I asked for adventure, I got adventure...

Yesterday I grogily forced myself out of bed at an ungodly hour trying to remember what was worth getting up this early for. Then I remembered: Sneska's dad was going to show us "three forths of Macedonia" today. He works for a phone company and travels all over the country regularly. Today he was going to some particularly interesting cities and asked if we wanted to go along. I was immediately excited to get to see some more of the country outside of Skopje. Those of you who know me well know that I absolutely love the mountains, and most of Macedonia is covered in mountains and hills. We drove along through the countryside for a couple of hours and saw some great sites along the way. My favorite was the stone ruins of an old village, probably over 500 years old (most things here are). Anyways, we turned off the main road onto a smaller, windier road, and then onto a still smaller road, that actually really didn't look much like a road at all. But we continued on, at first only getting scraped by branches, then bouncing up and down over rocks until we came close to hitting our heads on the ceiling in the car. Still we continued on up the mountain. At certain points, we would have to get out of the car and move rocks out of the way so that the car could get over them. Then we had to start backing the car up, and weaving our way in and out and over and around the rocks that were the "road." Soon, the car smelled hot, but still we continued on, slowly but surely trying to make our way up the mountain. Finally, we got stuck once again on a rock, tried to back up, tried to go forward, nothing would happen. The car was broken. Luckily, it was a beautiful day and really quite a nice spot to be (it would have been nicer with a working car, but who am I to complain.) So, with nothing else left to do, we took a coffee break, and proceeded to push the car meter by meter (notice that I speak in metric measurements now) back down the mountain. We would push and rock the car until it got the momentum to move over the next rock, it would roll a few meters, and then we would push and rock some more. We finally got it to a place where we could turn it around, and did. From there it was not so bad, back to the main road where someone was coming to pick us up from Skopje. While we were waiting, we pretended that we had to survive in the wild and ate blackberries and some kind of nuts that grow on trees over here. We picked the nuts, and sat in the road and cracked them with stones... I felt like a real cavewoman! :) Anyways, even though the day didn't go exactly as planned, we had fun in spite of it all.