Marcia and I made it back to our VOC digs this afternoon after a wonderful two-week trip to Spain, the foreign country we’ve visited more often than any other, except Canada. (Marcia actually spent a whole semester in Spain while in college, so it takes first place in overall time abroad for her, if not in number of trips). We spent the first part of the trip in Madrid, then went north to areas we’ve not visited before: Bilbao (and its suburb, Getxo) and Zaragoza. Then back to Madrid for a few more days, with a bus-trip over to San Lorenzo de El Escorial. We returned to some places we’ve loved before in Madrid, and also found some new favorites this time around. It’s a big, grand city, with lots to experience. And then we had a great time exploring the cultural treasures in Pais Vasco and Aragon, both ancient parts of the country with very distinctive histories of their own. We once again greeted a new year abroad, having done so before in Paris and Reykjavik. And we ate a ton of delicious food, most of it involving cod or various types of crustaceans or anchovies for me, with Marcia leaning a smidge more toward the terrestrial meat side of the equation.

I’m pretty whipped from travel and from what I think are still after-effects of COVID, and don’t really have the brain-power to write a big essay today, so will just post my photo album for now. If anything piques your curiosity there, ask in the comment section and I will be happy to explicate at more length. I may do so anyway here in a day or two, once my jets are less lagged. Marcia and I are off to Hawai’i for another two-week trip in ten days, so it feels great to be home for a spell of relative rest and relaxation. But, then, as good as it feels to be back in Arizona, we can tell that this was a great vacation, because we are already planning our next trip to Spain, rather than feeling sick of being there after two weeks. We’re thinking next time we’ll do a car journey, either from Bilbao west to Galicia, or from Barcelona around the Mediterranean coast through Valencia and Malaga. Decisions, decisions! We know we are most fortunate to be able to ponder them.

You can click on the image below of me interacting with Richard Serra’s monumental art at the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum to see the complete album. It’s a slightly bigger one than I normally post as a single album, so if you want to see the whole thing, you can click through to the second page at the bottom of the first one . . .