A Week's Vacation in Three Parts: Cantabria

Spring has sprung in Madrid.  The smell of olives is wafting into my apartment.  People have morphed into vultures, circling around the cafe terrazas waiting to pounce on a free table.  The sky is lit until 9pm, deceiving you into thinking you could sit out until it got dark and still have time to accomplish everything you want to that evening.  So I’m in vacation mode and would like to return to the roadtrip. Part Two. Cantabria.

Teleférico of Fuente De.  The teleférico of fuente de.  Wow. What words are there to describe it?  High up. Snow. Mountains. Words not usually associated with me, but that day, they were.

We arrived in sneakers and well I guess we weren’t dressed properly for the skiing, wood cabin, put-up-a-fire-and-let’s-have-some-hot-cocoa mountain look, so we went into the trunk in the parking lot and I pulled out my winter hat.  Still in sneakers, we ascended the stairs to the entrance amongst a crowd of winter-hatted others with chunky boots and cameras. Does that age people now? To say they have a camera? Yikes. We had our disposable ones :) I digress.  Luckily there weren’t a lot of people because it was early. Perhaps also some stayed away because they thought it would be foggy. We were so lucky. Bright blue sky, bright sun, bright white mountains.

Now this is not a cheap experience.  17€ round trip. But it was worth it for me.  I’m not often up in the snow-capped mountains taking chairlifts up hills to ski down, let alone in one of Spain’s national parks--Los Picos de Europa--with access to one of the major tourist highlights.

Initially, I couldn’t see the thing.  I couldn’t see a cable in the air, or poles, or something moving, nothing.  Just gigantic mountains and little dark spots of trees poking out like hairs.  After paying for the ticket, I watched as a red, white, and blue box-like thing was lowered into the loading dock.  I was gonna get on THAT???? I was terrified. Absolutely terrified. It didn’t even stop swinging a bit, so when you get on, your foot is not in the spot you thought it would be when you picked it up to put it on.  Am I being dramatic? Absolutely. Did it feel this dramatic? Absolutely.

Before I could change my mind, the door closed and we were ascending.  I just kept thinking don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down. I don’t think I did.  I was looking up and straight ahead. It was getting brighter and brighter as more and more of the mountain range revealed itself.  Always hiding from people, make you work hard to see it.

At the top I breathed air like I’ve never before.  Both literally how I breathed and the air I breathed.  Full, crisp, intoxicating. To be eye-to-eye with the mountains was to soar.  If I had done nothing else “exciting” the whole trip, I would’ve been beyond content to have just experienced this.

It wasn’t long before I found myself in the gift shop (only after 200 photos, of course).  And then nearby there was a small room with photographs documenting the history of the teleférico.  I was reassured reading about the two ways you can be saved if your cable car stops in the middle.  It's clear that this attraction is a jewel of the region.

On the way back down I felt confident.  I had conquered. Triumphant, I looked down on the way down.  Before I knew it, I was back on the ground looking up at those glorious mountains I had just had the pleasure of meeting.  The world is open.