Europe

We were just a little bit excited with the idea of taking 10 weeks to escape to Spain and avoid the end of the Canadian winter. First stop, Barcelona!

If you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re pretty big Gaudi fans. So when we learned that the city of Barcelona has recently opened a new Gaudi building to the public, we knew we’d need to add this to our itinerary: Casa Vicens.

Sitges is a lovely seaside town about an hour south of Barcelona. And remember, ‘Sitges’ rhymes with ‘Peaches’.

It’s hard to do justice to Las Fallas, the incredible Valencian festival, in a single blog post. There are many activities that go on during the festival, from paella competitions to music concerts, local bands to street performers. But like a drumbeat underscoring everything is the constant sound of fireworks.

After the sensory overload of Valencia we head southwest into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, to explore the rich Islamic history of the Andalusian region with our first stop of Granada.

Our time living in the UK has meant that the mere mention of the city of Málaga or the Costa del Sol was enough to send shivers of ‘tourist nastiness’ down our spines. Images of European tourists (well, truthfully, Brits on holiday) and stag / hen weekends quickly came to mind.

At its peak Córdoba was the second-largest city in Europe, and a world leading centre of education and learning. By far its most famous remaining landmark is the truly spectacular Mezquita-Catedral, or Mosque-Cathedral.

After the slow pace of Andalucia, it was a bit of a shock to suddenly be thrust back into the hubbub of a big city again. We arrived in Madrid to find the sidewalks jammed and every outdoor café bursting with people.

From Madrid the plan was to head North to the Basque region. Since we’d been city-hopping a bit, we decided to break the trip up with a few days in a small town in the wine region of La Rioja.

Bilbao: We’re in Basque country now, where everything is written in a font that looks remarkably like Asterix and Obelix and the letters X and Q appear way more often than our English-speaking tongues can fathom.

Our last few weeks in Spain we planned to spend in relaxation mode. A few days in the Pyrenees mountains followed by two full weeks at a small cove beach in Costa Brava (NE Spain, near the French border). It absolutely delivered.