May 22, 2014
Layover in Olot
Hiking in the Volcanic National Park
After 6 straight riding days, today was scheduled as a bit of a rest day to give us a breather before the mountains. With our usual complete lack of common sense though, we spent our rest day on a 15 mile hike through the volcanic national park. In our defense, we hadn't really meant to take in such a long walk - we thought it be more like 10 miles, but forgot to include four extra miles wasted in navigation blunders.
The region is crisscrossed with a number of reasonably well marked trails. Our plan was to take route 3 from Olot to Santa Pau, adding a spur to include Croscat volcano, the most colorful one from the brochures we'd seen. At the end we planned to catch the late afternoon bus back to Olot. We found the route out of town easily enough, but about four miles later were chagrined to see that we were entering it again - it turns out that route 3 has several tentacles at the Olot end, and we had turned back onto one of them. Looking at our gps we saw that we had drawn a complete, rather large circle. Very nice.
Finally making it out of town, we enjoyed a lovely walk through beautiful woods and countryside. Much of our time was spent deep inside beech forests. After a week here, I'm still surprised at how green this part of Spain is. The volcanos themselves are a pretty quiet attraction though, especially after growing up in the Pacific Northwest.
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