Spain (unfinished)

Spanish Trip

We were facing a very long trip on the first day. In the first place, USAir had suddenly switched from Orly to Charles de Gaulle Airport, which meant an hour longer on the road to get around Paris. In the second place, there had been a slight misunderstanding on the dates: we thought we were leaving on the 11th and arriving in France on the 12th and accordingly had made reservations in the Dordogne Valley for the 13th. We expected to stay near Paris, possibly in Chartres, on the 12th. When our tickets arrived, however, we were leaving on the 12th. This meant a seven-hour drive to the Dordogne after a night on the plane with no sleep.

The Hotel Bonnet in Beynac was our goal. We had stayed there the year before and loved the town and the inn. After I had written them, the young woman co-manager called to tell me that they really weren’t open until the 14th—Good Friday—but that they would be happy to give us a room anyway. We would just have to eat elsewhere.

We actually managed to get out of de Gaulle, around Paris, and all the way to the back roads into Beynac without getting lost, which was both unusual for us and a very good thing considering our tired state. The hotel staff greeted us happily, taking our arrival as a great joke since they had all the dining room chairs piled in the lobby for a fresh coat of shellac and drop cloths all over the stairs. But our room was fine, and after a nap we walked down the road along the riverbank to the main part of the village for dinner. They gave us the hotel key in case we arrived back after they had gone to bed, and told us to just  drop it in the desk drawer. We had a delicious meal at the other hotel, sitting at the same table shown in Rick Steves’ “Travels in Europe” on PBS, and were back long before the shellacking was finished.

The next morning we headed for Albi. Yes, this was supposed to be a trip to Spain, but we got a bit sidetracked. We had to stop in one small town to ask for directions, and I was longing for a video camera — Don and two Frenchmen waving their arms and the map for a good ten minutes while the men argued with each other and finally pointed him in the right direction. On the way we detoured into a marvelous bastide town (we tend to collect bastides) we’d never heard of up on a hill—a wonderful place, but I can’t remember its name. It was about this time that we realized that we should have brought a couple of our French guidebooks. We were flying blind.

We found Albi, though not quite by the road we had intended, and enjoyed a visit to the cathedral. Part of it, of course, was under scaffolding—we have decided the world is under scaffolding. It is strange to see a cathedral of brick, and this one is very odd-looking anyway. The inside was amazing. I don’t think I had ever been there, and Don didn’t remember the inside if he had been there. We found a nice little secluded square for an outdoor lunch near the cathedral and then headed for Carcassonne.

Our visit to Carcassonne would have been much easier if we had known that the town refers on its signs to the old fortress town as “Le Cité.” We could see the medieval walls but couldn’t find instructions to get there. Finally we walked into an old hotel—rundown but formerly extremely elegant—and got both a room and instructions on walking to Le Cité.

The castle/town was marvelous once you got past the crush of tourist traps just inside the gates. We walked all over the ramparts and saw everything there was to see, and then stopped in a little square for a beer and to rest our feet. Then back into the new town for dinner at a place called “Le Rolls” and bed.

The next day we actually went to Spain. It is amazing to cruise right through the gates that formerly stopped everyone at the borders. No passport check, no stopping at all. The ride through the coastal section near the Pyrenees was incredibly beautiful. But then we stayed on the old road along La Costa Brava, and got the full flavor of overbuilding of a resort area—highrises, junk, traffic, and tiny views of the sea every now and then.

We rolled into Barcelona intending to head for the Tourist Information Office to get a hotel. Despite having two maps, we had some trouble finding the major street it was on (largely because the major street we were on wasn’t on the maps). We finally, after asking directions, found the street and found the address. The office was closed. Permanently. No forwarding address, no sign in the window.

Okay, there was another one listed near Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. Back we went the way we had come. Finally parked, thinking we had missed it, but when I got out of the car there were the towers of the church a block away, looming over the trees. So I got back in and we headed there.

Well, at least we got to see Sagrada Familia. I regret to say that neither of us liked it at all.  Up close it loses all the fairy-tale sandcastle quality of the photos and just looks overdone and vulgar. It rather reminded us of the incredible grotto we had seen next to a Catholic church in Dickeyville, Wisconsin, with bits of glass and tiles and stuff pushed into the concrete. And there was no tourist information office to be found anywhere within blocks.

By then the only hotel we had seen was the Ritz, a little out of our league, and we could see that one of the hotels in the Baedeker was on a major road that we could actually locate—the Avenida Diagonal. So we went there, even though it was well out of the historical area where we had wanted to stay. We were now beginning to realize that as well as needing French guidebooks we needed more than the one Spanish Baedeker and the Karen Brown we had with us. We usually have a whole assortment and learn from each one—they fill in each other’s gaps.

After registering, we set off to walk to the Gothic Quarter and Las Ramblas. It was quite a hike, but straightforward. We found the cathedral and some nice areas, and also found ourselves in the midst of the Paseo. It seemed that everyone in Barcelona—families with kids, old people, teenagers, everyone—was walking along in the area. We were fascinated, and kept walking along with them. A couple of blocks from the waterfront we spotted a great square—La Plaza Real—surrounded by stately 18th-century buildings, and we detoured into it. A good place for a couple of beers, which were most welcome at that point. A strange mix of parents with children, business people, and an extremely dirty group of young people with guitars and bedrolls who clearly had not seen a bathtub or a laundry for several months. We finally left there and walked the rest of the way to the waterfront, where the giant Christopher Columbus monument sits in the center of a roundabout.

We walked back in the general direction of our hotel, but found ourselves in a somewhat unsavory area and detoured slightly in what we thought was the direction we had come down on. “I’ll be glad when we get out of this old Gothic twisty stuff and back to the grid,” said Don confidently.

We got to the grid—at a corner. One street led off on a diagonal to the left, another to the right. The sun had set. We had no idea whether we should go left or right, and none of the visible street signs matched anything on our map. We went into a shop and I asked the young woman there. Neither she nor anyone in the store could figure out the map. They finally agreed that we should take the left-hand street, so we did. And walked, and walked, and walked. None of the street signs seemed to look the same as the ones we had seen on the way down. Finally I stopped a young man getting out of a car and asked for the Avenida Diagonal. He pointed us toward the right, but he was very agitated about it. “Es muy lejos, muy lejos!” he kept saying—It’s very far, very far! Apparently we had gone in the wrong direction for miles. So off we went again. And walked, and walked. I asked a lady at a bus stop. “Straight ahead,” she said—I think. Asking questions in my limited Spanish is easy, but understanding the answers is not. A few blocks further I asked a couple of men walking toward us, and they assured me that it was only a block away. I feigned collapsing with relief and they laughed. Indeed, some five miles or so after we had started we were back at the hotel, whose restroom was most welcome. I had been desperate. We went across the street and had a fashionably late dinner of vegetarian pizza in a family restaurant.

The next morning we actually found the Mies Barcelona pavilion without undue difficulty. It is really lovely. We hung around for a bit gazing at it and being amused by the contrast between it and the very ornate tower—Victorian era, I think—right behind it.

Making up the trip as we went along, we headed for Murcia. It was supposed to be a nice town, it wasn’t too far, and it had a good cathedral. Of course, we got lost. In the first place, we came into town from the opposite direction from what we expected, so we went from the old town into the new across the river and then had to reverse and go back to the old town. Then we tried to find the tourist information agency. There was a sign pointing to it and the cathedral down a street. We turned on the street. No tourist agency, no cathedral, no further signs. Back to try again—different fork of the road, same result. Don was getting testy.

Purely by accident, we spotted one of the hotels on our list. We stopped, and I went in. The young woman at the desk had her back to me and was chattering away on the phone in Spanish. She hung up, turned to me, and said “Yes?” Now there I was, in black turtleneck and black slacks, no sunglasses—how did she know I spoke English? We got a room—surprisingly cheap, since it looked a bit pricey.

Out for our walk. Surely now we could find the cathedral and the tourist agency, on foot. Same sign, same road. Into the depths of the old town, around and around. We found the bull ring, with much excitement around it. We saw innumerable families all dressed up with the children in costumes of vaguely biblical nature who had clearly come from the cathedral. It was Easter Sunday. We went around what we thought was every possible street, with map in hand. Finally, in desperation, I asked an elderly couple in a little park. They not only pointed us in the right direction, but were very interested in where we were from, so we struggled through a brief conversation.

The road we were on led around the back of the cathedral. It is a funny building—the back is exposed, but buildings close it off so that the side entrances and the front are on different streets. A certain amount of visual confusion was cleared up when Don realized that the photograph in Jim’s Baedeker was printed backwards. Unfortunately, our delay in finding it meant that all the festivities had just ended, so we didn’t get to see anything but empty folding chairs out front and people leaving. We strolled about and found a nice long public park with refreshment places alongside, and sat down for a beer or two. Our nice young waiter told us we should really stay until Tuesday, when the grand festival would take place.

Of course once we had found the cathedral all roads seemed to lead to it—except, of course, the road that had the sign pointing to it. We passed it at least four times in our further walking. Dinner, I blush to say, was at a Pizza Hut just across the river—there were no restaurants open except for hotels because of the holiday.