da beach

We're back from our beach excursion, and boy was it a doozy!

I don't want to ruin the surprise ending, but let's just say that there was a lot of sun, sand, and swimming, with the surprise addition of stretchers, scans, and souvenir scars.

The 6 "S's" of a good vacation, no?

But on the bright side, we all made it back alive. Which I'm not exactly taking for granted these days.

So look forward to that while I start at the beginning...

Our first stop was Valencia, a little under 4 hour drive from Madrid. Josh plotted out our course to give us a pit stop at a castle.

This is one of Spains Paradores-- castles that have been converted into hotels, so you can brag that you spent a night in a castle. 

Since we didn't stay the night, we can only brag that we used the bathrooms in a castle.

Holla!

A couple of hours later, we were seeing a different style of castle...

 Poor Derek is utterly incapable of opening his peepers for a sunny photo, and yet does not have the facial structure required to keep sunglasses on his face. He's a little flat in the ole face.

Pretty Beach!

So there were quite a few European-style sunbathers on this vacation, you know, sans top. Our unobservant children never even noticed.
They were too busy making sure they got sand in every crack and crevice of their bodies by making sand-angels, and drying off from the sea by rolling in sand.
There was a lot of sand.

After our afternoon at the beach, we got cleaned up and set out to explore a little of Valencia.

The next morning we hopped on a bus to go to a park Josh had scoped out online.

Yes, Alex is wearing the same shirt from the night before. I don't have a dryer people, we have to conserve.

The playground is a replica of Gulliver from Gulliver's Travels.
You can see how big it is from this google maps view.

And here's the clown crew sitting on Gully's head.

And his hand

You could slide down lots of his parts.

This also happened to be our 12th anniversary, so we had Alex take a picture for us.

And then we were off for another afternoon at the beach.

The next day we headed south to our next hotel.
To be continued...