From Madrid to Barcelona

Posted on 11/13/2023 by Andrew Reynolds

Last week I talked about our time in Madrid.  This was the longest visit we had to any city on the cruise and was an add-on.  It did highlight for me the difference in travel modes.  When you stay for a few nights in one place you get a more in depth experience of the place.  On the cruise ship, you stop for a day in a city and just get a quick look or a taste of the city.  It’s a tradeoff – travel on the ship lets you visit more places and see more things while staying in once place lets you experience that place more deeply, but you don’t get to many places.

Having the Madrid add-on before joining the cruise ship let us have a little bit of both.

We had one full day and two nights in Madrid and then we were off to Barcelona.  We took the high speed train.  The cruise line had arranged all the transportation for us so in the morning we got on busses to the train station where one of the guides walked so fast that they lost half their group, which included us.  Good thing there were two guides, and second guide had a more realistic idea of how fast a group of senior tourists could walk.

I should point out at this point, that we traveled on Viking Cruise Line and their catalog of cruises and styles of travel seems to appeal most to us older types.  While there were people under 50 on the trip, most were over 50 and many over 70 so in many places there were conversations about mobility, stairs, cobblestones and exactly how far were we going to walk that day.

And the first question asked on most outings was, “Where will the restroom stops be?”

We were loaded into the first class compartment and were served a Spanish style breakfast that lacked bacon – crispy or otherwise.  The interesting thing to me was how much Spain looked like California.  Expect for the Spanish style farm buildings, it could have been a train ride from Sacramento to Los Angeles.  It’s no wonder that the Spanish decided to colonize California.

In fact, a lot of the Mediterranean looked like California.

We got to our ship, the Viking Saturn, about mid-day and were told that we could access our cabins after 3:00 pm so we went up to the buffet to get something to eat and find a place to hang out until we could get into our cabin.  After we’d been sitting a few minutes a waiter told us that there had been an announcement and that all cabins were now open.  It was nice to get into the cabin earlier than we had expected.

Viking does things a bit different that other cruise lines.  First their ocean ships are smaller than most cruise ships.  The average cruise ship accommodates between 3,000 and 4,000 guests, while the Saturn only takes 930.  This is nice as the ship doesn’t feel crowded and you got lots of attention from staff.  The ship did have a lot of amenities like nice restaurants, a bar, swimming pool, theater, and even a nice place for afternoon tea.  It didn’t have water slides or activities for kids.

There were two main choices for dining, the buffet and the restaurant (sit down full service) that you could just show up for.  There were two speciality restaurants that you’d have to book a table at. More about that in a later post.  Mostly we ate at the buffet on deck 7.  We did eat in the full service restaurant once, but most times preferred to graze at the buffet. The food was great. There was wait staff in the buffet area to get drinks, clean up and generally help where requested.  

The day after getting on the ship we had a walking tour of Barcelona.  It wasn’t exactly the tour we wanted, but it was all that was available when we were able to pick our outings.  Turns out that while the cruise boasts a lot of great, interesting tours, there is limited availability.  You pick your tours a couple of months before the cruise, but it turns out that people in the higher price cabins get to pick first and us folks in the cheaper cabins get last choice, so Heather and I were disappointed that many of the good tours were unavailable to us.

The most interesting part of our Barcelona tour was seeing the architecture of Antoni Gaudi and getting a walk around Sagrada Famila, the basilica they’ve been building since 1882.  Yes, it’s been under construction for over a hundred and forty years.  Gaudi was appointed Architect Director in 1884 and worked on it until his death in 1926.  It’s still under construction using Gaudi’s design concepts and is expected to be completed in 2026.

Here’s a picture:

The place is massive and there is no way to get it all in one picture.  The other thing to mention is that the place is crowded.  Barcelona is a crowded city, and the ships full of tourists just add to the congestion on the streets.

After our walk around the construction, we were bussed across town to a medieval section of town for a little sight seeing.  I don’t want to sound like a cynic, but it looked a lot like all the other medieval walled cities we saw.  I’ll show some pictures in another post.

We then were taken back to the ship where we had our dinner, listened to the port talk for the next day and went to bed. The port talk was an important part of each day.  Normally given at 4:30 and recorded for those of us still out on tour to view in our staterooms later.  The cruise director gave all kinds of information for the next day’s activities. Things like weather, history of the area, interesting facts, and notes about crime in the area (like pickpockets, scams, etc).  Then the tour manager would go through all the tours for the next day with times of departure, the physical difficultly of the tour, what to expect, any special things happening like shuttle busses to port and so on.  We always listened to these as they often gave info not in the printed documents we had.  

It didn’t take long to fall into a daily rhythm of activity – breakfast, tour, port talk, dinner, and collapse into bed while the ship cruised to the destination. 

Our next stop was Marseille, which will be the subject of my next post. 

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Friday Wisdom – Life

Posted on 11/10/2023 by Andrew Reynolds

While I like one liners, I do share my father’s taste for the old fashion shaggy dog story. Basically a one liner joke tacked on to the end of a very long story. The shaggy dog story has fallen out of fashion in our rush, rush world where the average attention span in 10 seconds, but I thought I’d change things up a bit with a few one-liners followed by a shaggy dog story (a short one, not the 20 minute version father told). and yes, the original shaggy dog story was about a shaggy dog …

In my youth, I spent a lot of time and energy in my search for the meaning of life. I often asked that question of teachers, preachers, and random adults. I learned a lot. Here’s what I’ve learned:

The best way to kill a ChatGPT AI bot is to ask it, what is the meaning of life?

I started writing a joke about life but then found it had no meaning.

Did you know that Kierkegaard thought omelettes gave meaning to life? Yes, because they’re eggs essential.

I was in Germany standing outside a famous baroque composer’s house thinking about the meaning of life. It’s called thinking outside the Bach’s.

I found it!!! The meaning of life … on page 932 in the dictionary between lie and lifeboat.

Once there was a man who really wanted to know the true meaning of life. He studied every book he could find in his American midwestern home town. He asked teachers, doctors, clergy, philosophers and all the great thinkers he could find. None could answer his question to his satisfaction.

One day the man heard of a wise guru living high the Himalayas who know the true meaning of life. The only way to reach the guru was to climb the mountain to the guru’s cave. So the man decided he needed to speak with this wiseman.

Now the man wasn’t rich so he had to sell all he owned to get enough money to make the journey. Before he went he took mountain climbing lessons, bought outdoor gear, ropes, packs, good shoes … everything he’d need to climb to the guru’s cave. But despite all the hardship, the man knew he had to ask his question of the guru.

Well, it’d didn’t go well. When he landed in India he discovered that the airline had lost half his climbing gear, which he had to replace, further depleting his few resources. Then on the train journey north to the Himalayan village where he’d start hiking out of, the train derailed and the man was badly injured. After many weeks recovering from a broken leg the man again had to buy more equipment as much of what he was traveling with was lost or damaged in the train wreck.

Finally the man arrived in the village and learned from the locals how to get to the guru’s cave. They warned him that it was a dangerous journey and that it would be best to wait a few months until there was better weather in the area. The man couldn’t wait. He was running out of money and was becoming more impatient to get his answer.

So one cloudy, wind morning the man set out to climb the mountain. It didn’t go well. A thunderstorm soaked him to the bone, a strong wind blew away his pack with all his food, his stove refused to light and then in the darkness of the storm he got lost. He wandered lost for days in the cold and wet.

Just when all seem lost and the man was near death due to hypothermia and lack of food, he saw a small light on the mountain. At last he found it, the guru’s cave. He entered and the guru gave him a blanket, food, water and let him rest by a warm fire. Then the man asked his question, “Guru what is the meaning of life?”

The guru considered the man for a moment and then said, “Life is a fountain.”

“What!?!” replied the man, “I traveled thousands of miles, was almost killed and you tell me life is a fountain!!!”

The guru looked puzzled and answered, “What? Do you mean life isn’t a fountain?”

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Wednesday Working – Sheep and Quilting

Posted on 11/08/2023 by Andrew Reynolds

This week I’ve got three of the small figures for the nativity set done:

Two sheep and a cradle. I’ve started to cut the people figures. Hopefully I’ll have pictures of them next week. Generally I work an hour or two at on this project, but not every day. From time to time I get questions on how I cutting these pieces. Here’s a picture of the scroll saw that I use:

Here you can see me working on the figure for Mary. That tiny black line going through the pattern is the saw blade. It’s about the thickness of about five sheets of paper. It wears out fast so I buy them by the gross (144) and change frequently. Sometimes things go wrong and they break. It’s hard to tell from the picture but there’s only about three inches of clearance between the table and the blade clamp.

The other question I get a lot is how to do I see what I’m doing. Well:

I cheat and use a magnifier lamp. I think this one is about 5x. It has LED lights and I couldn’t see to cut without it. This week I went to see my eye doctor and like all of us older folks, I’ve got cataracts so the light is needed. The doc thinks I’ll need the cataract surgery in a few years. Getting old is so much fun.

Since winter is fallen here in the high desert, the garden is closed until spring which means I have more time for quilting. You’ve seen this quilt top before, but I finally started quilting it. Not sure this will show up well, but here’s the pattern I’m going with:

Basically it’s squares in squares. The quilt thread I’m using is a light color so it shows up best on the dark parts of the quilt. Here’s a close up of another part of the quilt:

This is the first thing I’ve done any quilting on. I’m doing this on a regular sewing machine with a walking foot since it’s just straight lines. This is just a wall hanging so I’m hopeful that it won’t take too long to finish.

That’s it for this week. Next week I hope to have finished the quilt and if I’m really dedicated, all the figures for the nativity done. If you need me, I’ll be at the optometrist getting my new glasses.

Posted in quilting, woodworking | Tagged , , , | 22 Comments

The Difference Between American and British Bacon Or My Autumn Vacation

Posted on 11/05/2023 by Andrew Reynolds

Part 1

Bacon is not really important to this story, but I thought I’d mention it because I like bacon.  America and Britain approach bacon differently.  The main difference is that America bacon comes from pork belly while British bacon is cut from the loin, same cut as pork tenderloin.  British bacon is leaner and often is in bigger pieces than American bacon which is typically cut in strips and has a lot more fat.  In the UK, you’ll often hear American bacon called, “streaky” bacon.  Canadian bacon is similar to British bacon and often used in the American breakfast delight called, Eggs Benedict which is a poached egg, a slice of Canadian bacon on an English muffin smothered in hollandaise sauce. Naturally this was invented by an American.  I should also note here that English muffins are an American invention and what we Americans call “Canadian bacon” is more like a small piece of lunch meat and has little resemblance to what is sold in Canada.

This is where my vacation comes in.  Heather and I did a Mediterranean cruise, and every morning the breakfast buffet offered, bacon, crispy bacon and Eggs Benedict.  I have to disappoint you Canadians when I report that they used British bacon on the Eggs Benedict, not Canadian bacon or at least not the American version of Canadian bacon.  Crispy bacon is what the cruise line called British streaky bacon or as we Americans say, “bacon.”  They also offered an Eggs Benedict with a smoked salmon instead of bacon, which was nice, but I still often took the bacon version, the British bacon version that is.

Now that we have that out of the way our itinerary started with two nights in Madrid. This was an add-on to the cruise, but still run by the Viking Cruise line folks. We flew out of Reno with a stop in Dallas where we changed planes.  I could spend a lot of time complaining about our air travel arrangements, and likely will.  We had to endure a six hour layover at DFW.  We arrived on a domestic flight, and went to the giant TV boards to see what gate our international flight left from.  We couldn’t figure it out and eventually I found an air line help desk that also had trouble figuring it out on their computers.  Luckily one gate agent was smart enough to take out his personal cell phone and look up the information outside of his company information systems.

We were at the wrong terminal – like the wrong side of the airport.  On the tram ride to the correct terminal we noticed the building thunder storm.  Our flight left the gate more or less on time, but then we waited on the runway for about an hour as the rain, wind and lightening delayed our departure and I fought off the fear we’d be sent back to the terminal.

I wrote a poem about it.  Well, okay, I have a title of a poem about it that I hope to someday write …

Anyway, we did manage to get in the air and land at Madrid airport, which turns out to be impressively large.  There’s a whole thousand word essay about that (complete with pictures) that I could write.  Maybe next time.

Anyway we eventual found our ground transportation and were taken to our hotel.  After checking in with the tour desk we went to find dinner.  Being tired, jet lagged, frazzled, brain dead, but too hungry to sleep, we just went to the hotel bar and ordered food there.  Being on vacation, we decided to indulge in a cocktail.  They had a menu in English, and a waiter who spoke enough English to get us what we wanted.  Now, when Heather was looking at the cocktail menu, she just kind was overloaded and asked the waiter if she could just get a gin and tonic.  He said, “of course, what kind of gin?”  Now we’ve discovered there is a current trend of what I’ll call designer gins out there.  I can’t tell the difference between Beefeaters or Gordon’s or anything else.  Heather’s solution was to ask if there is a Spanish gin. This delighted the waiter who then promptly brought her a fish bowl sized glass and proceeded to pour what I estimate was about four or five normal shots of gin followed by a medium sized bottle of tonic.

Heather did her best, but only managed a third of her drink.  I tried to help, but I had my own potent drink to deal with (a Manhattan Mule).  Let’s just say that we fell asleep quickly when we finally stumbled back to our room.

The next day we had breakfast in the hotel and joined our tour of the city.  The tour was a three part thing, a bus tour of main sights, a walking tour of an older section of the city and finally, a visit to the Prado Museum.  It’s impossible to describe that museum, but we saw works of art I’ve studied in school and I enjoyed seeing their collection.

This tour also gave us a taste of what all our tours on the vacation would look like – a taste of wherever we were.  I could have spent a couple of days at the Prado, but we only had about 90 minutes so only saw a few of the great works there.  This came to be true of most of our tours, short, crowded and neither of us really remember what the guides where telling us.  Still, it’s nice to say, that we’ve been there.

For lunch we stopped at a nice restaurant, El Yate, or in English, The Yacht so being a seafood place, I ordered a burger.  Right next to the restaurant was the Sorolla Museum which was the home of Joaquin Sorolla that was turned into a museum of his art.  Since this wasn’t an official tour, we got to spend a lot of time there and actually had time to shop in the gift shop – a luxury you didn’t always get on the cruise tours.

That evening we did another city walking tour that I don’t remember that well.  Heather has some pictures.  We then joined a group dinner out at a Tapas restaurant.  Tapas is basically Spanish small dishes or what we might call appetizers with drinks.  This seemed to be more of a social thing rather than a culinary delight.  Maybe it was just what they ordered for us, but the food wasn’t memorable.  If I was out for an evening with friends, it would have been a nice meal with drinks over conversation.

Well, that’s about it for this time.  Next post I’ll talk about our train ride, and the bus that broke down.

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