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A Journey of a Thousand Miles…

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Well, you know the old saying.  Having just completed that very thing, I might change it to say that it “starts in first gear.”

Our particular 1000 mile route started in southern Spain in La Manga.  We really needed some downtime to catch up on rest, laundry, exercise, and a few self-cooked meals.  While this was a good place to do it, we learned the difference between low season and off season.  Off season is “Sol-less” (no sun) and also “Soul-less” (no other people around. 

We left the empty highrises and cool temperatures behind and headed north to cold weather in Zaragoza and then snow in San Sebastian for our last night in Spain and our final tapas crawl.  From there it was on to frozen slush in Limoges before arriving in a chilly Paris.  

After a final 4 days and 1600 km, we had to say goodbye to our second Peugeot.  (It was a great car and if you are American or Canadian, check out the leasing programs in France.)  Our next stop is Thailand, which should be considerably warmer than the 2 degrees on our dashboard below.

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Posted in France, Spain, Travel | No Comments »

Bottom Ten

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

We finished off our whirlwind tour of southern Spain with a stop in Granada to see the Alhambra.  It’s a large complex with a fort, a palace, museum, church, and many other interesting buildings.  It was a great day out, but it will be our last heavy duty sightseeing for a while (see the photo below). 

We realized that we are getting a little burned out on tourist attractions and need a little break, which we have planned for the coast. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed everything that we’ve seen, but sometimes the little inconveniences build up over the weeks.  With that in mind, we have a little venting to do.  We’ve complained about this stuff to each other enough that it’s time to share the grief with all of you reading this.

Top Ten Travel Gripes

1. Anytime you need something from a store, it’s usually closed (especially in Italy).

2. Poorly designed hotel bathrooms—we’ve seen over 200 of them on this trip and they range from incredibly small sizes, nonexistent shower basins, unexplainable shower heads with H/C water combinations, and the inexorable need to stick a bidet in each one, no matter how small it is.

3. Internet (also on our top 10 “must have” list)—the quality runs the range from slow connections in the hotel room (depending on where in the room you are and which way the computer is facing) to the high speed connections in an internet café where you can get the full experience of instant lung cancer from the smoking, stimulant-hyped-up gamers and pray that your computer doesn’t catch a virus (or for that matter, you personally don’t catch a real virus).

4. Parking—We love having a car and the freedom it provides, but parking in most cities and towns is a nightmare.  There are basically three options: 1) Park at the hotel for 30 Euros/night,  2) Find a pay spot on the street (like hitting the lottery) and keep pumping money into it every 2-4 hours,  or 3)  just do what the locals do and make up spots on the sidewalk, street, bike path, ditch, etc and hope you don’t get towed or booted (having a French license plate makes this option risky).

5. Laundry – Given the exorbitant prices that hotels charge for laundry service (8 Euros for a pair of jeans), the only real choice is to do it yourself.  The exception to this is Asia where you have it done by the kilo for next to nothing and it comes back all wrapped up in plastic like a present.  For the DIY option we have searched endlessly for automatic Laundromats that were rumored to exist in each town, but in reality they are few and far between.  Instead we’ve had to opt for the squish-squish method in the bathroom sink and hope everything dries by morning.

6. Toll Roads – They take the “free” out of freedom.

7. Hunting for Dinner – We don’t want to eat junk food, but need to stay within our budget.  That leaves us with a nightly search for a restaurant with decent food at a decent price, usually within walking distance to our hotel.  One of the most fun things about vacations is usually finding that perfect place, but night after night it can become a drag.  Don’t bother asking the hotel front desk – they will usually just send you to a Michellin-starred place you can’t afford or some dive run by a friend or family member.

8. Electrical outlets—Why does every country feel the need to be different?  Ever since Ben Franklin discovered electricity, someone has been compelled to create different standards and different plugs. Maybe it’s a conspiracy to prop up the billion dollar adapter industry.

9. CNN international and BBC World—the most boring TV channels in the world.  And they repeat every 15 minutes.

10. People who complain about traveling. 🙂 

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Posted in Spain, Travel | 3 Comments »

Around Madrid

Friday, December 11th, 2009

As we get closer to the end of our time in Spain, we’ve had some decisions to make about where to go.  It’s just not possible to see everything in a month, so we cut down the list and then did it again.  Last weekend also turned out to be a holiday long weekend (Feast of the Immaculate Conception), so hotels everywhere were booked up and double the  normal price.  I’ve been getting a little tired of big cities anyway, so we made the crazy choice to avoid Madrid.  I know, who goes to Spain, but doesn’t visit it?  Well, we do.  Instead we opted to skirt around Madrid and I’m not sorry because we got to see some pretty interesting places.

We left Valencia and headed for a place near Cuenca called the Ciudad Encatada, a park in the mountains with weird limestone formations.  From there our next destination was Segovia where we visited the Alcazar castle.  Up next was Toledo which has a great hilly old city with winding streets and a beautiful cathedral.  Unfortunately the Alcazar here is closed (along with quite a few other museums) for restoration, but we still managed to see a few of the famous El Greco paintings.  From there we stopped in Cordoba to visit the Mezquita, a former mosque turned cathedral.  After all the sights we took in over the last week, I may have been getting a little immune to historic buildings at this point.  The Mezquita was certainly the cure for that and I was surprised and delighted by the uniqueness of it.  The design is totally different from anything we’ve seen before and since it is off-season we nearly had the place to ourselves.   It’s huge and impossible to capture in photos, but here’s my attempt.

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On another note, we’ve been trying out the local food specialties in each place, some with better results than others.  The cochinillo (roast suckling pig – hooves and all) was a little too strong for my tastes, but Eric enjoyed it.  We both found the salmorejo (a thick, cold tomato soup with chopped ham and egg) to be good, but very rich and filling.  Overall the food has been good, but we’ve had to adjust to eating at 9:30 at night.

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Buen Apetito

Friday, December 4th, 2009

It’s strange because it feels like we’ve been really busy for the last week, but I can’t really think of much to write about.  We returned to Barcelona in time for the El Classico game – FC Barca beat Real Madrid, by the way – and spent a few days seeing some things we missed the last time we were here.

One of the things I’ve learned in the last year is that I’m not usually a fan of big cities.  I get bored in places that are too rural though, so somewhere around 200K population seems to be comfortable to me now.  Anyway, Barcelona is one of my exceptions and I’m glad we decided to come back.

 This time, we took a cooking class, which we’ve done in other parts of the world and really enjoyed.  This one started out in La Boqueria market, which is a culinary treat by itself.  From there we brought our ingredients to the teacher’s apartment for a full day of cooking and eating.  Catalan cuisine turned out to be simple and tasty, but the key ingredient is patience.  Everything needs a long time to cook for the flavors to sink in.  We made a tortilla, which is something like an omelette – not a taco shell, then an amazing veal dish with sofregit, and the finale…  Crema Catalana.  See my results below.

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Attack of the Giant Spider

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

It’s not a radioactive mutant from the future, but it was almost as scary for me.  The creepy sculpture below is in front of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.  The building itself is amazing, but I much preferred the flowery “Puppy” sculpture on the other side to this arachnid.

The museum is the centerpiece for the lovely walk along the river to the old city, where we had yet another lesson in tapas.  We continued our education in the Rioja region in Logrono.  There are dozens of bars/restaurants on every block, but we seem to be getting better or maybe luckier about which ones we choose on our nightly crawl.  I never thought that I’d be writing this, but after tasting the specialty here, I don’t think I hate mushrooms anymore.  Gasp!  Now if I can just get more comfortable with spiders….

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Posted in Spain, Travel | 1 Comment »

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