The woman was asking us if we wanted a salad and they gave us a choice of fish or meat. She then asked us if we wanted lamb by making the ‘baaaa’ sound which we ended up choosing. We were under the assumption that we were just getting a salad with lamb pieces but got a large salad with no lamb. The salad has other meat in it and was quite filling. After she took the plates away, she then returned with two other plates with the larges pieces of meat that we had ever seen. This is the type of thing that if she put on a tray on the side of our car, the car would tip over (Fred Flintstone style). We were able to negotiate splitting a single dish of the delicious lamb meal.

Before we left Vancouver, we had made all of the arrangements by email to rent the house in Ronda for this upcoming week. The emails that we traded back and forth (which we all in Spanish) essentially stated that we would call them before we reached Ronda and meet them at a gas station by the side of the road and they would lead us to the house. We had called them from Sevilla before we left and got only voice mail on the three numbers that we were given. I was getting the bad feeling that this whole arrangement had ‘fiasco’ written all over it.

To our relief, we ended up reaching Ronda and managed to reach the woman on her phone and ended up meeting at the gas station at the edge of town. We made it to the house without any further problems. The name of the house was "Los Garibitos" as its seems like a Spanish custom to have a name for a rural house.

The house was extremely nice looking and we drove through a series of almond a orange trees on the road approaching it. It was a renovated country house which would easily sleep about 7 people and had a swimming pool off to the side. We unpacked and settled in for a week of relaxation which was going to be just what we needed after the previous two weeks of running around seeing the sites. Barb had really outdid herself in booking this villa as it was just perfect.

We woke the next morning and discovered a cat sleeping in front of the door who was meowing obviously wanting to come in. The owners didn’t mention anything about a cat so we assumed it must be a neighbour’s cat. As soon as we opened the door, the cat walked right in and headed straight for the kitchen. We surmised that this cat had made a living getting well fed by tourists who stayed at the house.

We had a quick discussion about what we wanted to do while at the house. I told Barb that I wanted to do nothing and just unwind in our last week in Spain. Actually, I told her that in honesty, I *did* want to see Gibraltar and we could make it the one day trip while we were here. We ended up getting some groceries that morning to take advantage of the kitchen that we had here. We found a local supermercado and bought a week’s worth of groceries and about 5 bottles of good Spanish wine (three of the bottles were to take home). We were extremely surprised at how cheap the groceries were here and we estimated that it was about 40% cheaper that it would have been for similar groceries in Vancouver.

Next to the house that we were staying at, there was a small farm with a few animals. The first morning, we heard the crowing of the rooster next door in the early dawn hours. Only have lived in cities my whole life, my understanding of farm life is based on sources that most people like me would have used: movies and television. As such, I expected the rooster to crow at dawn and then everyone gets up and gets on with their day. This is only partly true. The part about the rooster crowing at dawn actually happens but it also crows 10 minutes after dawn, then 10 minutes later and then pretty much the whole day. While the crowing was kind of cute for the first hour, it was plain annoying by mid afternoon.

We decided that Monday was going to be our drive down to Gibraltar so we headed off on the highway through the Sierra Nevada mountains down to the Costa del Sol before heading west to Gibraltar. I had read somewhere that the highway that goes along the Costa del Sol has about the highest number of deaths in the world due to a combination of tourists driving drunk back ad forth from their hotels to the beach. We kept this in mind as we drove that stretch of road.

Because Gibraltar is a British territory, we had to cross a border from Spain so we packed our passports. While it is possible to drive into Gibraltar, we decided to park on the Spain side and walk over. Gibraltar is unusual for a number of things but most for the fact that once you cross the border crossing, you have to cross the runway of the airport to get to the main part of town. It’s actually quite something to have these gates be closed for all of the traffic for a few minutes while this huge jet either takes off or lands then the gates are lifted and you walk across the runway to the other side. I think that this is the only airport in the world like this where people have to walk across a working runway on a regular basis.

‘The Rock’, as Gibraltar is known as is quite a sight and of course has a fairly rich history (what with Admiral Nelson defeating the Spanish armada here and getting himself killed in the process). Lesser known that this famous sea battle are the Apes of Gibraltar. When Barb first told me about this before we left Vancouver, my first through was that it was some kind of bizarre place resembling the Planet of the Apes movies where apes were the masters and men were nothing more that sources of food and amusement. Ironically, this is pretty much what the Apes of Gibraltar is like. I’m not sure how this all started but there are these monkeys that live at the top of the rock and tourists (like us) spend good money to be taken up there so that the monkeys can steal food from our bags and otherwise not have to live a normal monkey life. For all of this, we get to take a few pictures of the apes. Under normal circumstances, the view from the top of Gibraltar would be quite spectacular and you could easily see into north Africa but there was too much cloud and we got to see pretty much nothing.

Other than the rock, there are a few museums in Gibraltar and about 500 tourist-oriented stores (mostly selling booze and electronics for the British as it is very much cheaper than in England). If I had to do this over again, I would park on the Spain side of the border and take some picture of the rock and then go home. Consider yourself warned if you happen to be in the area.

After a long drive home from the coast, we ended the night with a nice dinner of quail and partridge – both local delicacies.

 

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Product endorsement section: We normally pickup maps for the cities that we will travel to before we leave home and we have found the National Geographic street maps to be the best. The main reason is that they come laminated in plastic which not only protects it in the rain but allows it to be unfolded and folded again in seconds. The normal paper maps are a real pain especially when in a busy metro station trying to get your bearings.

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In addition to the few bottles of Spanish wine that we will be bringing home, we also have a few jars of Nutella packed away in our luggage which we picked up at the grocery store. Now many of you will be asking: "Baden, what’s with the Nutella? You can buy this in Vancouver". Technically this is true but on our trip to Germany two years ago, our friend Frank disclosed to us what may be the greatest scientific mystery of our time: European Nutella is different than Nutella in North America. I can’t explain the logic behind this but we have found that the European version to be more to our liking and always make a point of bringing several jars home with us. So far we have not had to explain this to Canada Customs officials.

Our time in Spain is quickly coming to an end. Our stay at the house in Ronda will be over on Friday morning and we will be heading back to Madrid for our flight back home. The Excellent Spanish Adventure has been different that any other vacation and we will remember it for many years. As is our custom to wrap up this final email, here are the hits and misses of our Excellent Spanish Adventure:

Hits:

-Excellent Spanish Vino Tinto (red wine). And so inexpensive!

-Low Prices. This has been the most inexpensive country we have visited in Europe so far and by quite a large margin. If you weren’t eating in restaurants but buying groceries every day, it would be very cheap to live here. I can see why so many British come here for vacation as it would be a *huge* bargain for them.

-Flamenco. This one night exceeded my expectations on every level and will be one of the main things that I remember from Spain.

-Football. I will never be able to experience another sports event in Canada like seeing Réal Madrid in Bernebau stadium.

-Chocolate Con Churros. This delicious breakfast combination was the perfect local experience to start our days in Madrid. Sadly, we have not seen this anywhere in Ronda.

-Los Garibitos. The perfect ending to our trip was to unwind in this idyllic Spanish countryside house.

 

Misses:

-Language. This is actually not what it seems. We actually would have gotten much more out of our trip to Spain had we spent a bit more time learning some Spanish. The people couldn’t have been friendlier trying to accommodate us on this point.

-History Overload. After about the second week, we both just couldn’t see another castle or cathedral. This is not really a negative but is something to consider for anyone planning on seeing Europe. Spending some time just doing *nothing* is sometimes the best thing you can be doing. And it’s *so* Spanish.

-Smoking. This one makes it to every one of my summaries about anywhere is Europe. Be prepared to have smoke everywhere – from the minute you step off the plane.

 

Until next year.

 

Adios!

Barb and Baden.

 

Pictures for our Excellent Spanish Adventure can be seen here

 

 

One of the observations that we have made while in Spain is that ham is very big here. In fact, I would go as far as saying that if you don’t like ham (or any other types of food from a pig), stay away from Spain. In Barcelona and Madrid, we noticed that there were these stores called “Museo de Jamón” which directly translates to “Musuem of Ham”. As it turns out these are pretty much delicatessens but there are *so* many restaurants and bars that sell ham that it has to be the most consumed food in Spain. In most places you go to, there are a few dozen 30 inch legs of ham hanging from the ceiling and they slice these up for consumption during the day. In the department stores, you can buy these large wooden frames (for your house) that hold these large legs of ham so that you can carve them easily. I can only assume that the Muslim population in Spain have their own restaurants.

We took the metro down to the stadium for the football match. About 5 or 6 stops before the station, we saw more and more people getting on wearing all manner of Réal Madrid shirts but mostly scarves. The energy level was building until we finally reached the stadium stop and when we got onto the street, the place was sheer pandemonium. There were about 50,000 people on the streets and most were blowing these long plastic horns or others with horns powered by compressed air. There was this one section of the street next to the stadium where there were easily 100 tour buses parked side by side. On the street in front of the stadium, there are several vendors selling all manner of Réal Madrid items and I purchased a scarf to better fit into the crowd.

We made our way into the correct gate of the stadium and climbed (and climbed) the stairs to get to our level. There are 5 levels in Bernebau stadium and we were in the 6th row from the very top. The place was about 95% filled and the game was as exciting as I thought it would be. It is quite obvious that football is a very important sport to the Spaniards and the home team didn’t disappoint and won 2-1. I was able to see stars like David Beckham and Brazilian star Ronaldo (who both play for Madrid). Ronaldo scored both goals and the crowd just went wild when the home team scores. Overall we were very happy to have experienced this part of Spanish (and European) culture and I was very impressed that I saw no rowdiness or vandalism at any time during the evening.

Day 11:

Today we made our second day trip as we were going to the town of Toledo (pronounced: Toe-lay-do). Toledo is famous for it’s large cathedral (hence the term: “holy Toledo”) as well as it manufacturing of swords.

We took the train out to Toledo from Madrid and walked around the medieval town. The first thing that we noticed was that there were a lot of stores selling swords. I mean a LOT of stores. I didn’t count them but there are probably about 90 stores selling pretty much the same collections of swords. I find it interesting that at some point, someone must have had to say to themselves: “well there’s 75 other stores in town selling the exact same collection of swords, I should open a store to sell the same thing and be #76″. If you were going to film a movie in which swords were required, this would definitely be the place to go to outfit the cast. I saw swords for Conan movies, Klingon knives, Japanese swords and many, many Lord of the Rings swords. In fact, most of the stores sell the Lord of the Rings “rings”. I was curious to know how someone would bring home a 5 ft. long sword? It’s not like this would fit into your suitcase and you couldn’t exactly bring this on board your flight.

By the time we found the cathedral, we were pretty much under the impression that Toledo while interesting, was extremely touristy and was mostly filled with sword shops selling the same trinkets.

This was until we saw the cathedral.

From the outside, the Toledo cathedral looks pretty unimpressive and I was almost not going to go inside. However the inside of the cathedral was (in my opinion) one of the most impressive sights to see in all of Europe. I feel that only St. Peter’s basilica in the Vatican is more impressive that this cathedral which is really saying a lot. The altar of the church has a number of carvings which describe the life of Jesus and are all made of gold. Apparently most of the gold used here was plundered from the new world by Columbus and subsequent people which ended up in places like the alter of this cathedral.

Day 12:

We would be leaving Madrid today and taking the train south to spend three days in Sevilla (pronounced: Se-via but known as Seville in English). We knew that we were going to miss Madrid as it was definitely a favourite of
ours on this trip.

One of the things that we had noticed all over Barcelona and Madrid were these billboard ads for an Italian suit company which featured George Clooney. The as shows George wearing this nice Italian suit on the golf course and swinging a 9 iron. The line at the bottom is “La marca del hombre” (“the mark of a man”). Naturally, the message here is that if you want to be cool like George Clooney on the golf course, then you’ve got to be wearing this Italian suit. I hope that he was paid a bundle for doing this ad as he looks pretty stupid in my opinion.

When we left Madrid, it was actually getting to be quite cooler but when we arrived in Sevilla, the temperature and humidity was back up there and we have subsequently been sweating again every day. As we arrived in Sevilla just around noon, we had most of the day left so we spent it exploring the town as we normally do when first arriving somewhere new. By this point we were almost getting tired of seeing another cathedral but decided to see the one in here as it didn’t costs us anything. One of the particular distinctions of this cathedral is that it contains the remains of Cristóbel Colón (Christopher Columbus to most people). It has always surprised me why names of cities and people are so often changed to something quite different when translated to different languages. I’ve yet to see the logic behind this.

Day 13:

Today was Barb’s birthday and we had been discussing for about a month what we would be doing on this day to celebrate. When Barb and I first talked about this last month, my first comment was that “I’m taking you to Spain for your birthday”. However, after further discussion, we had agreed that this would be a good day to see a flamenco show and had made arrangements with the hotel to go to one. Since flamenco dancing had its origins in Sevilla, we thought that this would be a nice place to see this and also make it a special night out. One of the concerns that I had about going to a flamenco show was that it was going to be very touristy and similar to the hula shows in Hawaii where they have a gift shop out front and always bring a few people out of the audience to try there luck at the dance and generally make a fool of themselves for the delight of the crowd. However, we would have to see how that turned out that evening.

Sevilla does not have a metro system (unlike Barcelona and Madrid) and as such, it makes exploring the city much more difficult as you generally have to rely on walking or bus/taxi. With a Metro (and in possession of an appropriate Metro pass), you can basically go anywhere in the city for dinner so the possibilities are much more open.

We spent the morning walking along the Gaudalquivir river and it’s many bridges and it brought back memories of Paris walking along the Seine last year. The layout of the river and bridges in Sevilla is quite similar to Paris in that respect.

As we were exploring Sevilla, we found quite a number of stores which sell flamenco costumes and shoes as well as castanets. Shops selling fans were also in abundance and reminded me of the many sword stores in Toledo.

When it was time to go to the flamenco show, we struck out in search of the street where the place was and promptly got lost. We ended up being a few minutes late as the place was this real hole in the wall off this dark alleyway. We were ushered to our seat and the show had already started a few minutes earlier. It only took a few minutes of watching the show to realize that this was no tourist show and quite simply, the show was incredible. The dinner club where it took place was crowded and hot and the stage was very small but the energy and passion shown by the performers was indescribable and we thoroughly enjoyed it. This show was easily one of the best experiences of anything we that we had seen in Europe on *any* trip. This is a must see event if you are in Spain.

Day 14:

After the highlight of yesterday’s flamenco show, we had another day trip planned today to go to the town of Jaréz. This town has an interesting history as it is known by many names (depending on who were the rulers of that area at the time). The Arab name for the city was Sheréz and the English translated this to Sherry. This seemed appropriate enough as on of the major things produced in this town was Sherry. We planned on visiting a bodega (winery) and also see the Andalusia horses at the famous riding academy in this town. The unfortunate part is that (unknown to us) today was a holiday for the town as they were celebrating their patron saint and as a result many things were closed. The horse academy ended up being fully booked so we were disappointed about that but managed to go on a tour of one of the wineries where sherry and brandy were made. We bought a bottle of each from their store to bring back home.

Tomorrow we leave Sevilla and head to our final leg of our trip. Here we will wind down and relax for a week in a the rented villa just outside of the town of Ronda in southern Spain. We will also be picking up our only car rental and driving out to the villa which should be about two hours drive from Sevilla. For the next week there will be no more cathedrals of other such things to see but we intend to spend time exploring the swimming pool at the villa in great detail.

I will conclude with the final chapter of our Excellent Adventure next week from Ronda.

Take care,

Baden and Barb

Continue on to Barb & Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Final

So we began talking about why this was the case and trying to figure this out. In the end, we really didn’t have any real good answer other than that many people that we know travel to Mexico and perhaps Spain was considered “the same” as Mexico. I guess this is like saying that Canada and England both have some things in common so if you’ve seen Canada then don’t bother going to England. It doesn’t really make sense but we similarly didn’t have Spain high up on our list as it too five trips to Europe before making it here. All we can say is that we have certainly been enjoying ourselves here with our trip not even half over.

So cancel those plans to Italy and France and book a trip to Spain.

Day 7:

We arrived at the Madrid airport to an absolute downpour. It seems that when you arrive on a plane in Spain, you have to get on a bus and then get driven to the terminal. The 25 meters that we walked from the plane to the bus got us soaking wet. We took the subway to our hotel and were quite surprised that when we walked up the stairs from the subway station, it was bright and sunny. A very good sign.

We were pretty exhausted after dragging our luggage through the Madrid subway system from the airport so we did some quick exploring and just went out for dinner at a nearby restaurant. The place we went to eat was off the beaten track and we assume that very few tourists eat there because we arrived at 9:30 and we were the only ones in the restaurant until 10:00. We drank a bottle of great Spanish red wine with our meal and as usual, walked for about 30 minutes before getting back to our hotel around 11:30.

It’s interesting that we have found eating so late very easy to do as we normally are eating around 6:00 at home and would be crazy if we were eating at 10:00. However, when in Rome (or Madrid), then say, do as the Romans.

I have had a few people ask me about how safe we feel walking the streets in big cities in Europe. The true fact is that living in Vancouver is a very poor training ground for travelling *anywhere* as we never really have to deal with much in the way of street crime. However, the reality of the situation is that you must exercise a certain amount of sensible caution in most areas over here as pick pocketing is really the main concern. I’m not talking about being absolutely paranoid but just being cautious about what you put in your pockets and what keeping a good eye on your backpack. We never feel unsafe anywhere we have travelled to but you just have to remember that you have to keep your eyes open.

Day 8:

Today was the first day that I would describe as “cold” as the temperature was about 17 or 18 bright and early in the morning (about 10:30). The weather in Madrid is quite different than Barcelona not so much of the temperature but the there is virtually no humidity in Madrid so you are not sweating the same way we did in Barcelona.

Today we really started to explore the city for the first time and I quickly saw how truly grand Madrid was – truly one of the great cities of Europe. I know that I’ve used that expression before but Barcelona, while a very beautiful city, just was not on the same scale as Madrid. While exploring downtown Madrid, you can just see that architecture and design of the city that gives you this feeling that this is an important city. We walked down one of the major streets: the Gran Via (10 lanes wide at its widest) past many of the larger buildings like the Banco d’España.

We did some more shopping in that area of town and later went out for dinner at a local restaurant. When we got back to the hotel, our tickets for the Réal Madrid football match had arrived and we are now set for this Sunday. I had ordered the tickets on the Internet before leaving Vancouver and had supplied our hotel name for them to be delivered when we arrived.

Before we left for Spain, we were considering attending a bullfight while we are in Madrid. However, since the bullfights are only on Sundays, we had to abandon those plans when we decided to get football tickets. We were actually watching the bullfights on the TV this afternoon in the hotel room so we had a chance to understand what we were missing. To be honest, it’s probably just as well that we’re not going.

We also did a visit to the huge Prada Museum which is probably the largest museum in all of Spain. The main showcase in this museum were paintings from the Spanish artist Velésquez but many other famous names like Raphael and Goya. There were specific sections for Spanish, Italian, Dutch and German artists. It’s interesting that most of the art fell into about 2 main categories: religious and rich families. I guess in the 1600′s – early 1700′s (where much of the art is focused), an artist was sponsored either by the church or wealthy families. It’s interesting that many of the paintings had scenes depicting nude people but there was always a convenient tree branch or cloth handy to cover up the ‘unmentionables’.

Day 9:

After getting to bed at past midnight the night before (as usual), we had to getup at around 6AM to make an early train to Segovia which is about 2 hours north of Madrid.

After departing the stating in Madrid, it reminded me how much I really love travelling by train in Europe. Travelling by train is so convenient as you can show up at the station about 10 minutes before the departure and just jump on board. There’s no line-ups for security and endless waiting at the boarding gates and then waiting for your luggage when you finally get there. Going by train allows you to see the country side and you sit in relative spacious and luxurious seats compared to a plane.

We did a lot of train travel in Britain and Germany but much less so in France last year. The main reason was that a train from Nice to Paris was about €250 and was going to take about 5 hours. We were able to get a flight with EasyJet for €50 for the both of us for a 1 hour flight. I suspect that these discount airlines will continue to steal passengers who would normally travel by train.

The main attraction in Segovia is a 2000 year old Roman aqueduct. The aqueduct here is spans between two hills and is over 2500 ft long and about 100 ft high. Apparently it is still functional as the backup system for supplying water to Segovia and the surrounding area. This is pretty good considering that it was built a couple of thousand years ago.

One the way back from Segovia, we were the only ones in the compartment on that train and as usual, the conductor came to check our tickets. About 15 minutes after checking them, he came back and started asking us something in Spanish and was pointing to a handful of Euro coins. We thought that he was asking us to pay more as he kept saying ‘pay’. After getting out the dictionary, we finally were able to understand that he was asking us what country we came from (‘país’ is Spanish for ‘country’) and that he collected coins from other countries. We had to disappoint him by stating that we had left our Canadian money at the hotel room. He seemed like a nice enough guy and it was unfortunate that our Spanish was not god enough to have a conversation.

Day 10:

This morning we had a breakfast that we had heard about and had wanted to try since we got to Spain: ‘chocolate con churros’. This is basically a very, very think chocolate drink (almost pudding) and the churros which are these fried doughnut-like things that you dip in the chocolate drink and eat. We washed all of this down with our usual coffee con lèche and it was a meal fit for a king. It’s a good thing that we’re walking so many kilometres each day otherwise these rich breakfasts and dinners would definitely be adding to our waistline.

This evening we will be heading out to Bernabeu stadium for our anxiously awaited Real Madrid football match. We will likely be there with about 75,000 other people and we expect it to be quite an exciting evening.

Tomorrow we head out on our second day trip going to Toledo. On Tuesday, we will be leaving Madrid and going to our next destination: Seville. I will be sad to say goodbye to Madrid as I have very much enjoyed myself. I know that Barb is not such a big fan of the bigger cities but this is really my passion when we come to Europe.

Until next time,

Barb and Baden

Continue on to Barb & Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Part 5

We decide to call the airline to find out where things are. In order for us to do this, we have to call Madrid and we don’t want to make a long distance call from the hotel so this requires us to buy a phone card. We get the phone card and manage to figure out how to use this with the Spanish operator and then speak to the company who deals with lost luggage as Air Canada apparently doesn’t do this themselves. After speaking with the woman for about 20 minutes, we are told that Barb’s suitcase is in Tel Aviv. The woman assures us that the suitcase would be delivered that evening. Given the situation, we are somewhat sceptical of a delivery that evening.

One of the positive experiences that we have had so far in Spain has been the fact that it has been much cheaper than we have previously experienced in Europe. We estimate that it is about 25% cheaper than France in general from what we paid just last year.

We spent most of the day today touring the buildings in Barcelona which were designed by the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi. Now to be honest, I have never heard of Gaudi before coming here so I won’t expect that this is something that is very common knowledge but his buildings are truly unique in their design and are scarcely done justice with mere words. His most famous work (and perhaps the most famous building in Spain if you go by the covers of the guide books for Spain) is the gothic Sagrada Familia church.

We decide to go to the Sagrada Familia church early and try to “beat the crowds”. Unfortunately, our definition of early ended up being about 11:00 and when we got out of the subway station, there were at least 25 tour buses out front. The outside of the church appeared to be a construction zone as the unfinished construction that began about 90 years ago seems to have undergone a resurgence to try and compete the work that Gaudi started.
Scattered around the outside of the church were dozens of tour groups which typically comprised of a tour leader (usually holding some kind of sign in the air) and about 50 mostly retiree-type people in tow. Barb and I had long ago agreed that we much preferred to make our own tours and set our own schedule as opposed to the more formal types of guided tours. However, to each his own.

When we returned to the hotel that evening, we anxiously asked if we had received delivery of the suitcase and were disappointed to find out that it did not arrive.

Day 5:

Our hotel reservation in Barcelona included the cost of breakfast in the dining room which we sampled the third day that we were here (we missed the first breakfast as we slept in too late). After giving this a chance, we decided that we would be eating breakfast outside from now on as dry buns and pre-packaged muffins were not what we came to Europe for. We found a local café and some coffee and croissants as this seemed to sustain us well when we were in France year. The breakfast was quite good but the French still reign supreme (in our estimation) for making top quality croissants.

Today was pouring rain and we decided to go to the Picasso museum and spend the afternoon there. Since our trip to France, we have made a habit of visiting museums when travelling to Europe and my only disappointment is that we never did this when we were in London, Berlin and Rome years before.

I can’t categorize myself as a huge art connoisseur but there’s something very real about visiting art galleries when you’re spending day after day looking at (often) touristy local sites. Also, it’s not every day that we’re going to be able to see the works of the great masters that are available in the major European cities so why not spend the time we figure?

We ended the day with a perfect Paella meal accompanied with more excellent Spanish red wine (vino tinto, por favor!). As has been our routine, we went for a walk after dinner and made it back to the hotel by about midnight. The perfect evening was completed by the sight of Barb’s suitcase waiting for us in the lobby.

Day 6:

We had no real agenda today so we walked around a bit and mostly just relaxed. Tomorrow we leave Barcelona and head fly to Madrid for about 6 days. The Madrid stay is expected to be a highlight of the trip as we have made arrangements to buy tickets for a Real Madrid football match next Sunday (I won’t dare call it a *soccer* match as I understand that this is a criminal offence in most of Europe). Our only hope is that our luggage makes it there with us.

Until next time …

Baden and Barb

Continue on to Barb & Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Part 4

So here we are enjoying the good life up in business class about 2 hours into the trip when we notice that it has started to rain inside the cabin. Ok, so it probably wasn’t actual rain coming down on us but the roof of the cabin was leaking and dripping on the heads of about 20 passengers (most of whom actually *paid* for a business class ticket).

Advanced Travel Tip #1:
If you have not done a lot of plane travel, you may not know that it is not normal for it to rain inside of the cabin – especially when you are in the air. If you experience this situation, you would not be unreasonable to think that something was amiss and should ask to speak to someone about this.

The flight attendants took immediate action to correct this problem and began stuffing white towels into the slots of the roof where the water was coming out. These towels remained there for the rest of the flight and the change in precipitation allowed us to enjoy the remainder of the trip in proper business class comfort.

Mental note: I am glad that Air Canada’s current financial problems has not let them lower their standards in important areas like aircraft maintenance.

We made it to Toronto and transferred to our flight to Madrid which found us back in the economy section again but comfortable nonetheless. We had to pickup our luggage in Madrid as we had to transfer to another airline for the
1 hour flight to Barcelona.

Small problem: Barb’s luggage doesn’t arrive in Madrid. OK, so we have dealt with this kind of issue before and have learned to tough it out in a foreign city with only the clothes on her back and a VISA card to comfort her.
Somehow I know that Barb will survive.

We end up making it to our hotel in Barcelona around 8PM and fall asleep almost immediately. As it is now Saturday night and we have effectively lost one day from travel, we prepare to make a fresh start early Sunday morning to start exploring our new city.

Day 3:

We wake up at 1PM – not exactly the early start that we hoped for but hey, we’re on vacation and don’t have to live by the clock. We have missed our free breakfast at the hotel so decide to look for a good place for lunch. We find a nice cafe where there are actual local people eating and have a couple of café con lechés (coffee and milk) and a tasty sandwich. It doesn’t take long for us to realize that we are in Europe as just about everyone is smoking.

Since today is Sunday, most of the stores are closed and we will have to wait until tomorrow to engage in one of our favourite pastimes: European shopping. At around 7PM, we make it back to the hotel room to relax and prepare ourselves for a typical Spanish dinner which we will not start until about 9PM. My first dinner will hopefully be a popular Spanish dish: Paella (pronounced pie-eh-ah). This is a rice dish with many types of meat or seafood served in a large flat pan.

Our main objective over the next 3 days that we are in Barcelona is to explore more of the city and experience as much Spanish culture as possible before we leave for Madrid on Thursday.

Stay tuned …

Barb & Baden

Continue on to Barb & Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Part 3

Our planning for this trip began a mere six weeks ago due mostly to the fact of us moving into our new place and finishing our renovation consumed most of our time which we would normally be using to plan the details. I say we in the generic sense because truth be known, Barb does about 95% of the planning on all of our trips. It’s not that I don’t like to do any of this kind of stuff but we’re talking about easily over 100 hours of time that Barb spends planning each trip. I usually just ask her to do a presentation on the short list of choices of where we will be staying so I can add my two cents before we book anything. You’ll just have to take my word that this system works quite well.

When we were considering where we might travel to this year and decided on Spain, one can’t help but start thinking of the great names of history that one associates with Spain. Names like Christopher Columbus, Don Juan and Manuel, the waiter from Faulty Towers. Spain seems to have a varied blend of culture and rich history that in many ways is unique among other European countries.

This trip will be interesting in the fact that we are the *least* prepared of any of our trips to speak the native language. Armed only with a few translation books, we’re hoping that we won’t run into too many problems in this area.

The first destination on our Spanish adventure will be Barcelona, then onto Madrid, followed by a week in the southern area of Andalusia where we have rented a villa. We’ll finish our trip in Sevilla (Seville) for a few days before making our way back home.

I’ll check in again in a few days after we have settled in on our discovery of Barcelona.

Take care,

Barb and Baden

Continue on to Barb & Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Part 2