14 October We let the bulls out of the cage.  Friday night, Rick and I explored one of the tighter caves on the island.  It was an old lava tube that several flows and collapses had formed into a deep and untouced casa de darkness.  Many entries were barely wide enough for our monster bods (yeah I’m working out again).   Two full days of clog stomping starting with a long diverse trail on saturday.  The sun must have paid off the cloud mafia.   Yarrr….On the far side of the island we could see three other islands (sao Jorge, Pico, and Graciosa)!  After standing on the highest point in tercera (if you don’t count all the radio tower crap) Sierra da Santa Barbara 1023m, we stumbled blindly into an unknown trail.  Quickly we found ourselves in Hoff Canyon (above). We named the canyon and the lake (Dino), being the first Americans to discover them.  We found ourselves deep in the canyon without the time to return, so we climbed the canyon wall through a mossy couloir. Route finding was tricky, and we thought we were trapped on a grassy ledge with no way up or down.  Finally we pulled through and on the other side was an caldeira the size of rhode island! We figured we could cut straight across, as it turned out it was a peete bog that we crossed anyway with peete sludge up to our knees.

  We were trying to make wiki-wiki so we could get to the bullfight before it started.  It was in the streets of Porto Martins and we watched it from a friend, Julie’s house.  We had the best show of all four bulls!  The bull-fighters (or crazy common folk using umbrellas, old blankets, or just their hands) kept getting the bull into our Julie’s yard to fight them. The boys that tug the bulls rope need Chuck Taylors to outrun the bulls and they have quite a name: Photo of the squad Later we were invited to a portuguese winery, which was an old stone shed (you could fit more people in a peugeot) and about 15, “barrels” (or wooden carraffes) of wine. I was ready for the leprechon to jump out of one.  They were quite proud of the yellow mystery they handed us in dixie cups. One thing that is awesome about these islands is that there are public bathrooms everywhere!  Europe and the states need to catch up with these third world crazies!