Friday, September 15, 2006
FRIDAY, AUGUST 25th TRAVEL TO SPAIN
We arrived back in Dublin late in the afternoon on Thursday. We had a very pleasant drive until we were in about fifteen miles of the city. The four lane ended and we got off into construction and surface streets. At one point it took us forty five minutes to go a couple of miles. I was glad to get back to the car rental agency at the airport and get back on public transportation. We took a bus down into the city and went to our hotel. We spent the night then took a taxi to the ferry terminal at Don Laoghaire. We just reversed our trip from this point. We took the ferry to Hollyhead in Wales. We went by train from Holleyhead to London where we had to change train stations to get a train to Dover.
We went by underground from Euston Station to Victoria Station and caught a train to Dover where we planned to take a night ferry across the English Channel to Calais, France.
All plans have a weakness. When we arrived at the Dover Ferry Port it was about 11:00 pm. We found that the ferry company had discontinued their foot passenger service from 9:00 pm until 6:00 am. We were stuck in the terminal for the night. We could have taken a taxi back into the city of Dover and tried to find a hotel; however, at that time of night paying a taxi to haul us around in search of a room did not seem like a good idea. They had very comfortable chairs and couches in the arrivals lounge at the ferry terminal so joined a lot of other people who evidently were in the same situation as us and slept in the waiting room.
I questioned the people at the desk about the incorrect time schedule I had which did not show the stoppage of night service. The response was that they just hadn’t gotten around to reprinting the time schedules. The night service had been stopped for ten months. I was a little bit unhappy with them.
This delay caused us to arrive in Barcelona, Spain early on Sunday morning instead of mid afternoon on Saturday. We rented a car and drove about an hour and a half to our timeshare accommodations for the week.
We had a room in a hotel in a small village of Bellver de Cardanya. We were fortunate that the wife in the couple who ran the hotel had a British Mom and she knew how to speak English. There were not a lot of people in that region of Spain who spoke English. Most of them spoke Spanish, some spoke French, but the official language was Catalonian which is some kind of a mixture of Spanish and French. Even when we got back to Barcelona we did not find a lot of people who spoke English.
We stayed at this hotel from Sunday afternoon until Wednesday morning. It is located in a beautiful valley in the Pyrenees Mountains.
Our hotel was located literally next door to a 12th Century church named The Church of Santa Maria de Tallo. We went inside the church one evening when there was some sort of service or meeting going on up front.
We were with another couple and we just sat down on the back seat and took a look at the building. There is a carved wood statue of the Virgin which is the same age as the church. They date back to sometime in the 1100’s.
Our landlords were a young couple who had moved up into the mountains from Barcelona. They wanted to manage a Bed and Breakfast so they took a second lease on this hotel and were doing a very good job with it. It was small and very old Europe.
She took care of the front office and even helped with the housecleaning. He is a gourmet cook and turned out good meals. Their names were Daniel and Rebecca and we got to be good friends with them.
Daniel didn’t speak any English, but Rebecca and Mary became good enough friends that we know a lot of the problems involved in running a hotel. We met a very nice couple from Australia and exchanged email addresses. We plan to stay in touch with them, because if we stay healthy and don’t go broke we plan to go to Australia in the near future.
While we were in the mountains we went to another small town nearby named Puigcerda. We went there looking for a Laundromat. No luck; we haven’t seen a Laundromat since we left Ireland. What we found was a real nice little town with great shops and restaurants.
In the village center is Santa Maria Placa. It is a square with an old bell tower which is all that is left of The Church of Santa Maria. The church was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. The town was founded in 1171 and the bell tower is about that age. Most of the buildings are newer than that but you can tell by the width of the streets and some of the buildings that the city is old.
We had lunch there a couple of days at little outdoor cafes. We really enjoy the local foods and atmosphere. We can usually find a server to help us with the menu if they don’t have an English version.
On Thursday, August 31st we left the mountains and headed for Barcelona. We had planned a blitz of Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon, Portugal. We got to Barcelona mid morning and returned our rental car. We also had to take some time to go shopping. Mary’s digital camera died. It was only a year old and we did not understand why it quit. I told Mary that it was probably only designed to take two million pictures and she had easily exceeded that in the last year. I guess we will get Cannon to look at it when we get back to the US. We then took a city tour on an open topped double-decker bus. About ten o’clock Thursday night we caught a sleeper train and went to Madrid. We arrived there early on Friday morning and spent the day touring and sightseeing in Madrid. At about 11:00 we boarded a sleeper train and went to Lisbon. We arrived in Lisbon early morning and spent the day touring and sightseeing on Saturday. Saturday night we took a sleeper train back to Madrid. On Sunday morning we got a train from Madrid back to Barcelona and had a sleeper scheduled for Sunday night to Torino, Italy. That is a real whirlwind, but the sleeper compartments on the trains are comfortable and they are, in most cases, less expensive than a motel would be. We arrived rested and ready for another day of sightseeing. The only disadvantage to traveling like this is you misses seeing the country between the cities. We enjoy the trip as much as we do getting there.
The first tour we took was in Barcelona and it is a beautiful city. The narrative which was so fast and the Spanish accented English kept me from getting too many of the facts. We have a lot of beautiful pictures, but we are not sure what they are.
I do know that it is a major port on the Mediterranean Sea. Also there are a lot of improvements which came from the Olympics being there a few years back.
The next day in Madrid we were on a tour that had such poor sound on their headphones that we got nothing from it. Again, Madrid is beautiful old city which dates back to 711 AD. There have been a variety of influences on the growth of the city and it has been capitol of Spain since 1516.
It is sometime referred to as the European Jerusalem because of the mix of Christians, Jews and Muslims. Mary and I decided that we will not have much text from those two days so we will just put in a bunch of our favorite pictures.
We had a great tour in Lisbon. At first glance Lisbon appears to be a third world city. It looks ragged, dirty and in bad need of repair. That is the old city. When we got into the newer area of the city it was a lot better looking. We bought a ticket which allowed us to ride the public transportation and the take all the tours which they offered. We rode a city bus down the Plaza de Commerical where the tours were staged, the square was built in the mid 1600 and serves as government offices today.
We first took a Tram tour which was electric and ran on tracks. It covered the old city. It would have been impossible to have used a bus for the tour because of the narrow streets. There were times when a car would park in the street and the tram driver would just have to sit and blow his horn until someone came and moved the car.
As most of the old sections in European cities, the narrow streets open to squares or plazas and the streets have no systematic design, but just ramble in any direction. This situation was made more extreme because of the hills in the city.
They claim, like Rome, to be built on seven hills. The buildings in the old city reflect the many influences on Portugal due to their empire building in their early history. There are Moorish, African, Arab, as well as Spanish styles scattered throughout the city. The neighborhoods are ethnic and the shopping reflects the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood it serves. A lot of the buildings and the side walks have tile siding.
It came from the Moorish influence and is decorative, but it serves well as insulation and is very low maintaince.
There is a section of the old city which has Moorish roots and has provided homes and entertainment for many of the artists, writers and musicians of the culture. AlFama is the name of the area and it is the name given to the music which has come to be identified as the national music of Portugal. Played on a twelve string guitar it has a very distinctive sound.
In 1986 Portugal joined the European Union. Since then billions of dollars have been invested in Portugal and it has gone from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to having the highest economic growth rate of any country in Europe. This more modern economy has benefited Portugal, but it has also widened the gap between the rich and the poor.
Portugal continues to be a sea going nation and Lisbon is a great port, however, in the recent past efforts have been made to develop an industrial economy and shore up the agricultural economy. The difference which has been made by membership in the EU is readily apparent in the construction within the business community in the last twenty years.
In the time we spent in Lisbon there is no way to grasp the culture and the spirit of the city. I believe that Lisbon will continue to rise in the ranks of Capitol cities of the world. We have completed our blitz. We are ready to return to Barcelona so we can get our connection to Torino and spend some time in Italy. We came back from Lisbon on a sleeper train. We arrived in Madrid early on Sunday morning and took a train from there to Barcelona.
This was all country which we had slept through on our trip to Madrid from Barcelona, so we got a chance to see some new country. It is dry and rugged hills and mountains. Any agricultural endeavors were irrigated. There was a considerable amount of farming, especially grapes and fruit trees.
We got back to Barcelona in early afternoon and were not scheduled to leave there until 8:40 that night on a sleeper to Turino in Italy. While we were waiting I set us up in the lobby of the station to do some work on the computer. I piled up some bags and set to work. We took turns working and when it got to be suppertime I went to eat and Mary stayed with the luggage and worked with her pictures. After I had eaten Mary went to eat and I stayed there and worked on my journal.
When Mary came back she was looking for her small carry on bag and it was gone. While I was distracted by the typing of my journal someone came by and lifted Mary’s bag. It had her purse in it so she lost all her ID including her passport. We also lost all of the credit cards, driver’s license, SS card, and even a credit card sized copy of her birth certificate. Needless to say we missed out train to Italy.
It was Sunday before Labor Day so the US Consulate was not open the next day because of the holiday. We had to wait until Tuesday morning to get Mary a new passport, so it was Tuesday night before we got out of Barcelona.
We reconsidered our position and decided that we would not rent a car and go to our timeshare. We called and cancelled our reservation there and made reservations for Wednesday night in Venice and Thursday and Friday nights in Florence. We stayed in a hostel which was a five minute walk from the Consulate. We badly need to do laundry, but we could not find a Laundromat. On the roof terrace there was an outdoor laundry area and Mary did our laundry by hand and hung it on the line. It has been a long time since we did that.
The front edge of the concrete tub was ribbed and made into a rub board, and there was a wash tub and a rinse tub. We had a good time with that. We also had a very pleasant supper of crackers, cheese, fruit and a good pastry, which we bought at a deli up the street.
Barcelona is a beautiful city, but we were glad to get to Italy.
We arrived back in Dublin late in the afternoon on Thursday. We had a very pleasant drive until we were in about fifteen miles of the city. The four lane ended and we got off into construction and surface streets. At one point it took us forty five minutes to go a couple of miles. I was glad to get back to the car rental agency at the airport and get back on public transportation. We took a bus down into the city and went to our hotel. We spent the night then took a taxi to the ferry terminal at Don Laoghaire. We just reversed our trip from this point. We took the ferry to Hollyhead in Wales. We went by train from Holleyhead to London where we had to change train stations to get a train to Dover.
We went by underground from Euston Station to Victoria Station and caught a train to Dover where we planned to take a night ferry across the English Channel to Calais, France.
All plans have a weakness. When we arrived at the Dover Ferry Port it was about 11:00 pm. We found that the ferry company had discontinued their foot passenger service from 9:00 pm until 6:00 am. We were stuck in the terminal for the night. We could have taken a taxi back into the city of Dover and tried to find a hotel; however, at that time of night paying a taxi to haul us around in search of a room did not seem like a good idea. They had very comfortable chairs and couches in the arrivals lounge at the ferry terminal so joined a lot of other people who evidently were in the same situation as us and slept in the waiting room.
I questioned the people at the desk about the incorrect time schedule I had which did not show the stoppage of night service. The response was that they just hadn’t gotten around to reprinting the time schedules. The night service had been stopped for ten months. I was a little bit unhappy with them.
This delay caused us to arrive in Barcelona, Spain early on Sunday morning instead of mid afternoon on Saturday. We rented a car and drove about an hour and a half to our timeshare accommodations for the week.
We had a room in a hotel in a small village of Bellver de Cardanya. We were fortunate that the wife in the couple who ran the hotel had a British Mom and she knew how to speak English. There were not a lot of people in that region of Spain who spoke English. Most of them spoke Spanish, some spoke French, but the official language was Catalonian which is some kind of a mixture of Spanish and French. Even when we got back to Barcelona we did not find a lot of people who spoke English.
We stayed at this hotel from Sunday afternoon until Wednesday morning. It is located in a beautiful valley in the Pyrenees Mountains.
Our hotel was located literally next door to a 12th Century church named The Church of Santa Maria de Tallo. We went inside the church one evening when there was some sort of service or meeting going on up front.
We were with another couple and we just sat down on the back seat and took a look at the building. There is a carved wood statue of the Virgin which is the same age as the church. They date back to sometime in the 1100’s.
Our landlords were a young couple who had moved up into the mountains from Barcelona. They wanted to manage a Bed and Breakfast so they took a second lease on this hotel and were doing a very good job with it. It was small and very old Europe.
She took care of the front office and even helped with the housecleaning. He is a gourmet cook and turned out good meals. Their names were Daniel and Rebecca and we got to be good friends with them.
Daniel didn’t speak any English, but Rebecca and Mary became good enough friends that we know a lot of the problems involved in running a hotel. We met a very nice couple from Australia and exchanged email addresses. We plan to stay in touch with them, because if we stay healthy and don’t go broke we plan to go to Australia in the near future.
While we were in the mountains we went to another small town nearby named Puigcerda. We went there looking for a Laundromat. No luck; we haven’t seen a Laundromat since we left Ireland. What we found was a real nice little town with great shops and restaurants.
In the village center is Santa Maria Placa. It is a square with an old bell tower which is all that is left of The Church of Santa Maria. The church was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. The town was founded in 1171 and the bell tower is about that age. Most of the buildings are newer than that but you can tell by the width of the streets and some of the buildings that the city is old.
We had lunch there a couple of days at little outdoor cafes. We really enjoy the local foods and atmosphere. We can usually find a server to help us with the menu if they don’t have an English version.
On Thursday, August 31st we left the mountains and headed for Barcelona. We had planned a blitz of Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon, Portugal. We got to Barcelona mid morning and returned our rental car. We also had to take some time to go shopping. Mary’s digital camera died. It was only a year old and we did not understand why it quit. I told Mary that it was probably only designed to take two million pictures and she had easily exceeded that in the last year. I guess we will get Cannon to look at it when we get back to the US. We then took a city tour on an open topped double-decker bus. About ten o’clock Thursday night we caught a sleeper train and went to Madrid. We arrived there early on Friday morning and spent the day touring and sightseeing in Madrid. At about 11:00 we boarded a sleeper train and went to Lisbon. We arrived in Lisbon early morning and spent the day touring and sightseeing on Saturday. Saturday night we took a sleeper train back to Madrid. On Sunday morning we got a train from Madrid back to Barcelona and had a sleeper scheduled for Sunday night to Torino, Italy. That is a real whirlwind, but the sleeper compartments on the trains are comfortable and they are, in most cases, less expensive than a motel would be. We arrived rested and ready for another day of sightseeing. The only disadvantage to traveling like this is you misses seeing the country between the cities. We enjoy the trip as much as we do getting there.
The first tour we took was in Barcelona and it is a beautiful city. The narrative which was so fast and the Spanish accented English kept me from getting too many of the facts. We have a lot of beautiful pictures, but we are not sure what they are.
I do know that it is a major port on the Mediterranean Sea. Also there are a lot of improvements which came from the Olympics being there a few years back.
The next day in Madrid we were on a tour that had such poor sound on their headphones that we got nothing from it. Again, Madrid is beautiful old city which dates back to 711 AD. There have been a variety of influences on the growth of the city and it has been capitol of Spain since 1516.
It is sometime referred to as the European Jerusalem because of the mix of Christians, Jews and Muslims. Mary and I decided that we will not have much text from those two days so we will just put in a bunch of our favorite pictures.
We had a great tour in Lisbon. At first glance Lisbon appears to be a third world city. It looks ragged, dirty and in bad need of repair. That is the old city. When we got into the newer area of the city it was a lot better looking. We bought a ticket which allowed us to ride the public transportation and the take all the tours which they offered. We rode a city bus down the Plaza de Commerical where the tours were staged, the square was built in the mid 1600 and serves as government offices today.
We first took a Tram tour which was electric and ran on tracks. It covered the old city. It would have been impossible to have used a bus for the tour because of the narrow streets. There were times when a car would park in the street and the tram driver would just have to sit and blow his horn until someone came and moved the car.
As most of the old sections in European cities, the narrow streets open to squares or plazas and the streets have no systematic design, but just ramble in any direction. This situation was made more extreme because of the hills in the city.
They claim, like Rome, to be built on seven hills. The buildings in the old city reflect the many influences on Portugal due to their empire building in their early history. There are Moorish, African, Arab, as well as Spanish styles scattered throughout the city. The neighborhoods are ethnic and the shopping reflects the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood it serves. A lot of the buildings and the side walks have tile siding.
It came from the Moorish influence and is decorative, but it serves well as insulation and is very low maintaince.
There is a section of the old city which has Moorish roots and has provided homes and entertainment for many of the artists, writers and musicians of the culture. AlFama is the name of the area and it is the name given to the music which has come to be identified as the national music of Portugal. Played on a twelve string guitar it has a very distinctive sound.
In 1986 Portugal joined the European Union. Since then billions of dollars have been invested in Portugal and it has gone from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to having the highest economic growth rate of any country in Europe. This more modern economy has benefited Portugal, but it has also widened the gap between the rich and the poor.
Portugal continues to be a sea going nation and Lisbon is a great port, however, in the recent past efforts have been made to develop an industrial economy and shore up the agricultural economy. The difference which has been made by membership in the EU is readily apparent in the construction within the business community in the last twenty years.
In the time we spent in Lisbon there is no way to grasp the culture and the spirit of the city. I believe that Lisbon will continue to rise in the ranks of Capitol cities of the world. We have completed our blitz. We are ready to return to Barcelona so we can get our connection to Torino and spend some time in Italy. We came back from Lisbon on a sleeper train. We arrived in Madrid early on Sunday morning and took a train from there to Barcelona.
This was all country which we had slept through on our trip to Madrid from Barcelona, so we got a chance to see some new country. It is dry and rugged hills and mountains. Any agricultural endeavors were irrigated. There was a considerable amount of farming, especially grapes and fruit trees.
We got back to Barcelona in early afternoon and were not scheduled to leave there until 8:40 that night on a sleeper to Turino in Italy. While we were waiting I set us up in the lobby of the station to do some work on the computer. I piled up some bags and set to work. We took turns working and when it got to be suppertime I went to eat and Mary stayed with the luggage and worked with her pictures. After I had eaten Mary went to eat and I stayed there and worked on my journal.
When Mary came back she was looking for her small carry on bag and it was gone. While I was distracted by the typing of my journal someone came by and lifted Mary’s bag. It had her purse in it so she lost all her ID including her passport. We also lost all of the credit cards, driver’s license, SS card, and even a credit card sized copy of her birth certificate. Needless to say we missed out train to Italy.
It was Sunday before Labor Day so the US Consulate was not open the next day because of the holiday. We had to wait until Tuesday morning to get Mary a new passport, so it was Tuesday night before we got out of Barcelona.
We reconsidered our position and decided that we would not rent a car and go to our timeshare. We called and cancelled our reservation there and made reservations for Wednesday night in Venice and Thursday and Friday nights in Florence. We stayed in a hostel which was a five minute walk from the Consulate. We badly need to do laundry, but we could not find a Laundromat. On the roof terrace there was an outdoor laundry area and Mary did our laundry by hand and hung it on the line. It has been a long time since we did that.
The front edge of the concrete tub was ribbed and made into a rub board, and there was a wash tub and a rinse tub. We had a good time with that. We also had a very pleasant supper of crackers, cheese, fruit and a good pastry, which we bought at a deli up the street.
Barcelona is a beautiful city, but we were glad to get to Italy.
