A Day in Grenada as Seville Draws to a Close

 

We have a lot to do today to get ready for tomorrow so I will keep this short. Tomorrow we start walking!

The weather here is a bit cooler than expected. Warm enough in the daytime in Seville, but cooler at night and definitely jacket weather for me at about 10-12 degrees.

Yesterday Barb and I did a day tour to Granada to see the Alahambra. We got off to a rude start when my alarm failed me (in truth, I failed it with an a.m. / p.m. Shift) and when we rushed off to catch our bus I had left my tour voucher in the room! Fortunately the vouchers really are redundant - the man has a list of names - so no big deal. We climbed onto the bus and napped the 3 hours to Grenada.

It was rainy and much colder in Grenada. It is at a higher elevation and the the morning was damp and quite windy, so not pleasant to wander around. But it was well worth the journey and braving the elements.

 

The Alahambra definitely lived up to its reputation! It is actually a whole walled city with 3 different castles inside! It is a wonder and is so beautiful in the intricacy of the design and finishing details. I was amazed to be standing in the room where Christopher Columbus received the money from Queen Isabella to finance his first expedition to find the New World! I will write more later about our trip for sure!

 

It poured rain as we left the Alahambra but that was short lived and the sun came out for the afternoon. A nice meal and some wine fortified us for the return journey home to our hostel, where Ian, who has now arrived to join our little walking group, had dinner waiting!

What a view of Granada from the walls of the Alahambra which is on the mountainside above!

Today we mail our "non Camino" things to the end point at Santiago de Compostela and get our backpacks and "Credentials" ready as tomorrow is day 1 of the walk. I also have to collect my iPhone from the repair shop - somehow it became "un-jailbroken" prior to my leaving Toronto and I had to get that done again so that the Spanish sim card I bought will work. Unlimited data for only 8 Euros a month! Nice because the mapping/locating features in the Camino app i have work best with connectivity.

 

The Grand Tour of Europe

OK, now I am safely installed in a comfy seat of a Boeing 777-300 ER aircraft heading for Frankfurt enroute to Madrid, Spain. I will post this blog when I get to Frankfurt, asuming that they have free wifi.

This huge air bus is quite a step up from the smaller aircraft I came home from Cuba in. There are extra comfy seats and a personal viewing screen with a large movie selection at my beck and call. The attendant announced that there would be a dinner seved and a "morning" muffin and coffee service in the early hours of the morning before we landed. Lots to do to fill in the 7 hour flight. Most importantly, there are two power outlets above the tray table - a USB and a 110. I won't run out of juice and I play with my electronic toys. I got my early morning blog published while at the airport (thanks to Pearson's free wifi) and spent the remaining time with last minute emails.

Now that we are at cruising altitude of 33,000 ft, want to tell you what got me thinking of Europe for my "Part 2".

Approximately 350 years ago the idea of travelling for the sake of curiosity and learning developed and spread widely. The idea reached its highest peak in the 19th century as travel became more accessible and in particlular in Great Britain where there was a great deal of interest in the continent and classic culture. The travel was called Grand Tour and according to the Oxford English Dictionary the first recorded use of the term was by Richard Tassels in his book An Italian Voyage (1670). The historian Edward Gibson on the outset of one of his Grand Tours remarked: “According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman”.

Young and rich English men, starting from the second half of the 17th century and further on the 18th and 19th centuries, often spent two to four years travelling around Europe in an effort to broaden their horizons and learn about language, architecture, geography, history and culture in general. It was commonly undertaken in company of a knowledgeable guide or tutor and provided not only a liberal education but became a symbol of wealth and freedom.

So where dos that leave me? When I finished high school I was really anxious to finish formal education and start living life. I didn't consider taking a few years to travel.

So I went to a community college and trained as a computer programmer and started working for a living. I didn't feel it important to take a few years off to travel. Now I wish I had. But all is well that ends well and now I have that opportunity.

I can't afford to take off for 2 to 4 years, but I have worked really hard in the last two and saved enough to travel for 6 months. I have given a lot of thought about how the next 30 or so years of my life will unfold, God willing. I am not going to live what might be a conventional golden years. No, I will work a lot longer than would be expected - ok, by the time Harper gets though with us we will all be working through our 70s anyway. So instead of early retirement, we will all be faced with late retirement. I for one have decided to alter the equation. I will work for a few years and then take some time off to travel or to write or to do something meaningful with my life. I can probably do this 6 or 8 times in the next 15. This sabbatical is only the first installment of what I hope to be a regular feature in the years to come.

Stay tuned maybe I will get another blog posted during the next leg of my flight. I am waiting now for my connecting flight to Madrid from Frankfurt.

Insomnia at GopherBroke

Today we set off for Spain. I am traveling with my dear friend Barb McCowan and so came up here yesterday so we could set off together to catch the 5:30 p.m. flight. Everything is packed (more or less) and there are just a few last minute things for me to do. I thought I would sleep until 7 a.m. or so but some how my brain thought otherwise and I find myself awake at 4:30 a.m. It was a dream that woke me up - you know, one of those "made for TV" drama type dreams. I was a cop and there was a serial killer on the loose. I woke up when I got to the part when my partner and I found a clue which suggested that I might be the killer's next target. I gave up trying to go back to sleep after tossing and turning for an hour. I wonder what that dream is supposed to mean?

I am quite excited about my trip. It is part 2 of my 6 month sabbatical journey. Having successfully put Part 1 behind me I am anxious to resume my gypsy ways after my 10 day "refueling stop" at home. Next is 90 days travelling through Europe - 50 days in Spain, 16 days in France and 24 days in Italy to be precise. A lot of traveling and a lot of travel arrangements because by nature (and profession) I am a planner and I did all the planning myself. No "I will figure it out when I get there" for me! So I have carefully researched destinations to decide the cities I want to see and places to stay and things to do and the route to take. Let me give you the "Reader's Digest version.

Seville, Spain for 4 nights to do some sight seeing and to get in the right headspace to walk across Spain. Going to take a day trip to Granada to see the Alahambra. Barb and I will be joined in Seville by the 3rd member of our little expedition, Ian Royce.

Yes, I said WALK ACROSS SPAIN! It is called The Camino aka The Way of Saint Jaimes. We set off on April 15th following this ancient pilgrimage route leading to the official final resting spot for the bones of St James the Apostle. Each year hundreds of thousands of pilgrims or Peregrinos (as we will be called) follow the many routes in Europe which all lead to Santiago de Compostela. The route we are taking, called the Via de la Plata or Silver Route will send us pretty much straight north for about 700 km at which point we can continue on this route west or head a bit further north to join the Frances Route For the final 300 km to our final destination. We will need to average about 25 km per day to keep to our timetable. Barb is going to fly home at this point with lots of stories to tell Johnny when she gets there. Ian is the wild card. I hear he will finish his Camino wandering a wee bit earlier than Barb and I so that he can spend a week in Barcelona. I will fly from Santiago de Compostela to Barcelona on May 30th.

1. I will spend 2 nights in Barcelona before taking a scenic train through the Pyrenes Mountains to Toulouse, France and then on to Bordeaux on June 1st.
2. I have for 2 nights pencilled in Bordeaux to do a winery tour and hopefully hook up with some "friends of friends" for a meal. A fast TGV train will take me to Paris on June 3rd.
3. Paris will be fun. I have rented an apartment in the 4th arr. which is right in the heart of Paris near the right bank of the River Seine. Three of my adult children will be joining me for a week of sight seeing. We will even steal away for a day trip to see the D-Day Beaches at Normandy! The kids fly home on June 11th.
4. Next I have 2 unplanned nights. I expect that I will leave Paris on the 11th and spend some time in Burgundy in either Beaune or Dijon, but in any case I need to be on my way to the French Alps - Chamonix/Mont Blanc for the 13th.
5. I am staying in Chamonix for 3 nights and am really looking forward to seeing the Mer de Glacé Glacier and taking the cable car to see the the highest peak in the Alps. The cable car travels over the Alps to the Italian side, so I may be able to get to the next destination from the Italian Alps side. The train route doesn't look promising so I will have to see.
6. I arrive in Cinque Terra, Italy on June 16th for 3 nights. The 5 hillside villages are famous for their views of the Mediterranean and the picturesque, colorful houses built on the sloping ground from the sea up to the National Park they border. The walking paths and the train ride connecting the 5 villages is what folks come for.
7. On June 19th I will take a train to Pisa, see the sights for a couple of hours and then carry on to Florence where I will be for 4 nights to see the city sights and the Tuscan countryside.
8. On June 23rd I will take the fast ave train to Venice. The next morning I will join a small tour group for a 15 day tour of the rest of Italy including Gubbio, Assisi, Spello, Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Sorrento and Almalfi Coast including Positano and Amalfi Villages. At tours end, on July 8th I will make my way back to Rome for my flight home on July 9th.

You might have noticed that the picture didn't upload when I loaded this at first, then the whole blog disappeared for a day - evidence that i am somewhat challenged by my blooging tools. But now (I hope) the whole thing is going to upload.

October 17, 2012 - Update:
I am revisiting all my blogs and fixing them up - some have somehow lost their pictures and many contain small typing errors due to my haste in posting while on the road.  I fixed this blog and replaced the missing picture today.

Cuba Bound

Bags packed and repacked, last minute details looked after in a flurry of this and that, the sigh must have been audible all the way down to my lobby as I settled into bed last night.  Now I sit snugly ensconced in my window seat aboard my Copa Airlines flight enroute to Cuba via Panama and finally I am able to put fingers to keypad and compose a few lines.  

Firstly, let me apologize a bit in advance for the visual aspects of the blogs I will be putting together in this next 6 weeks.  This one might not be too bad, I am using a new bogging app called Blogsie which has let me copy some pictures from my photo album on my iPad to add visual interest and I have chosen some photos I had taken on a previous trip, but not knowing this app very well I can't seem to find a way to size them smaller. Addenda: notice that I figured that out?

I am going to try and find some connectivity at the airport in Panama to upload this blog, blogging will be much more difficult when I get to Cuba and the speeds too slow for any pictures to be uploaded.  I am wondering if these pictures may be too much to upload in Panama as well and I might just need to delete them if I have difficulty.  If you are reading this blog posted from Panama and there are no pictures you know what happened.  

Cuba is another matter.  No pictures for sure. Infrastructure in Cuba is just not able to support fast connections, with the US embargo they are not able to deal with US companies nor are they able to connect to the good old www via the States.  Also, no wifi and no USB and a meter on the Internet cafe computer means I will need to retype my compositions using the Spanish keyboard - tedious for sure! The Cuban Convertible Pesos are pegged to the US dollar so at 6 CUC per 30 min, unless you compose in advance and type quickly blogging can get expensive.  So you will need to excuse my terse, poorly worded in haset blogs of the next 6 weeks while I am in Cuba.  I don't intend on spending much time in my room composing blogs, just time to sketch out the briefest accounts - the details will need to wait!

Yesterday was not one of my finest. I usually try and squeeze too much into my days and since my last day at the office on Wednesday, I bet I set a personal best for 6 days of constant "get things done" activity.  My to do list, which lately has been a small spiral bound dog eared notebook, has pages of items checked off from these last few days.  The bigger problem was the unplanned items which sucked up time.   Too little time and so much to do! I regret not taking up that last minute late afternoon coffee date offer yesterday - who know maybe he was my Prince Charming? No, better not open that box of candy when there is an early morning flight to catch and you are not yet packed!  

• Like the ill fated trip to Canada Computes, which is the best computer parts store among the 20 or so along that College Street strip just south of the University.  I left without getting the netbook battery I desperately needed and a $450 parking ticket to add to the aggravation!   A costly lesson in paying attention to things outside my immediate focus.   What looks like a parking spot by the road markings and line of parked cars on either side might instead be a loading zone.  Note to self: going forward you will alway check what the sign says not just a red circled   "P".  
• Like the frantic, last minute emails between my Collingwood tenant regarding her difficulties with paying rent now that she has a restraining order on the boyfriend who had previously ponied up half the rent and who also was requesting to have his name taken off the lease. 
  
• Like the doomed effort to resurrect my old netbook, with a good battery but nothing else good about it. I gave up when iCloud proclaimed that it did not support my browser and I was running the most recent version which was upwardly compatible with the OS, lowly XP, which powered this little grannie.  I resigned myself to be tethered to power when I need my net book. Not that much of a hardship as I also am bringing my iPad.
• Like the late night run to the bank to deposit my new home HST rebate check which had arrived in the mail and was forgotten in the frenzy of activity until I noticed it when clearing out my wallet.  
• Like the urgent exchange of calls with The Bank call centre agent regarding the RESP withdrawal I was trying to make for my daughter who is in her 1st year of Ryerson.  It seems I needed to send proof that she had enrolled in 10 hours of courses per week last semester or I could only pull $5,000 out instead of the full balance of $5,188.  
• 
  

With only a few things not as I would have preferred, the dead battery on my net book being one of them, I had everything prepared for my departure about midnight last night.  After popping open the little teeny bottle of bubbly - I think it was all of 250 ml - I raised a glass in toast of my adventure to come, set my alarm for 4:30 a.m. and was instantly asleep.  

Everything was laid out and ready to go, which was a good thing cuz next thing I knew the phone was ringing and my airport limo driver announced he was in the lobby!   I had requested a wake up call - which somehow was not delivered.  What happened to my alarm is a mystery, maybe I slept through it or perhaps I succumbed to the old am/pm mix up, I don't know.  As I realized that I had 10 minutes to get to the lobby before the $39 per hour wait time rule kicked in for the limo driver, I sprung into action. I was in the cab 5 minutes later. Sure pays to be organized.

Not to let you think it was all work and no play in this last week, I did do the rounds of goodbye events and visitations.  

• My office mates gave me a bang up party on Thursday night.  I was given a compass with my boss's business card glued on, so I could find my way back after my travels.  
• Friday I took my folks on a road trip to visit my brother out Lake Huron way.  
• Saturday I trucked up to Gopher Broke Farm and we had a great evening of sing along to the great duo stylings of Johnny and Davey.  Davey had fallen in love with a red head who let him play her strings like it was their first and only night together.  This is a bit of an inside joke  as the red head is an electric  guitar leant to him for the night by our 83 year old friend Beba who is a country neighbor of Barb and John's.  It is a treasured remembrance from her now long dead brother and quite the prize as far as Davey is concerned.  He has been given permission to borrow it for the evening anytime he comes up to Barb and John's. I guess he will be a frequent visitor.  He is infatuated with the gal.  When he was questioned as to why he thought the guitar feminine he could only say "How can she not be - she is so wonderful to hold!"
• Sunday, Barb and I walked over to Beba' place, which is 5 files away and is a standard part of our training to walk the Spanish Camino in April. It was great to visit Beba, who was a bit laid up having sprained her ancle a while back.
• I rushed back into the city to attend Sunday night's bon voyage family dinner party and we did a French wine tasting in honor of the Paris leg of my trip, where I will be joined by 3 (and perhaps even 4) of my adult children.  I walked half the way home from the Beaches before I packed it in and jumped on to the King streetcar after feeling a hot spot on my heel start to develop from my winter boots.
  

Monday and Tuesday was all about the to do list as you already know.  

But enough of the minutia of my left behind life, which I will now refer to as B.S. - before sabbatical.  But I will start that tale in the next blog, which may or may not be finished in time to post when I get to Panama.

As the plane heads down beneath the clouds toward Panama city and I have gotten this blog finished, it feels like my to do list is complete.  What next?  Havana!

 

Dreaming, Planning and Training

On  Training Walk with my friend Barb who will be Walking with me through Spain on the Camino

Watch in the coming days for the first few blogs on my new travel blog site. I have spent a great deal of time planning my Cuba, Spain, France and Italy itineraries. I have been busy for months checking out travel routes, lodgings, points of interest and researching equipment to take on a 1,000 KM trek not to mention chipping away at my trekking training program for the last few months. Lots to do.  So I was really not able to spend time writing blogs - until now.  Today was my last day at work!

Next Wed I head off for Cuba.  I plan to write a few blogs to describe my trip plans and trekking equipment before I leave, so check back between now and then to get some updates.

I have discovered that the University of Havana intakes new Spanish Languages students the first Monday of each month.  So after a couple of weeks of R & R beachside in Varadero and treking a bit through Cuba, during the month of March I will be taking a 4 week language course in Havana. 

For the European leg of my holiday, 7 weeks will be spent in Spain walking the Camino, or Pilgrims Trail, via the Via de la Plata route.  After that I will hop over to Barcelona for a wee visit and then travel through  France and Italy for the remaining 6 weeks. One can only remain in the EU for 90 days in each 180 day period and long term visas seem impossible to get. So I will return to Canada at that point and take a road trip to the East Coast which should leave me enough time to find and bond with my new dog before I am back to work in September.

I had a great feeling of satisfaction today as I finished off the last of the work I had on my plate and cleaned out my desk of several years of clutter.  I still have a fair amount to do in the next week before leaving, but there is an equal measure of goodbye parties and visits to break up all the little chores which need to be completed.

I really enjoy music and like to choose music to go with my blogs. My all time favorite traveling song is by a Canadian - Tom Cochrane. When I hear this song I want to hop into my Convertible and head out onto the highway. Well, that will have to be for next summer when I will tour the East Coast.


Life is a Highway
Written by Tom Cochrane, from his 1991 album Mad Mad World.

Life's like a road that you travel on
When there's one day here and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend and sometimes you stand
Sometimes you turn your head to the wind
There's a world outside ev'ry darkened door
Where blues won't haunt you anymore
Where brave are free and lovers soar
Come ride with me to the distant shore
We won't hesitate
Break down the garden's gate
There's not much time left today

Life is a highway
I wanna ride it all night long
If you're going my way
I wanna drive it all night long

Through all these cities and all these towns
It's in my blood and it's all around
I love you now like I loved you then
This is the road and these are the hands
From Mozambique to those Memphis nights
The khyber Pass to Vancouver's lights

Knock me down get back up again
You're in my blood
I'm not a lonely man
There's no load I can't hold
Road so rough this I know
I'll be there when the light comes in
Just tell 'em we're survivors

Gimme gimme gimme gimme yeah
If you're going my way
I wanna drive it all night long
There was a distance between you and I
A misunderstanding once
But now we look in the eye

There ain't no load that I can't hold
Road so rough this I know
I'll be there when the light comes in
Just tell 'em we're survivors

Life is a highway
I wanna ride it all night long
If you're going my way
I wanna drive it all night long

source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/