Mt. Vitosha

I mentioned in my previous post that the hardest thing to leave behind here in Sofia is the people. We have been so fortunate to be able to spend lots of time with Jon, Andrea and Samuel over the past several days, as they have graciously allowed us to stay with them until we leave. We will miss having them so close, but know that we will still remain friends despite the long distance. There’s a special bond that exists when you’ve gone through everything we’ve gone through together–moving overseas and being so far away from friends and family, learning a new culture and a new language, and the list goes on.

Yesterday we had gorgeous weather here, so we all decided to spend the day up on Mt. Vitosha. We see Vitosha everyday, since it’s one of the dominating landmarks in Sofia, but we have just never gotten around to going up to the top.

We took a gondola lift almost all the way to the top. It was about a 30-minute ride. The lift is really just a couple miles from where we lived, so I can’t believe we just now got around to doing this.

We stopped for lunch near the top at a cafeteria-style restaurant. This is also a ski hut in the winter.

We had good intentions to hike to the top of the mountain from the lodge, but the trail was much steeper than we were expecting. The combination of a dog, a pregnant woman, and a baby made the steep climb very unappealing, so we came back down. We still managed to get some pretty great views without making it to the top.

From close to the top we could see down into Sofia really well. These pictures show our neighborhood. For some reasons, the blocks look a lot better at a distance.

I was so glad that we got to spend part of our last weekend on Vitosha. Not only is it something we have wanted to do the whole time we’ve been here, it is also a major part of the city and one that we both wanted to experience before leaving. It was a good way to kind of “say goodbye” to this city that we’ve called home for the past nine and a half months.