studioducey: how i was driven to spain

long about the last time i blogged, i was having drinks with some friends one evening. i believe i was drinking manhattans, in case you're interested. they came in a really cool glass, and a makers mark manhattan was only $5. i love the brick. carlo was talking about his upcoming trip to italy and i was getting mighty jealous. my daughter robin had been talking endlessly about her upcoming entire-summer-long trip to most of europe and i was already jealous of that. all my life i've wanted to spend lots of time traveling, but what with not being so footloose and fancy free, i've always said no to that. you know, kids to raise, mortgage to pay, greeting cards to design, corporate egos to stroke. (i was terrible at that last one.) anyway, you know, one excuse after the other.

robin would be meeting up with friends in every country she was visiting except spain, so eventually with the help of those manhattans and the encouragement of my friends, a fairly subversive seed was planted. why not go to spain? with my eldest daughter. who speaks spanish.

to make a long story short, that's exactly what i did. at first robin may have been a little uneasy with the suggestion, but she came around. her hesitation was understandable. just for starters she thinks 3:00 a.m. is a reasonable time to go to bed and noon is a reasonable time to get up. plus, we had never traveled together, or even spent two entire weeks just the two of us. as it turns out, we're pretty great traveling buddies, and the spanish way of life pretty much dictated that i get into the late night/late morning schedule. (one morning we tried to get an earlyish-start and found that, except at the bus station, there was no place to have our cafe con leche until 9:30 or 10:00.) during the whole trip there was only one "moment," and that turned out to be a good thing.

so we went to barcelona, granada, gibraltar, tangier, cadiz and jerez de la frontera, with a couple of side trips. i could have stayed another two or three weeks or years, especially in southern spain. it reminded me of back home in california. i guess it's time for me to learn spanish.

here are a few snaps from barcelona: