Fully aware of the impending end of our stay in Europe, and not certain of the exact date of the move (something which is still not certain today), but working on the assumption that it may come as soon as the end of May, we continued to execute our plan to see as much as possible. Gradually moving north and thus following spring temperatures, Spain was next on the list. Having made several trips to the southern part of Spain, Barcelona and Madrid represented a significant gap that needed to be filled. The initial plan I had in mind was to fly to Barcelona, make our way to Madrid and then fly back from there. However, in a moment of bizarre mental lapse, I forgot about this and thought only of the benefits of flying back from the same airport – no need to try to find transportation to the airport etc. On top of that, when presented with a choice of Barcelona-something and Barcelona-Girona, I assumed that these were simply names of two Barcelona airports and chose the less expensive one. It turned out that the first one was actually in Barcelona suburbs, while the other one was in another province-one hour by bus. Luckily, that was not as big a problem as one might think, after all, it takes more than an hour to get to most of London’s airports and it is more expensive.

Barcelona is a fun place if you like unusual architecture.
(Click on the picture to see it full size, use a back button to return to this spot.) We spent almost two days visiting houses designed by Gaudi and his cathedral, which is still under construction. We will have to go back in 10 years to check up on the progress. The nice part is that Gaudi was not the only one designing funky houses and it is easy to find lot of unusual buildings. The only thing that was a bit strange was running into Catalan and from time to time being unable to decipher certain menu items. Luckily at the tapas bars we could just point to different food items without knowing what they are called.

The original idea was to take the train from Barcelona to Madrid, but it was not until I looked at the time table that I realized how far apart the two cities actually are. Worse surprise was when we went to buy tickets (luckily one day ahead of time) it turned out that had only 1st class. I was not in the mood to pay 90 euros per person (more that the plane ticket on Ryan Air). So we went to investigate option two – bus. It turned out much cheaper, even though a little bit longer. But we simply decided to get up a little bit early and by taking the 8 o’clock bus make up some of the lost time. It was a long trip, but we got to see a lot of countryside and to our surprise, most of it looked like west Texas: most of it flat and quite dry – clearly a difficult place to make a living. The Spaniards who came to colonize Mexico must have felt completely at home – no environmental shock of any kind.

We found some very nice pastry shops in Madrid and had a real Madrid breakfast of churros dipped in very thick chocolate – something that took care of my appetite for the rest of the day. After walking around through central Madrid to heart’s content and spending as much time as we could bear at the Prado gallery we still had some time to spare and took a bus tour to Toledo, which was the capital until (I believe) the 16th century when it was moved to Madrid, which until then was just an insignificant town. Next day it was back to Barcelona by bus, and while seeing the scenery once was interesting, seeing it twice was a little bit too much – basically a lost day.

The next planned trip was to the south of France (Languedoc, to be more precise). This time Alice joined us. We bought inexpensive tickets from London Standsted to Montpellier. Stansted is a little bit further away than Gatwick or Heathrow, but the low price of airfare makes it worth it. It is usually not a big deal, we take the tube to the Liverpool station and then express train which reaches the airport in 45 minutes. This time it was a little different. When I came to the window to buy a ticket, I was told that there was some kind of a problem and that the train could not make it all the way to the airport and that we would have to make part of the trip by a replacement bus. What do we want to do? At that point in time we did not have any real options, the plane was leaving in 3 hours, taxi would probably take longer than that and would be very expensive.

They told us it would take 3 hours to get to the airport, but I found that hard to believe. If the train takes 45 minutes and we switch to a bus outside of London, where traffic should not be a big problem, I did not understand why it should take that long. We understood once we were told to get off the train and switch to a bus. There were no busses! Bus replacement service is something one runs into quite frequently on the weekends when there is maintenance on the lines, and it usually works quite well. After 10 minutes is became clear that buses were not coming any time soon and the 200+ people who got off the train will miss their planes. Luckily, Alice asked someone where we could find a taxi. Frankly I was not very hopeful. The station was on the outskirts of what looked to be a very small town – I was not sure they had more than one or two taxis, if that. In addition, I thought that all taxi drivers already knew about the train problem and were on their way to the airport. But since I did not have a better idea, we headed off in the indicated direction. To my amazement, after about ten minutes we came to a small high street and were able to find a cab. It cost about 50 pounds to reach the airport, but we made it in time to catch our plane.

Luckily, the rest of the trip worked out well. We flew into Montpellier a lovely provincial town with a long history and the oldest medical school in Europe. It was an important city in the middle ages, a major stop along Santiago de Compostella pilgrimage route. You can see the route in the town if you look carefully, because it is marked by little brass pecten shell embedded into the road. I found something else during my morning walk: a space invader mosaic on one of the walls. You have to be a certain age to know what a space invader is. It was the first video game (other than the silly ping pong) which was introduced in Japan in late 70’s and soon took over the whole country by a storm. As it happens, there was an article about this in the paper that morning. Apparently, there are space invaders in several cities around the world and they are not distributed in a random way. If you connect the locations of the space invader mosaics in any city, you can trace out a geometric figure from the video game.

From Montpellier we moved on to Nimes, which we used as a base for the next few days. Nimes itself was Celtic opidium and later became a very important Roman city and has the most completely preserved roman circus in the world as well as a few other Roman buildings. The most impressive structure is, however, an hour out of town by a local bus: the large roman aqueduct the so called Pont de Gars. We spent a better part of the day getting to it and back and seeing it from all directions. Next day we visited Avignon, residence of several popes during the 14th century. Interestingly one of these popes was involved in the selection of Charles IV as emperor and Charles visited his patron in Avignon. We also had the doubtful luck of experiencing mistral – the powerful wind which can sweep from the north along the Rhone valley. It was very strong and I hate to imagine how it must feel in winter.

From Nimes we took a longer train trip to Carcassone, much further to the west, within sight of the Pyrenees. Carcassone is a medieval fortified city, well preserved (and substantially restored) with its three city walls still intact. We were lucky to get a room in one of the three hotels within the city walls and could enjoy the place after most of the tourist buses left and the city took on a more medieval and less Disneyland feel.

From Carcassone it was back to Montpellier for another night and then to London. I went right from the airport on a flight to New York and the next morning to Houston. The same evening to Denver and back to Houston. Next day was Saturday and that gave me a chance to drive to San Antonio to see Monica. Back to London, where I found that I needed to go to Moscow for two days – and all of a sudden here we are, almost in the middle of May.