capileira, Bubión, and Pampaneira. I'm pretty sure that the people who created the trails between the three had my sort of humor because there would be a very clear trailhead and then half a mile later the trail would split into three places with no marking whatsoever. Naturally, I always chose the wrong one and ended up on someone's private property, their wild dogs would come sprinting toward me inducing a moment of terror and regret, only to be greeted with a sniff and then quickly rejected. 

Off-road hiking in Las Alpujarras

Other than these relatively isolated incidences of poodle-induced terror, I didn't have much problem with the whole "propiedad privada" thing. Except for the fact that I'm pretty convinced that crickets wildly reproduce in the summer-time because the second I stepped off the trailhead —rather, the second the trailhead straight-up disappeared— there were crickets everywhere. Literally in all the places. Every step I took, there were 6 or 7 crickets that would hop up out of nowhere. I'm not gonna lie, I died a little on the inside. I don't particularly care for bugs. I mean, who does really? Except for those adorable nerdy little kids with glasses who collect them in a jar only to study them and then grow up to be wildly handsome geniuses. You know who you are.

Anyway, it was kind of gross, and I'm pretty sure I accidentally killed 15 or 20 crickets. And I'm a bit of a pacifist so for a while there I was feeling pretty bad about myself. However, after a couple of miles of jaunting through cricket-infested territory, one very rude cricket jumped a little too high...and landed IN MY SHIRT. Yes, there was a cricket in my shirt. It gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it. I almost ripped off my whole shirt out of sheer horror but that would have given the cricket too much satisfaction. After that, I didn't care about killing the crickets. One rude cricket and my pacifism flew out the window. I'm pretty sure that's how wars start. One damn rude cricket....

Apartments in Bubión

Aside from the whole cricket jumping incident, my stay in Las Alpujarras was lovely. Two solid days filled with hiking, sitting by the pool, and chatting with old men about Spain's Eurocup domination. Since the weekend I was in Alpujarras was the weekend of the Eurocup final, the owners of the lodge that I was staying at turned their outdoor patio/garden into a raging outdoor sports bar— as raging as one can possibly get in a town of 559 people. Had I not been surrounded by wildly out of control small-town Spaniards, I probably would have felt almost sort of bad for Italy and their horrifying 4-0 dismal performance. BUT, when in Spain do as the Spanish do... show up late to meetings, eat dinner at 11pm, and NEVER feel bad for the Italians.