Days 16-19 Beach Boy   When Carol and I first got together, I had stated unequivocally my opposition to sand, the reality of it, the very concept of it and the grit of it that manages to find itself into every crevice and moving part of my body – especially  and particularly how it winds […]

   We were the underdogs. Eleven years old and younger, with oversized gloves and a still-to-be-developed relationship between a baseball and a bat. All knew the stakes. Win and move on, lose and go home. Would the parents feel it more than their kids?   In the first inning the visitors (us) scored twice and […]

Want to keep me from harping on my new comic novel A Roomful of Monkeys? How about buying it? If that won’t shut me up, nothing will. Visit reidchampagne.com and scroll down to my published “works.” Buy both (An American Walkabout) and save! (Not really. I have no idea how that would even work.) Oh, […]

Days 12–15 Nothing happening and loving every minute   These blogs are written from a daily journal I keep when Carol and I travel. It’s little more than a tick-tock of the day’s activities, no matter how routine. Nothing of what I record is worth a blog itself; the notes are meant to jog the […]

Days 9-11 Meet the Rotarians   The winds had calmed, which meant our day-trip to Cadiz would be by ferry and not by bus. You might remember that Cadiz had been our original planned destination, but thanks to Carol’s monumental screw up, we wound up in Rota, and as Robert Frost said of the road […]

Days 6-8 Paradise extended   Carol and I had been in Rota for exactly four days, during which it rained on all four. On the fifth, the weather broke. We walked Rota’s Beach and streets without umbrellas and sat out on our rooftop terrace, all for the first time. In spite of the sometime sideways […]

Days 3-5 Devon and the Deep Blue Sea   While the weather remained quite unsettled by wind and rain, we were still able to take advantage of the breaks to make a couple of discoveries that would help define our stay in Rota. The first couple though, not so much.   A friend of Carol’s […]

Grocery Shopping and that’s about it   The sunny skies were a pleasant surprise based on the forecast, but we took advantage of the break to do our weekly food shopping, now that we were native Rotarians. Well, almost. The natives would know of the Carrefour supermarket around the corner from us about a five […]

Day one: Rota in the rain   We had dinner in a family-run Italian restaurant located about a minute from our apartment. The little grocery was closed, but we were able to get a bottle of vino blanco for the apartment at a cheerful bar (La Silla Azul or “The Blue Chair”) across from that […]

The 03112 to Madrid    We stopped for coffee and croissants just around the corner from our apartment the morning of our departure from Barcelona. Then we walked the five minutes or so to the city’s main train station, where we sauntered through baggage check, and then immediately onto our first class carriage for our […]