wiped!

What an awesome weekend. We didn't even come close to scratching the surface of the hiking trails up at the Seven Rila Lakes. Pictures will be up on Facebook tomorrow or Tuesday, when I get some spare time, and I may show some here as well. We went up there with a large group of family/friends (over 30 people), so we were rather limited in what we could do. Evy, myself, and one of our friends, Dessy, are already discussing taking a 3 day camping trip up there later on in the month so we can actually see the rest of the trails with the proper provisions, and without a group of people to worry about.

Rest of it was nice. Hotel was a few klicks down the mountain from the trail head, and the group also rented a house up in one of the valleys just around the bend, so we had cookouts on Friday night and Saturday night. Plenty of food, plenty of rakia, plenty of beer, wine, and "Cloud", as they call it here....1/2 Mastika and 1/2 mint liqueur. The saying is that by the third one, you are so bombed that you think it's raining, and the sky is cloudy. For the uninitiated, Mastika is a liquorish tasting clear alcohol, and the Mente is a mint-flavored liqueur, so it's an interesting combination.

I can attest to the fact that it is indeed quite potent. But I had already had a few glasses of rakia by that point, so :) In any case, everyone was pretty well liquored up by 8 or 9 p.m., and while Evy and I retired around midnight, everyone else stayed up until 2 a.m. or so. On Saturday night they even broke out the karaoke machine, which was epic in its own right.

Another phenomenal weekend, which was perfect for the end of July as I wrapped up a busy month of writing. August is looking even busier, but we have a Black Sea holiday to Nesebar planned for the first week of September, so that's a nice motivator to keep the nose to the grindstone for now :)