Getting started: The Holy Week Road Trip, Part II

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

After weeks of planning, the day finally arrived for us to set out on our epic journey. We had class that morning, then Nick and I went by Cafe d'Arthe for breakfast. Eva, my boss, the owner of the bar, and one of the sweetest women I've ever met, gave us good luck Cokes to take on the road. We met up with Andres at Santa Justa Station, across from which was the rental place. We were informed that the car would be 30 minutes late. Typical Spain.

In the meantime, they sold us insurance and tacked on an age-related surcharge, which, combined with the 18% VAT (value-added tax) added more than 100 euros to our bill. Eheu! It's only money!

Finally, the car got there. With only about 15 km on the odometer, we were the first renters to drive it! If only the company knew what we had planned for that beautiful Volkswagen.

The Three Amigos

Unfortunately, I was the only one who had brought luggage to the school that morning, so our first task was to drive to my friends' houses to get their stuff. We couldn't figure out the gearbox or how to get out of the parking lot at first, which was a good start to our 6000 km journey. We finally got out of the lot and into the driving madhouse that is Sevilla. One-way roads change direction without notice. The roads themselves are narrower than my hallway. Rules are more like suggestions. Still, it was our first foray into European driving, and I loved it. We found our way to Nick and Andres' houses, packed up, and finally got onto the road at 4:20PM-- two hours and twenty minutes later than planned, with a ten hour drive ahead of us.

We admired the beautiful Spanish countryside, dotted as they were with Tio Pepe signs.

After four-odd hours of driving, we stopped in Manzanares to stock up on supplies, which mainly consisted of food and sleeping bags

We hit the road again, passing through Valencia around 11PM. We had planned on taking highways during our trip in order to save time, but it was here that we faced the harsh reality of how expensive that would be. Unfortunately, most of the major highways in Europe are toll roads. We paid 25 euro for the relatively short stretch between Valencia and Barcelona. We weren't even a half day into our trip and we had already had a major setback. But improvising is half the fun of shoestring travel, and we were confident we would figure it out. I carried on driving for another hour or so after Valencia before handing off the wheel and taking a nap in the backseat.

Around 2:30AM, we pulled off the highway into a little Catalan seaside town-- probably Sitges, but I didn't write it down. We found our way to the beach, laid out our flimsy sleeping bags on the sand, and fell asleep to the sound of the Mediterranean.

"You're not going to see anything!": The Holy Week Road Trip, Part I

Before we get started with the nitty-gritty of the trip itself, it would probably be helpful to those of you reading if I gave some background to this trip of ours.

I studied in Spain during the spring semester. Because I was at an official campus of Texas Tech, we generally followed the academic schedule of the folks back home in Lubbock. The one major exception was that we didn't get spring break. In Spain, Holy Week is a national holiday and the whole country, it seems, takes off. So we traded one week's vacation for another.

Anyone who knows me well knows I love to take road trips. I actually enjoyed the 9-hour cross-Texas trip I had to make anytime I went home to Houston or came back to school. My family has taken road trips every year for longer than I've been alive. When people around campus started discussing plans for Holy Week-- flying to Amsterdam or Ireland, etc.-- I knew immediately that I wanted to take advantage of the long break to see some of Europe by car.

Fortunately, I was able to find two other guys who enjoyed road trips as much as I did: Andres Murguia and Nick Maxwell. Both of them jumped at the idea of taking a week-long, multi-country marathon of a trip. We did our due diligence about driving regulations, found out that it was actually really cheap to rent a car, and got to work planning the trip. We came up with a nine country, nine day tour that would cover around 4000km. Below is the general outline (starting in Seville at the southern end of Spain and going counter-clockwise).

We printed out a ton of Google maps for each day of the trip and bought several country-specific maps to help us navigate.

As the day for our trip approached, I was both extremely excited and very nervous. It was a dream trip, to be sure. But setting out on such a long journey on a continent that you're not familiar with, that you've never driven in, where you don't speak most of the languages-- is pretty intimidating. We weren't the only ones anxious about this plan. My mom was beside herself with worry. Most of our classmates thought a 4000km road trip was their idea of hell. But the people whose criticisms I'll always remember best were those of the professors. The center director, Dr. Inglis, sat us down and told us that we were headed for certain disaster. We'd never be able to make our checkpoints in the allotted time. We'd be driving all day, get to our destination tired, and have to wake up the next morning and do it again. There was no way we could keep up that kind of schedule. We'd get lost. We'd get stranded. We'd drive off a cliff.

And worst of all, we wouldn't see anything anyway.

His challenge (that's exactly what it was!) was enough to push any second thoughts I had out of my mind.

A long-delayed update

It's difficult to believe how long ago it was that I left Texas to study for a semester in Spain. It'll be three years ago next month that I returned. Since then, I graduated college, moved to Houston, started medical school, and married the beautiful woman who put up with four months of trans-Atlantic dating for me.

I set out with the best intentions for this blog. It would be part travelogue, part mini-course on Spanish language, literature, and culture. But the burden of keeping up with the blog started to take away from time experiencing Spain and it fell into neglect. I wasn't exactly making a living blogging so its abrupt end probably went unnoticed by all save my immediate family and a handful of others. I thought about it from time to time, about how I needed to at least make a post explaining that I wasn't going to be blogging anymore if for nothing else than a sense of closure. I just never got around to it.

What made me log back on today for the first time in years was watching the series The Long Way Round on Netflix. It chronicles Ewan McGregor and his friend as they travel around the world on their motorcycles. It's a fascinating show that I highly recommend. In one of the scenes, they're getting an impromptu tour of an old Soviet coal mine by some probable mobsters in Ukraine. They hold up a nugget of coal to prove that, yes, it's a real coal mine. Go figure. I thought, "well that would be a neat souvenir." And then considered the problem of collecting physical objects during such a trip with limited space.

I don't get philosophical much anymore (those days spent talking about nothing at all for course credit are behind me, for better or worse), but I considered the idea that the best possible souvenir they could have from this trip is this series that keeps their memories of their journey so sharp in their minds. My parents were the first ones to point out to me that when you take a trip, you're not really paying for the trip itself; you're paying for the memories. Any time I want, I can go back to Spain, or Alaska, or Boston, or any of the wonderful places I've been lucky enough to see over the years.

Which brings me back to this blog. Although I hope that a few of you have gotten some enjoyment out of reading about the things I did in Spain, I've realized that it wasn't ever really for y'all. It was to keep my experiences sharp in my own mind, so that I could revisit them any time I wanted.

Although I had many more great times in Spain during the few months I was there beyond the end of this blog, what I really want to do over the next few days is chronicle a side trip that I took over Holy Week with two buddies of mine. In a lot of ways, it was my own Long Way Round. A few of us taking a ridiculously ambitious trip through a continent that we didn't know with a travel plan that we were told in unequivocal terms was crazy and would likely get us killed. But what a journey it was. We didn't have the luxury of a full time camera crew and production staff to record our journey, but I do have several pages of notes from the trip that I've kept in my backpack for the last three years. It's time that I make them a bit more permanent.

So with that, I hope that those of you reading will get some enjoyment out of these next few posts. I know I will.

Excursion to Madrid pt. III

From Toledo, we drove straight through Madrid to Segovia, a small medieval town in the mountains just outside of the capital. The main thing the school was concerned with us seeing here was the incredible Roman aqueduct, which is one of the most significant Roman remnants on the Iberian peninsula. And indeed, it was impressive. Too big to get into one picture, but a quick Google search will give you a good idea about the immensity of the structure.

Although the aqueduct is the most significant thing in Segovia from an historical and educational standpoint, what I was most looking forward to was the legendary restaurant right next to it, El Meson de Candido, and its specialty: roast suckling pig. The pigs are roasted whole, with some of the entrails removed (but not all-- I stumbled upon a kidney in my section). Traditionally, Candido himself comes out with the pigs arranged on platters, cuts them into sections using a dinner plate, makes a speech, and smashes the plate. The other room got to see this, but alas, I guess they were running low on plates that day and our room didn't get the pleasure. What we DID get, however, was one of the top five meals of my life.

Hunter, shown in the picture, and I ordered the suckling pig. My other two friends at the table ordered baby goat, which was also quite good. But you just can't beat roast baby pig. Crispy skin, tender, juicy meat. Paired with a good house wine and followed by the best dessert I've ever had (the "house special dessert", which I later found out is also know as a segoviano) and a fantastic cafe con leche, and there you have it. The atmosphere was great too. The inn (meson means inn in Spanish) has been around since the 1700's, and Candido, who ran it for sixty years before he died in the 1990's, became a legend of Segovia. He was officially recognized by the king as being "the greatest inn-keeper in all of Castilla-Leon", which is the autonomous community (like a state) in which the inn is located. We didn't realize it until towards the end when we got commemorative pamphlets that his son, also named Candido, had been our waiter the whole time! Naturally we went and asked him if we could get a picture with him. "A picture? No. Many pictures!" was his reply.

The purple sash he's wearing is an honor bestowed upon him by the king. Such a nice guy. If I ever come back to Segovia, Candido's will be my first stop. Because we spent so much time eating (true Spanish form), we barely had any time to check out Segovia's other major attraction: the Alcázar of Segovia, perhaps better known to Americans as the castle that inspired the Disney castle.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Exterior_Alcazar_Segovia.jpg

After jogging through the castle (great views of the surrounding countryside and cool sets of armor), we made it back to the bus just in time.

From Segovia, we finally went to Madrid, where we checked into our hotel. We had been given a list of possible things to see in Madrid, since there were no required group outings. Along with the list of sites to see, we got a list of restaurants we might be interested in. We decided to try one of them, El Rey de los Tallarines, or "Noodle King", that night. Some might criticize us for eating Chinese food in Madrid, but one has to remember that we'd been eating Spanish food for two and a half months at this point, and anyway this restaurant hand makes their noodles, which is something I wanted to see. Didn't disappoint. Plate of noodles for less than ten euro, can't beat it with a stick.

Y'all are probably sick of hearing about food, but I'm hungry at the moment and we had some fantastic food on this trip. The next morning, we headed to el Mercado de San Miguel, which some of you may remember from the post about my first day in Spain.

We snacked and bought some food for later in the day. Earlier when I said that all our time in Madrid was free, well, that was true as far as it went. But during our first full day in Madrid, we took an excursion to another town to see El Escorial, one of Spain's largest palaces, and a popular day trip from the capital.

The palace is much too large to get into one shot with my camera. Here's a distant view of the place I found on the internet to give you an idea of the size:

Despite its outer grandeur, however, the inside is really pretty austere as palaces go. In addition to serving as a royal residence, it is also the tomb of every Spanish monarch, save two, since the 1500's. The twenty-six marble tombs line the walls of a circular room inside the palace. Pictures were forbidden, but I managed to get a shot inside.

Bad picture, but there was a guide watching us and it was dark, and of course I couldn't use a flash. Impressive place, but I was really looking forward to getting back to exploring Madrid.

The next day was our only full day of free time in Madrid, as we were due to take the Ave (Spain's high-speed train) to Sevilla the next morning. So, we started bright and early with the Palacio Real, Spain's answer to Buckingham Palace.