Wandering around the Balerics.

We arrived in Mao, Menorca after a long 4 day sail from Rome. We are now in the Baleric Islands of the eastern coast of Spain. We’re almost out of the Med, and I can’t believe how far we’ve come this year!

The town of Mao was really cool! The landscape here is really green with lots of trees everywhere and on these islands the houses are all built right on the edge of the water so they all have waterfront views. But from the water it all looks really cool.

We sailed onto another bay on the southern side of Menorca Island. We had heard from a friend that there was a Spanish Festival involving horses happening that night at a town we were going to be anchored at. The horse festival turned out to be really cool! Well, of course! We’re in Spain!! That’s epic enough! So we went into town at around 7pm and they had set up like a ring with a floor of sand. A single horse with a rider would enter from one side of the ring. The point of the night was for the crowd to try and spook the horse into rearing up and then all rushed in and hold it up as long as they can manage. Then after about five minutes or so the horse and rider leaves the ring as another comes in and the whole scene happens again. They went on for about five hours like this. I’d say there was probably 20 horses total. The later into the night, (and the more people had to drink) more people would join in the excitement of holding the reared-up horses. They also had a local band playing traditional music which we could hear at anchor til at least midnight.  Levi joined in for a bit as well….helping to try and spook it long enough to get the horse reared-up. He said it was crazy being that close to the horse with 20 other people all trying not to get hurt by the horse or by the other people!

Levi is in the jeans and black shirt

Next we sailed on to the island of Mallorca (Pronounced: may-or-ca) and stayed in two small bays on the eastern side. (One night in each.) Both bays we’re cute and very calm.

We plan to have one more overnight sail to the mainland of Spain, spend time going down the coast then on through the Strait of Gibraltar and out of the Mediterranean. We can’t spend long in Spain because we need to be though the Strait of Gibraltar around the beginning of October, due to weather, which is just about 2 weeks away.  So it seems we will be quite busy seeing as much of Spain as we can in the next two weeks before we head out of the Med and then on to Morocco.