54:50 - wanted to take it easy today because we are planning a hiking excursion this afternoon and it will be hilly! Pretty much ran some of the same hills as yesterday, with some slight variations, it is so cool to be so close to the mountain paths! Our apartment is right on the Mediterranean Sea (rocky, so not really a "beach" sea, but beautiful and clear so you can see right down into the bottom - and a wonderful blue-green color) where the Pyrenees meet.
This afternoon we went up the the monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes - we took a cab up and planned on hiking around up there and then hiking back down - we could have hiked both ways but it would have meant skipping our run in the morning because it would have taken about 4 - 6 hours to hike both ways. It is pretty impressive. Parts of it date back to at least 878 AD, and it was upgraded up until the late 18th century. The road leading up the monastery from the port was 8k of very serpentine road ... incredible that they could build this high up so very long ago! And it was huge (some pictures can be found at http://www.cbrava.com/santpereuk.htm). After touring the monastery itself we took a very treacherous hike up even higher to the point of the mountain where the Castle of San Salvador is located. The tour of the castle is not "tourist" at all it is basically a very rocky steep narrow trail on the tip of a 3000 ft mountain! The trail leading up to the Castle is about 3/4 of a mile, but not recommended for the average tourist (a picture at the monastery shows a cartoon person falling headfirst down off of a mountain along with several languages warning of the difficulty of the trail and strong winds -- almost discouraged me from trying it!). But, despite the slow going (it took us about 40 mins to climb up to the top), and the fact that "getting to the top" was not the end of the difficulty (since there were no paved walkways in or around the castle either) it was well worth it. You basically just got to climb around the old ruins of a 13th century castle - that has not been maintained, updated or excavated at all, and the view from the very top of the mountain was amazing! A strong wind was blowing a rain storm (it rained pretty much every morning and afternoon) in and we decided to climb down and not spend too much time up on the top (as it was actually kind of scary) - but enough to look around and find the old entry way into the castle. Then we hiked back to the town, had dinner and hiked back to the apartment (about a 8 - 10 mile hike for the day). On the way back we saw some "dolmens" which are rock dwellings dating from 3000 BC to 700 AD -- pretty incredible. There were so many of these types of things wherever we ran and hiked that it was overwhelming sometimes. Sometimes it was hard to tell how old these things were -- could be BC or could have just been abandoned in the late 18th century (or even in the 70's!).
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