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Spain 2003
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Barcelona
We
jumped on the overnight hotel train (TrenHotel) from Milan to Barcelona, which
meant we saw little of the landscape between these two cities. It was dark
when we were in France,
so
we saw none of it. I did set the alarm to get up in the middle of the
night so that I
could flush the toilet as we passed through France.
We had phoned from Vicenza to make hotel reservations at one of the hotels in
the Rick Steves book. We had a bit of a problem, as we could only get a
reservation for a single night. We were undaunted, as we figured we
could
always find a place after we got to Barcelona.
We took a taxi
from the train station to the Hotel Universal, which was a decent hotel, but on
a busy street. We
found that the traffic outside our window was heavy until well after midnight.
We thought this a bit unusual, until we moved to the Ramblas the next day and
learned just how late in the night things go on in this city. When we
arrived, we were told we could stay two
nights, but
then we would have to leave.
We bought two-day tickets for the “Bus Turistic”, which is the local “Hop On –
Hop Off” bus. We like to do this when we arrive at a new city as we get a
quick look at all the major sights. We then go back for a
longer visit
to anything we find interesting.
Barcelona is
known for its Modernisme style of architecture, which means “a taste for what is
modern”. Antoni Gaudí is Barcelona’s most famous modernist artist.
His designs are very distinctive and the locals enjoy pointing out his designs
all over the city. His most famous work is the Sagrada Familia (Holy
Family) Church. Construction began in 1883 and they say it will be
finished in another 50 years or so.
Even though construction is ongoing, you can walk throughout the structure and
even climb up into the upper reaches. I
think I
enjoyed seeing the construction techniques as much as the unusual design.
It is well worth the visit.
As always, we rode the metro all over town, to visit places more quickly (and
cheaply) than taking arranged tours. We saw a listing for the Maritime
Museum, so naturally we couldn’t pass it up. The museum is located in the
old Royal Shipyards, which to my
surprise
seemed to be indoors!
We wanted to stay at least three nights so that we would be able to take a day
trip to Montserrat. We were out walking around town and at the top of the
Ramblas; we recognized the name of one of the hotels listed in our guidebook.
We had phoned the Hotel Lloret from Italy
but it had been full.
As long as we were standing in front of the hotel, we decided to stop in and see
if they had a
vacancy.
Success! It is a very nice hotel, not at all fancy, but right on the
Ramblas. One of my favorite amenities was the vending machine with cans of
beer for one Euro. Nice breakfast included also.
The only
downside was the upside. Located on the Ramblas means it is noisy all
night. The only people who don’t stay up late in Spain are the trash
collectors. They are up bright and early banging the cans around.
(It may be th
at
they just go directly to work at the end of the evening.)
The Ramblas is a long avenue stretching from the Plaça de Catalunya to the
harbor, about 1.5 kilometers. It has a wide walkway in the center with a
narrow access road on either side. To quote our Rick Steves guidebook,
walking the length of the Ramblas..”you’ll raft the river of Barcelonan lift
past a grand opera house, elegant cafés, retread prostitutes, pickpockets,
power-dressing con men, artists, street mimes, an outdoor bird market, great
shopping, and people looking to charge more for a shoeshine than you paid for
the shoes.”
Montserrat
We decided
a visit to the monastery at Montserrat would be a good day trip. Trains
leave Barcelona every hour or so, and the train ticket includes the cable car
ride up the mountain. This is a pretty rugged area just 50 kilometers from
Barcelona. Take a look at the picture to the left. We had to wonder
how people got up there before they installed the cable car. It turned
into a nice half-day trip, with a visit to (another) church. At least this
one had a choir so we got to hear some music. On to Madrid!
We used our rail pass and enjoyed first-class travel to Madrid. I really mean
first class. Each car had a couple of uniformed attendants (i.e.
flight attendants), very comfortable seating, a movie, and drinks. Lots
more room than an airplane, at least in economy as we usually travel.
Our hotel in
Madrid was a pretty good distance from the train station so we decided to take a
taxi. What a great location we had picked! Just a short walk from
the Pla
za Puerta del Sol, the Hostal
Triana is located on a small square, the Plaza del Carmen.
We found it to
be a fairly peaceful refuge in a large city.
Every evening the local residents would congregate in the park to socialize.
Our first day we noticed a line forming below our hotel balcony at about five
PM. We didn’t think much about it the first day, but then we noticed it
was an every day occurrence. We learned it was a dance club. For a
five Euro entrance fee you could dance the night away to a live orchestra.
We
decided to take a pass on the opportunity this trip. Maybe next time.
We were just a
couple of blocks from the Plaza Puerta del Sol, which seemed to be the center of
activity for the area. On one of our walks we noticed quite a large crowd
at the
plaza and learned it was a political demonstration. Pam and I can’t
seem to resist demonstrations, so we joined the crowd to see what was going on.
The first thing we noticed was the several large banners that proclaimed “Por La
Paz y El Empleo – NO A LA GUERRA”. I didn’t need Pam to translate that for
me: “For the peace and employment, NO TO THE WAR”. The
demonstrations were sponsored by the Communist and Socialist parties and labor
unions. Lots of speeches and music. Nothing violent.
This was in early April, 2003 so Pam and I were sort of the “protestees”.
Since we had mixed feelings about the situation in Iraq, we just avoided the
subject when we talked to the locals. As in Italy, people seemed to be
able to separate “Americans” from “American government (Bush) policy”.
Actually, Europeans seem to do a better job of separating individuals from their
government policy than we do.
We left the
area and caught the metro to go sightseeing for the day. As was the case
everywhere we have traveled, we rode the metro without any problems, and without
getting lost or stranded. We hardly ever take a taxi if there is a metro
available. In Madrid they are clean and frequent. In addition to the
route maps in each car, there is a display which tells the next station.
Great system, and cheap. A fraction of the cost of our San Diego Trolley!
We took a
couple of hours to visit the Palacio Real (Royal Palace), which is reputed to be
Europe’s third-greatest palace after Versailles and Vienna’s Schönbrunn.
It was built by King Phillip V in the 18th
century. Phillip V was born at
Versailles (he was very French) and ruled Spain for 40 years without ever
learning to speak Spanish. (Sort of like an American tourist.) The
palace is still
used for formal state receptions and other functions, though the royal
family no longer lives there.
We really enjoyed our stay in Madrid. It is a great city to wander about
in, between doing tourist type things. We discovered a great place for
breakfast, Maestro Churrero. We stopped there several times for Churros
and hot
chocolate. Coffee for me. The hot
chocolate in Madrid is
really thick. Sort of like hot chocolate pudding. As is the custom,
you can either stand at the counter and eat or pay a couple of bucks more and
sit at a table.
The Prado
We devoted an
entire day to the Prado. We arrived early, before the ticket office
opened, so we spent an hour walking through the Royal Botanical Garden, which is
adjacent to the Prado. These gardens were built by Charles III and there
is a big statue of
him in the center of the area. We also saw a couple of paintings of
him in the Prado.
When we left the garden and returned to the Prado we saw that about a thousand
people had arrived in our absence and formed a line at the ticket office.
Bummer.
We walked
around the side of the building and saw a much shorter line at another door.
If you click on the picture at the left you can see the two lines. One of
the museum employees was keeping order, so we asked her why two lines. She
said the short line was for the Vermeer exhibition which was there for a month.
We were reluctantly headed back for the long line at the main entrance when she
told us in passing that we could enter the main museum after we saw the Vermeer
exhibition for no additional cost! A half-hour later we were inside.
The Prado is almost overwhelming. It has whole rooms of masterpieces by
Velázquez, Goya, El Greco, and Bosch. Unsophisticated patrons of the arts
that we are,
we had prepared ourselves with Rick Steves’ museum guidebook,
Mona Winks.
We didn’t always agree with his
assessments of
the artwork, but it was a good guide for us.
I particularly enjoyed Goya’s work, the example of which on the left gives an
indication of the political influence he succumbed to.
We were in need of sustenance after a few hours of walking on marble floors, so
we stopped at the VIPS restaurant across the street for a bite to eat. We
couldn’t resist the banana splits.
Toledo
Time for a day trip…. We took a bus for the short ride to Toledo.
Really an interesting city. Be sure to click on the link to our photo
album/slide show to
see more
pictures.
We arrived at
the Plaza Zocodover (the main square) and found another little tourist train!
We couldn’t resist taking the short tour of the city it provided. Actually
it turned out to be a fairly long tour. They have a couple of trains which
run every hour or so, but we found they weren’t able to stay on schedule.
The train we planned to take was running an hour late because of a breakdown.
Our train was also late returning to the Zocodover as well. The streets
are pretty narrow but most of the drivers know just how much room there is for
parking without blocking traffic.
Unfortunately we ran into one driver
(literally) who parked a bit too far into the right of way. This happened
just a couple of blocks from the Zocodover so we were able to walk At least we
can say we have
been in a train wreck!
We had plenty of time to walk around the town and see the cathedral and old
buildings. It is
A pretty impressive city.
Back in Madrid
After the bus ride back to our hotel we decided on a light dinner – chicken
nuggets and salad from McDonald’s and a beer. We sat on our balcony and
watched the
people in the park below the hotel.
We decided to take a “housekeeping day” and do our laundry. We located a
Laundromat within walking distance and not far from the Prado. While we
were waiting for the clothes to wash we walked around the neighborhood and ran
across an unexpected tourist site – the home of Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quijote
de la Mancha). His home is now occupied by someone else (not a museum) and
there is just a plaque on the wall.
We also saw this
neat scooter – one of many on Madrid’s city streets. First motor scooter
I’ve ever seen with a hard top. Then we visited the shop pictured to the right,
the Museu del Jamon (Museum of ham). This is a chain of delicatessens and
meat markets. It was a little unusual to see the hams hanging around the
walls with the hoofs still intact.
Returning to the Puerta del Sol we found that the party in power had organized a
response to the earlier labor demonstrations. They answered rhetoric with
entertainment!
Click on the picture to the left to see a short QuickTime video. It will
take a few seconds to load. These performers were on tall fiberglass poles
that swayed back and forth to music. Really unusual! They performed
long enough I had time to return to the hotel for my camera. There were
also some pro-government speeches. As in the earlier demonstration, people
were pretty much ignoring the speakers.
Alas, it was finally time to leave Madrid and take the next leg of our trip.
Salamanca
Our plans were to take the train from Madrid to Lisbon, but we decided to stop
enroute and spend a couple of days at Salamanca.
We located our little hotel, Le Petit Hotel, located on a side street within
walking
distance of the Plaza Mayor. Salamanca is a university city, home
of Salamanca University, which was founded in 1230. It was one of Europe’s
leading centers of learning for 400 years, along with
Oxford and
Bologna. Today’s university occupies somewhat more modern buildings, but the
original buildings are still open to visitors.
In the classrooms you can see the original benches and tables with centuries of
carved doodling. The professors’ seating was pretty ornate but the
students
made do with plain wooden seats. We also visited the original
university library, which contains 40,000 volumes, all published before the 18th
century.
Salamanca has
an “Old Cathedral” (12th century) and a “New Cathedral” (16th -18th centuries),
which are attached. You reach
the old
through the new.
The façade at the entrance has interesting carvings. When it was restored
in 1993 an astronaut was
added. This caused quite a scandal at the time,
but now the locals say “He’s the person closest to God.”
We wanted to visit the Church and Monastery of San Esteban, because Columbus
stayed here while he was trying to convince Queen Isabella to finance his
voyages of exploration. He wasn’t successful. We could only visit
the outside as it was in the process of renovation.
We were
accustomed to seeing all the Roman relics in Italy but we tend to forget about
the R
oman
presence in Spain. There
are still a
lot of structures remaining. In Salamanca there is a Roman Bridge across
the Rio Tormes which is mostly original.
A nice town, worth visiting for a couple of days.
Costa del Sol – Marbella
We planned to wrap up out trip with a week on the Costa del Sol. We rented
a car in Jerez and drove to
Marbella, just west of Málaga. We had rented a
time-share apartment there for a week, through the
Armed Forces Vacation Club. We were
happy to find a one-bedroom apartment at the Club Bellasol for the week, and
Marbella is located ideally as a home base for day trips to the surrounding
cities. We were a couple of blocks from the beach, which was nice for our
daily walks, but not very attractive for swimming in April. Also, we only
saw one topless sunbather. (Sorry, no pictures available.)
We got a kick
out of our location, on Calle Zeus (Erick’s dog) next to Pueblo Don
Miguel.
Even though it was too chilly for swimming, we did manage to get a little sun.
This area is very popular with the Brits, and the local restaurants cater to
their tastes. I rather enjoyed baked beans on toast for breakfast too!
Cuevas de la Pileta
One of our first day trips was to the Cuevas de la Pileta (Pileta Caves) near
Ronda. I wanted to get a look at the prehistoric cave paintings (20,000
years
old).
The famous caves in northern Spain at Altamira are no longer open to tourists,
so this is the only example of Neolithic paintings
available to
tourists. The cave is privately owned, and a family member takes small
groups on tours. We drove to the location following directions in our
guide book. There was little in the way of signs to help us. We
found the parking area at the end of the road, and then walked up the hill a few
hundred feet on a dirt path. We got to the top and found the barred grate
at the cave entrance, and sort of a shade cover (like a carport). No
office, no other facilities, no sign, no schedule. There were a couple of
people standing around, and they said there was a group inside the cave.
Sure enough, after 45 minutes of waiting, the group came out of the cave.
In the meantime another five or six people had arrived, so there was a big
enough group for another tour. A very casual operation. Well worth
the visit. The paintings were amazing. There were also some other
artifacts lying
around – broken pots etc. We could only imagine what would happen to a
cave like this in the USA.
On the way back to Marbella we stopped at a little hill town called Montejaque.
There is a n
ice little restaurant here, La Casita, but getting to it was a bit
of a problem. The town was preparing for a fair and some of the streets
were blocked off. We managed to find our way to La Casita but one of the
streets we drove down just kept getting more and more narrow. At the end
of the street I had to fold the side mirrors back to drive through! Once
we arrived at La Casita we had a wonderful lunch.
We wanted to be sure to visit the Alhambra, but it wasn’t as easy as we had
hoped. We needed to make reservations and that was a problem. It was
a very popular time of year and the best we could do was 7 PM, two days later.
Okay, stay flexible. We enjoyed a nice breakfast on our balcony, and then
drove to Jerez.
Jerez
We had originally arrived in Jerez by train, and then took a taxi to the airport
to get our rental car. This was our first visit to the city itself.
This was the closest Pam and I came to getting into a fight during our entire
trip. I was driving, Pam was navigating. Need I say more?
To be fair, we had two different highway maps and neither agreed with the
highway signs. I mean the two maps had different numbers for the highways,
and the signs didn’t agree with either map. Also, the street names seemed
to change frequently in the city itself. At one point we stopped to ask
directions from a lady who had a flower stand at a fairly sizeable intersection.
She looked at our map and couldn’t even tell us where we were! We kind of
drove around until we saw a big Tio Pepe sign, and correlated that with the map.
We were at the Gonzalez Byas Bodega. As long as we were there, we took the
tour.
We entered the bodega and found….a tourist train! We got a quick course in
the process of making sherry. The tasting that went along with the tour
was fun too. In general we have always found sherry to be too sweet, but
we were introduced to some dry sherry that was pretty good. Not good
enough to lure us away from good old California reds though.
For a price (or if you are a celebrity) you can get a barrel dedicated to you. 
Winston Churchill, the queen and others have this honor. We also spotted a
barrel with Admiral Hyman Rickover’s name on it.
If you look carefully at the picture to the left, you can see the resident mice
enjoying their daily glass of sherry. The mice help keep the insects under
control, and they are appropriately rewarded. I wonder what kind of sherry
is recommended to drink with cockroaches.
Jerez is also the home of the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art.
We particularly wanted to see this, since we had missed out on the equestrian
show in Queluz, Portugal. We struck out again. There was a fair
ongoing while we were in Jerez and all the horses were performing at the fair.
The weather was so hot the day we were there, we decided we didn’t want to fight
the crowds at the fair. We went back to our condo and watched on TV.
Grenada – The Alhambra
We weren’t
really sure how long it would take to get to Grenada. It looked like a
drive of two or three hours, so we left mid-morning and planned to arrive at
noon. We actually made better time than expected,
with the toll road all
the way. Once we got there we had a seven-hour wait
until our entry time for the Palacios Nazaries, which is the area with all the
Moorish architecture. The rest of the Alhambra was open, as was the city
itself. So, we went sightseeing.
We walked around the city, ate, walked around the Alhambra, ate, and finally
just found a shady spot to sit. We did spend some time in the
Generalife
Gardens, which has lots and lots of roses. Also watch a wedding in the
garden.
We finally
talked the guard into letting us enter early, and we spent the next hour or so
admiring these beautiful buildings. Learned a little more history as well.
W
hen the moors were finally defeated and kicked out of Spain, Ferdinand and
Isabella moved into the palace at the Alhambra. This is where Columbus
came to finally get their approval (and funding) for his voyage of exploration.
It was kind of thrilling to stand in the room where Queen
Isabella finally said “Go West, Young Man”. (Maybe I have my
stories mixed a little bit here….)
Rota
We were
finally out of time, out of money, and after eight weeks, a little homesick.
It was time to get on to Rota and try to find a ride home. We drove to
Jerez, turned in our rental car, and took a taxi to the Naval Station at Rota.
We were able to get a room at the Navy Lodge and wandered down to the air
terminal to see what was on the schedule. There was nothing immediately
available, so we grabbed a pizza and beer and headed for the library to check
the internet. />
The next day
we saw a C-5 on the schedule and talked to some of the troops that were
scheduled on the flight. They had been delayed a couple of days for
repairs, but expected to get out. We were put on the manifest, so we went
back to check out of the Navy Lodge. Big mistake.
The C-5 repairs dragged on, and on, and we were stuck in the terminal.
Tried to get back in the Navy
Lodge but there were no vacancies. This was
the first night Pam had to spend in an air terminal, the down side of Space-A
travel. We enjoyed mingling with the troops returning from Kuwait though,
and renewed our appreciation for the young people in our armed forces.
