With the car stuffed to the gills with everything we might want for a summer of fun we took off on Canada Day on our Canadian road trip extravaganza. Our trip would take us from Ontario all the way across Canada, stopping in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland – with a side trip to Boston and Cape Cod for good measure!
Tag: hiking
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Sitges is a lovely seaside town about an hour south of Barcelona. And remember, ‘Sitges’ rhymes with ‘Peaches’.