Au Revoir Barcelona

We're having our last walks through the old neighborhood and packing up.







To celebrate being in our 60's and biking around Spain, we went to this Barcelona beach today. I have pictures, but I'm not posting them.












And Martha figured if northern Spain was good enough inspiration for Picasso, Pablo Casals and Gaudi, she could probably get a couple of watercolors out of it. These are from the few odd moments from the last week where she could get a little time to herself.

Back to Barcelona

In lieu of Bike Ride Day 5, we went back to Barcelona for a final day. Some observations:

Translations
In some cases, English translations are right on. In others, they are either puzzling or brilliant to the point that they're over my head. Given that Spain is an affluent, educated country with access to an unlimited number of English speakers, I'll assume the latter.







This is an excellent and precise exact translation. Good job.












These two, I'm not so sure about. 







And keeping with the linguistic theme, Martha has asked me to mention that "cerveza," which deals with liquid going in, sounds very similar to "servicio," which refers to liquid going out. She has concluded that the words must have the same origin. I don't agree.

There is only one mood allowed here in Barcelona.












Martha has been lugging this blue water bottle around for a week and a half since we were served water from it our first night here. If you see it at our house, please make a point to mention how pretty it is and ask where we got it.

Bike Ride Day 4

We finished up by by riding from Begur to S'Agaro along the Mediterranean coast.












I would like to say that the ride took a while because we stopped at so many beaches like this one. That is kind of true, but we also got lost a lot.

Until we got to the end and then really did spend some time at the beach.

Bike Ride Day 3

If slightly modifying one's ride includes sitting on a beach all day and doing watercolors, then we slightly modified our ride. And Martha did get a watercolor out of it.




What do you do when you have a medieval village with winding streets that are about six inches
wider than cars and those streets are also used by pedestrians? You can't make the streets wider, so you paint a sidewalk on it (shown at left), and tell drivers to honor the imaginary sidewalk. The truck in this picture illustrates one of many reasons this approach is not perfect.

The people who live here didn't see us looking longingly at their front gate and invite us in for a glass of Cava and some olives.

Martha initiated her painting session with some inspiration in a can. But the painting turned out great, so I'm not judging.














Then we had dinner at a very unique seafood place. They have seven tables and serve one thing - fish. They go down to the boats and grab an assortment of whatever was caught that day, then offer it on the menu. Each fish is weighed and priced. So for example, if you want a sea bass, they might say "We have six of those, the smallest is 1.6 servings and the largest is 3 servings," etc. So you pick the fish you want, the cook who cooks only one thing one way creates a little aluminum-foil basket and plops the fish in there, adds potatoes, vegetables, wine and olive oil, and slides it into a wood-fired oven until it's done. Yum. This picture shows the entire kitchen and cooking staff.

Bike Ride Day 2

We successfully made it 36 miles from Girona to the Mediterranean coast, dodging a couple of storms, making a few wrong turns and developing sore crotches, all of which were countered by drinking beer for lunch, riding through many medieval villages and not getting a flat tire.

The big green area at the beginning is a 7-mile climb to a monastery.

I didn't before appreciate why some bikes have shock absorbers, but now I do.

This is just one of many villages we passed, all of which looked pretty much the same. I'm not jaded.

In one of the villages, we stopped to tour Salvador Dali's summer home, which was pretty amazing. The museum curators preserved the historically-significant items from Dali's life and presented them as they were when he was alive. These included 8-track tapes, cassettes, records, a Datsun station wagon, and many other things that don't seem very "historical" to me. I'm not sure what that all means, but it can't possibly mean that I'm getting older.














About two-thirds of the way through the ride, it started to rain, which could only mean one thing. Time to stop for lunch. And close our eyes.

Bike Ride Day 1






We took a train to Girona today and met a lot of really nice dogs who were very well behaved, sitting calmly outside at restaurant tables and just being happy that they could share peaceful quality time with their owners. Basically all the things our dogs cannot do.

Then we did a 20-mile warm up ride that involved making one pretty big wrong turn and then a large loop around what someone told us was a collapsed ancient volcano.


Is this true? I have no idea.

Because I'm not riding alone this year, I have pictures of something other than just trees.












When we were 15 miles in and realized that we'd had nothing to eat all day, we stopped at a hopping local restaurant where the waiter told us that they were so busy they had no forks or spoons left, but we could have beer and either olives or potato chips, but nothing else. Which we did, while watching all the other people who arrived before us eating what looked like the most delicious meals ever created by humans.

Back in Girona we managed a nap, a good dinner, and now we are resting up for the long ride to the coast, which we plan to celebrate by doing nothing for one day. We'll see how that goes.