Catalonia: A New Perspective: Day 5: Thursday, November 24, 2011: Outside of St. Pere Pescador:

We got up to breakfast of croissants with chocolate inside- pain au chocolat in French though I don’t know what the Spanish call them, either way though they were delicious! There was also orange juice, coffee, and toast. We gathered our luggage and bags together and left it in the front room for “Buffalo,” the trip assistant and also the person who moves our stuff from place to place for us. We then walked down to meet the horses, brushed them off, tacked up, and rode off. We took more dirt roads today past corn and sunflower fields, as well as crossing two rivers. One of the rivers was very wide and we had to cross it to get to the road on the other side, and while we were in the middle one of the German’s on our trip, Tom, strayed too far to one side of the line of horses and hit a muddy soft spot away from the concrete that we were walking along. He and the horse sunk down and had to leap up and swim a little way to get back onto the harder surface, however, he and the horse were fine- just a little wet! After this excitement, we rode a little farther before reaching Castello d’Empurias around 11:30, we then rode through the town and to the other side where we met up with Buffalo for our days picnic. It was really nice, including a picnic table that he had set up, and real dishes. The food was delicious: salad again, along with noodles with pesto and sun dried tomatoes and cookies of course. We had a miniature siesta before leaving at about two o’clock, walking first back through the town, past a beautiful church and over a brick bridge dating back to the 1930s. We took more dirt roads past hay fields, allowing for lots of trotting and cantering before we reached another two lane road which we had to trot along for about ten minutes. Buffalo met us where the road we had been taking intersected with the highway, so that he could drive along behind us in an effort to keep the cars from passing us which can be very dangerous. After we trotted for ten minutes, we came to another dirt road that we turned onto. We passed lots of apple trees making the air smell like apples, until we reached our home for the night. It’s the horse’s home as well: they are staying just down the drive way from the house. After we got them settled in and gave them more grain, we packed away the tack in the red horse trailer that comes with us everywhere and walked up to the house. Bri and I are staying upstairs with a room that has a beautiful view of the drive and the ponies at the end. Dinner was tasty, vegetable soup, puff pastries filled with veggies and topped with goat cheese or a chicken puff for the meat eaters, and for dessert, a delicious birthday cake for me as it was my 20 birthday! By the end of dinner we were all tired as dinner lasts so long here, so we headed to bed to be well rested for our trip to the beach tomorrow.