Photo credit: Carol Madigan Since Carol likes to find things, and I prefer things to find me, we’ve adapted to each other’s preferences and enjoy a mutually agreeable compatibility on the road. But every road has a bump, and we hit one today. “I had failed to maintain a Nash Equilibrium, and instead achieved  Champagne […]

As pleasant and smooth as it was, the six-hour train trip into Barcelona gave me the urge to spend the first day in town with boots on the ground. It was a fifty-minute walk from my hotel to the Sagrada Familia basilica and that seemed doable. I need a lot of walking on this trip to make up for not taking my daily walk/jog along with me. I wasn’t in a picturesque part of the city, but as I approached the $300 per night Hotel Majestic, they’d set up a piano on the sidewalk as a way of drumming up some walk-in trade. It made for a nice rest break. I also observed that the clean sidewalk and streets are maintained by hand with straw brooms and oversized dustpans.