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 […]

  A couple of things were left out of my last blog. When we landed early in Barcelona and then cleared customs in a breathless matter of minutes, it wasn’t even 8:00 a.m. yet. Our apartment would not be available until 3:00 p.m. What we could do with eight hours to kill while schlepping luggage […]

DL 194 to Barcelona    The original plan to fly to Atlanta and then connect to Barcelona shriveled on the vine, so we made a quick Plan B to fly to Minneapolis and connect with a wide open (seating-wise) flight to Paris. That would get us over the pond, and from there we could refigure […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan    I think these ridiculously narrow, old city Seville sidewalks are how tightrope walkers train. Yet our’s led directly to a barber shop. No, I’m not belaboring a cliché.  Carol had been “advocating” a haircut since we landed in Europe. But I was crafty enough to put it off by offering, “we’re […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan    Given we had a 5:45 a.m. wake up call for our 8:00 a.m. train to Seville in the morning, I was still hoping for a light day. El Retiro Park was a pleasant subway ride, further enhanced by a smiling toddler who wanted to practice waving hello to total strangers such […]

   Carol is the only person I have ever known who can turn a fool’s errand into a certain done deal. For almost three years, we’ve been sitting on a pair of Eurail passes that had gone unused originally due to Covid. A series of extensions kept them valid through the period of travel restrictions, but […]

The original “plan” was to leave Madrid and head south for Seville. (I was thinking I might need a haircut and beard trim by then, anyway.) Then, from out of nowhere,  the phrase “Basque Separatists” popped into my head. After a couple days in a restive Catalonia, I was in the mood to be among some more troublemakers in the Basque capital of Bilbao.

These are examples of my travel goals:

So far I have two objectives for the Spain part of my trip. I’ve done a ton of background reading for this leg, including Michener’s exhaustive and exhausting Iberia, Zoellner’s chapter on the AVE high-speed train from Barcelona to Madrid in his wonderfully researched Train, Jack Hitt’s mostly enjoyable memoir of his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. I’ve also digested a stomach churning account of the Spanish Inquisition, and browsed several other weighty tomes. After all this, here’s what I’ve come up to do in Spain: I want to find a good bowl of paella and an English edition of Jan Morris’s Spain. That’s it, you say? Bear with me, though. (I know that’s bearing a lot.)