Blogs from Spain, Europe - page 5

SPAIN Nov 15th – Dec 2nd This trip will be remembered, by me anyway, for ‘The Time that the Parrots Came’!! They have been on the coast for quite a few years (noisy horrible things but quite pretty to look at!!) and I always hoped that they wouldn’t move inland. We have had one or two over the years but now there seems to be a small flock of about twenty parrots that have moved into a large tree the Plaza de la Legion. One can only hope that they disappear, as quickly as they have appeared, otherwise it will be a sad goodbye to all the small native birds, as the parrots have no predators. Parrots excepted, it was a quiet, if not busy couple of weeks. We rented Howards car again and was duly ... read more

Disembarked our ship in Barcelona and were rapidly transported to The Corner Hotel, a 4 star hotel in the middle of the city. Barcelona is basically a huge grid of one way boulevards with wide pavements so traffic flows easily. It is also easy to walk around .We walked to the Sagrada Famiglia, the famous Cathedral by Gaudi which is still unfinished. Sadly the only way to get in is by ordering tickets on line and despite both of us trying on different phones we could not succeed so could not visit this time. We weren't the only ones who were disappointed. What a stupid system! Later we ventured out to a local Tapas bar for dinner and then another little bar for a late night cap. Did a lot of walking! On day 2 we ... read more

Day one out of Cordoba was deliberately light on the pedalling front, to limit what could have been an 80km day, had we gone further east. We’d managed to fall asleep the night before despite our near neighbour in the apartment block singing his heart out to the transistor radio. A knock on his door after midnight stopped it (we’ve been told there are strict noise rules in such blocks in Spain). Misty and cool 5C at 8am was the weather pattern that followed us from Córdoba, to El Carpio and beyond. The 31km followed a good ten kilometres of cycle path, with an industrial N-road section after, and then a chance to peel off onto slightly quieter parallel (to the autovía) camino rurales. Coming into El Carpio before 2:30 was an outright record. We discovered ... read more

Camas was our two day base for seeing Sevilla and regrouping somewhat, after some one nighters to get there. Trundling along the one way cobbled streets, to find an exit onto something resembling a smooth surface, has become easier with time, and especially once you know there is no contra-flow pedalling here (we’ve been warned when done inadvertently, by a local) On our first morning, I discovered a fully paved green cycle way all the way to about 10km west of Camas, which starts with a 2km ascent and gave some wide if hazy views of the Sevilla region. I’m guessing some of the industry could have been adding to it. Italica, in Santiponce, was a Roman ruins site we visited very briefly in 2019 on our way to Jerez de la Frontera, and happened to ... read more

Bilbao is on the Northern coast of Spain on the Bay of Biscayne, the same bay the much of western France is on. It is the largest city in the Basque Country with over 1 million residents. In the 19th century it was the industrial center of the Basque Region, then came Guggenheim. The museum was designed by Frank Gehry and puts the New York Guggenheim to shame. The architecture of the building itself is worth seeing. The museum opened in 1997 and now I don’t think of Bilbao without thinking Guggenheim. More on the museum later. Unfortunately for us, Sunday in Bilbao is not the day to visit. Most everything is closed, except the Guggenheim. It is a very sleepy city on Sunday. We did not make it to the old section Casco Viejo or ... read more