For the fourth year in a row, I am flying toward the sunrise. But today our plane is early, and instead, as we touch down in Madrid, we see a large and full orange moon setting over the planes of central Spain. The color is striking against the black sky.  We are beginning our new…

We have planned only one day of real activity in Madrid, as we have been here before. Last year, our schedule did not allow a visit to the city’s cathedral. We will walk there today, about a mile, covering familiar territory: Plaza Del Sol, Plaza Mayor and on to the cathedral. Ana has been reading…

We have a 10 a.m. appointment to pick up the car. We will travel by cab and meet the representative at a hotel by the airport. To do this we must rise early, pack and then meet the cab reserved for 9 o’clock at a nearby corner. We have walked miles the day before and…

We have our breakfast Sunday morning happy to see that the heavy rains heard overnight have passed. It is a cool partly cloudy morning, perfect to walk. I will shoot many photos, as the town is a visual delight! We walk about the center of town to find the streets surrounding Plaza Mayor are bustling…

Salamanca is a nice place and we could spend another day looking at what it offers, but we are scheduled out by noon. We have a 5 hour drive to Fisterra and need to be there by the end of the day. Still, Ana has some things she’d like to do. She want see the…

When I chose Fisterra as our west coast stop on the trip, I knew little about it except it would be by the sea. Later I learned it was the far end of the Camino de Santiago de Compostella. The pilgrims’ goal is to reach the Cathedral of Santiago de Campostella, having started  hundreds of…

We wake to a dense fog over the sea and up to condo. Nothing much can be seen in the gray light. We have breakfast and I write this blog. Ana reads from a guide book about Santiago de Compostella. It is one o’clock before the sun breaks through.  Untill now, there has been no…

It is foggy again today, but we will leave anyway and fight our way through it until we are away from the sea. As farther in land, Santiago de Compostella is bright and sunny. The GPS does a good job of getting us to a convenient parking garage, and, even better, it has spaces to…

Today, we will drive obliquely across the corner of northwestern Spain, the Galicia Provence. We have been in Fisterra for three pretty foggy days. Now the forecast is better north and east of Fisterra on the north Atlantic coast. That is good because Ana has been eager to visit a beach with extraordinary rock formations…

We will leave this lovely B&B after only one night and head for a condo in Sonabia, close to Bilbao Spain. It is a long trek. We will drive almost 4 hours. We will leave the Eastern side of Galaicia, Cross Austurias. Then enter Cantabria, and travel east to the boarder with Pais Vasco, better…