Donde Esta El Jones Clan-o

Hey friends, sorry for the huge gap in posts. The two of us have been pretty slammed with school, work, and day to day life. As a result we've not been on here much lately. I'd like to promise more regular postings, but I'm afraid I can't at this point, although we'll give our best effort. Our most recent adventure was a trip to Spain, most of which was spent just Anne and I, but we met up with some friends for the last few days in Barcelona. This trip, coupled with my break from school, felt like the right time to break our streak of no posts. Anne and I found a ridiculous deal on some flights to Spain last year, and left for the trip on Christmas Day. Flying out of JFK to Barcelona, via Madrid, we departed after a lovely Christmas dinner at the airport, where we shared laughs and all around merriment over some sandwiches and beer. The flight had a rather inauspicious debut as we were seated behind a couple who had a 3 year old in tow. Needless to say we were both worried about the prospect of sitting behind an inconsolable screaming youth. We were not disappointed. I'm no expert on parenting, in fact I'd probably be lousy at it, but it seems fundamentally wrong to expect a child of that age to behave appropriately on such a long flight. Afterall, I'm 31 and it's all I can do to not go crazy when confined to a seat that long. This little dickens appeared to only have two settings, sleep and full throated scream. Sadly, the sleep setting was rarely dialed in. This made the 8 hour flight feel more like 80, which roughly equated to the number of beers I consumed. We did our best to not murder the parents, and make the best of the flight, but were both pretty glad to be off of the plane when we got to Madrid. After a sleepless flight, we connected to Barcelona, squeezed in a 45 minute nap on that flight, and settled in for our trip to really begin.
After getting off the plane in Barcelona, and failing to find an airport vasectomy clinic, we hooked up with our rental car. Our plan was pretty loosely made, we had booked a room for two nights later on, but had a few days sprinkled around to wing it before we were to be back in Barcelona on the 31st. We had booked something along the lines of a roller skate, but were pleased to recieve a complementary upgrade to a car with actual tires instead of shopping cart wheels. We scooted out in our hatchback Peugot 5 speed, with a plan to cruise up the mediterranean coast and find a town that seemed cool and stay there for the night. A few wrong turns later we were on the coastal highway, heading north towards France and thoroughly enjoying our drive. Initially, the drive was a straight shot up the coast with the beach bordering the road on the right, and various shops on the left. The ocean was as near as pulling off and walking 30 yards from the passenger door. Needless to say this was quite scenic, but nothing like what we had in store.
We stopped off for some snacks and caffeine to fuel ourselves to the night. Neither of us had slept much but were feeling pretty good with the excitement of "getting there". I always try to buy snacks that are unavailable at home, in this case some potato chips flavored like ham. I'm not sure why America hasn't embraced the meat-flavored potato chip but this is the second trip in a row where we've had them (sausage pringles in Japan), and they are the most delicious chip flavor. We also had something called Boca Bits, which I bought because I didn't know what they were. They turned out to look like pork rinds a bit, but they tasted more like Bugles. With a light snack on board we made our way farther up. For a time reference, this last part took about 3 hours, and it's roughly 4:00 pm local time now. As we drove farther up the coast, the towns became fewer and farther between, and the road climbed up into some small coastal mountains/hills. This road evolved from a nice scenic drive, into the most beautiful drive either of us had ever taken. It curved around every turn and bend of the mountains and followed the coast. Now the ocean was still roughly as close as pulling over and walking 30 yards from the passenger door, only now you would need to travel about 1000 feet straight down to the water. Initially I was having a field day stress testing the Peugot on the curvy roads, but it turns out that Anne has all of the intestinal fortitude of a newborn, so I was forced to slow to a crawl which pleased all of the locals piling up behind me on the road. As evening came on us, we were both ready to stop anywhere to eat and be done traveling for the first time in over a day. As the road gradually wound down to sea level, we entered the town of San Feliu. We decided this would be a fine place to spend our first night since we didn't want or need to press on, and we knew it would be a short drive to Begur, our pre-planned destination for the next night, the next day.
The nice thing about traveling when we did to the coast of Spain is it is the offseason, neither of us are real "beach" people, and that is the draw here for most tourists. As a result, most of the people around are locals, prices are very cheap, and you basically have your run of the place. The downside is that many hotels are seasonal, and the resulting accomodations are limited. Our first stop was at a restaurant, where Anne ran in and got a couple of recommendations for places to stay. The first one we tried was closed for the season, however there were people working there, renovating etc., and the owner happened to be there who recommended another place, different than the one recommended by the restaurant. We decided to try the restaurants recommendation first since we knew where it was, and its proximity to the water, and several restaurants. We drove over to the hotel which proved to be a huge challenge, so much so we never actually made it. We could see the hotel from the street we were on, a one-way, and drove down to circle back around to the street where the hotel was. We crossed several one-way streets before we could make a left. My thinking was, another left and we'll be headed the right way. However, after the first left we were now too far behind, so I'd need to make two more lefts. I took the first one I could, which was an extremely narrow street, so narrow that cars were parked on the sidewalk literally inches from buildings while the other half of the car still blocked half of the "street". I had to drive half on the sidewalk with literally inches to spare on either side of the car to pass. Oh, to make it easier, I'm in a stick shift and this street is going straight up a massive incline to the top of a hill. Finally, we reach the summit to find, yes! - a dead end. My two options were to try to turn around in a little path with an incline far steeper then the one we had just climbed, or try to back down this roughly mile long hill on the sidewalk avoiding parked cars. My plan was to back down the ultra steep side street (also a dead end, FYI), and then pull back up onto the original street, only I didn't have room to back down it, so I had to go nose first and then reverse up the massive incline. With my knees literally shaking, and the strong aroma of burning clutch in the air I successfully executed the turn. So with Anne looking through her fingers and me spewing a prodigious stream of expletives at the road design and lack of signage, we abandoned hotel 1 for the other recommendation. Fortunately, the sailing was much smoother from here on. No more harrowing road experiences, and other than getting lost a bit, the rest of the trip wasn't too bad. Although we did find it annoying that everywhere we went, there was excellent signage directing you to your destination, until the last couple of miles. It's like they're thinking, "hey we got you this close, you can find it from here". This was a bit frustrating, but all in all a minor glitch.
That first night we landed in a really nice hotel, turns out the recommendation was a good one. Our room had a very large balcony, and the bathroom featured both a shower and separate bathtub that was long enough for me to totally lay down in with legs straight out.
We took a 2 hour nap, and went out for some dinner around 8pm. Based on the hotel's recommendation we drove to nearby town, which was quite busy. We parked the car, and set out on foot. We were both basically starving so we had a coffee at one place, and then the next place we saw stopped for some food. We ordered two traditional Tapas plates, manchego (spanish cheese), whihc is served with sliced up baguette that has olive oil and fresh tomato spread on it (they basically slice the tomato, and squeeze all of the "guts" out of onto the bread and spread it that way). The other dish we had was fresh anchovies served in a similar fashion only without the tomato guts on the bread. This place was off the beaten path a bit, and the food was really good. Anne ordered a "glass" of wine, which turned out to be a bottle of wine (this is when we learned wine is cheap there), and I had a beer...and half of Anne's wine. With some sustenance on board and a little drink we stopped off at this little arcade where we played some games, one of which was an old timey animatronic shooting game where the machines reacted when you "shot" the targets (very much like something you would see at Silver Dollar City), only the reaction was me getting shot in the face with a squirt gun and then later me getting shot in the crotch with a different squirt gun. Good times. So with a wet crotch and full belly, we decided to head back to the hotel and take it on foot from there. We wound down the evening with a bottle of wine at our hotel, some delicious olives and hit the sack for some much needed sleep.
Our hotel included breakfast, a pretty heavy self serve deal, that included a griddle where you could fry your own bacon, I thought that was pretty cool so I fried up a few strips, which was really delicious. Then we cruised over to an open air market where I couldn't figure out how to work the parking meter, so we moved on defeated but not discouraged. Our drive took us on to Begur, a city right on the coast but up in the hills so not a beach town. After round two of signage that almost gets you there, stopping for directions once, we found our hotel, the Aiguaclara. A really cool old hotel, which was one of the nicer places we've stayed. Again, being the offseason, the hotel was relatively empty so they gave us a nicer room than we'd paid for, on the house. It had a sitting room, a big terrace right in the middle of the city center, and of course bedroom and bath. We settled in, and took a recommendation from the hotel owner (a really nice husband and wife) for a great place to get seafood right on the beach. About a 20 minute drive later, we were in a really small, secluded beach town called Tiamar. This is where I established myself as "most likely to forget essential items" by starting a trend of heading out without our translation book. I ordered some of the freshest calamari I've ever had served with a squid ink risotto, and Anne blindly order some fish dish which was phenomenal. As it is customary to have wine with a meal there, we ordered a nice bottle of white wine, and had a delicious lunch. The weather was cool, but clear and very beautiful. We then headed back to our hotel for a nap. I slept about 20 minutes but Anne was down for 2 hours. Bored I wandered around the city center (Begur was very small and very quiet), drank a couple of coffee's (you get espresso if you order coffee there) and then met back up with Anne. We again, decided to wing it for dinner. Ended up at what we later learned was a highly recommended restaurant. We had a phenomenal tuna carpaccio to start, Anne order an equally delicious seafood paella, and I had a maybe the best roasted duck I've ever tasted topped with foie gras (like the wine, foie gras is served almost everywhere and is infinitely cheaper than here). This is one of the best meals we had on the trip. We finished the evening at a very local bar called Callos, which was the name of the owner and, it turns out, the bartender that night. We had a nice conversation (as nice as possible given the language barrier), with the only two patrons and Callos (who was extremely drunk, that transcended the language issue without problem), while death metal played over VH1 rocks on the big screen (none of these guys was less than 40 years old and Callos was probably more like 60 so the music didn't exactly fit the atmosphere). We made brunch plans with these guys, and then forgot about them the next day. We finished the evening in the basement of our hotel which was set up as this cool "living room" with sofas and a self service bar.
The next day we also spent in Begur (two nights here), this time walking around since neither of us felt like being in the car. There was some really old ruins and lots of cool spanish architecture (my running joke was to note the brilliant spanish architecture, which I ran into the ground by day two but didn't give up on). After walking around for most of the morning, we had lunch at a really good restaurant called La Galena. We sat by an open fire place, and ordered some octopus to start, which was beyond amazing. Actually they started us with a little bite of some unbelievable chorizo (different than Mexican chorizo, more like the consistency of salami normally, but this was fresh and served hot, rather than cured and cold). I had braised oxtail which was good, but Anne had some monkfish stew (monkfish was very popular there, served almost everywhere) that was unreal. Again, a bottle of wine with lunch, and again we followed up lunch with a nap (real go-getters). We were both feeling pretty beat so we watched a movie our room. After showers, we headed out to a dinner place that we had noticed while walking around earlier in the day. They seemed to specialize in fire grilled meats, so this sounded very cool. Sadly it was pretty disappointing. We had manchego as a starter, which the bread was marginal, and sadly this was the best part of the meal. We had some rabbit and pork cheeks which weren't too great. The pork cheeks were so salty I could barely eat them, and the rabbit was tough. Undaunted we headed back to the hotel for a bottle of cava, and made (g-rated) movies with the flip cam.
The next day was again to be decided on the fly. We woke up to another excellent breakfast at Aiguaclara, lots of really good fresh fruit, bread, cheeses and sausages. We checked out and decided to head up to Cadaques, which looked like a cool small beach town, at the foot of the Pyrenees and near the French border. We booked a room online before we left Begur and headed up. On the way we found some ancient ruins (2nd century BC) that we decided to stop at. Really cool to see such an ancient city (very small), and there was even a cool statue that they had found. We pressed on and stopped off at a small bakery in a town that I don't remember the name of, for a snack. We arrived in Cadaques in the early afternoon, and checked in to the Hotel Rocamar. It was a cool older hotel whose heyday had probably passed a couple of decades ago. It was clean though, had an indoor pool which was a nice surprise, and overlooked the entire bay and town of Cadaques. Also, Cadaques was the home of Salvador Dali, or at least where he lived most of his life and where is home was. So we walked over and checked that out, it was cool but we didn't wait to take the tour since neither of us are really art buffs (or know anything about it at all would be more accurate). We went into the town on the way back and picked up a couple of swimsuits, fortunately mine wasn't a banana hammock, but Anne wasn't as lucky. Hers looked like the thinnest piece of a cotton band for the top and the bottoms weren't the best either. She hesitated but decided we would never see these people again anyway, so who cares. After a nice swim in the evening we went back to shower and get ready for the evening (no nap today). We started with some cocktails by the fireplace in our hotel which was really nice. Afterward we went out to a very local restaurant, buried in the intricate pathways of the city center, called The Mermaid. Again, more amazing seafood, so fresh, and this time two bottles of wine and desert. We stayed so late and had a wonderful time.
After a good nights sleep, we got up to find the best weather of our trip. It had been sunny everyday, but cool. Today, the 30th, was the warmest yet. Clear blue skies and around 70 degrees I went out in short sleeves. Without a doubt, Cadaques was the most beautiful place we stayed. The city is absolutely amazing, it feels like what my stereotype of a mediterranean city has always been. White buildings with helter skelter cobble stone streets, tiny pathways and with the ocean always as a backdrop. We spent the morning wandering around, eating a snack at a restaurant right in the beach where we sat outside. Then made our way back to our car, to head on to Girona. Girona, is another place where we planned our stay. This is the biggest city we had stayed in to that point by far. It has some really cool midieval architecture (spanish no doubt), and felt very old in the city center. We saw a really cool cathedral, dating back well over a thousand years. We stayed in a really cool hotel here too. The hotel had apartments you could stay in which we did (these were actually cheaper than a standard room), although we didn't utilize the kitchen really. It was nice though, and would have been ideal if you were staying for an extended period. We snacked at a crepe place where we each some really excellent savory crepes, which felt more like a dinner than a snack. Later we had churros and hot chocolate, a very traditional Spanish dish. These were awesome, deep fried dough with sugar on them, and a cup of hot chocolate to dip them in. Only, the chocolate is thick like hot pudding when you make it on the stove, and not super sweet. So good. We tried to meet up with a few of our friends who we were staying with the next few days in Barcelona, that were in Girona that night but were not able to find one another (made us wonder how we lived without cell phones). We were pretty beat and decided to not get too crazy that night (we are getting older for sure), and ended up having a quiet night, and catching up on some rest. The next morning we had a message at our hotel from our friends who had missed us the night before, and we met them that morning for some breakfast outside (nice again). They had rented a car as well, and were going to the same place as us in Barcelona. We caravaned down, dropped our cars back at the airport and took the bus into Barcelona city center to meet the rest of our group.
About dozen of us had rented a huge apartment in Barcelona, which was super cheap when divided up, for the few days. This is totally the way to go with a group, especially when phones aren't readily available. It eliminates the hassle of meeting up with people, it allows for some light cooking and drinking at a convenient place. Plus people can do their own thing if they want and know where to meet up later.
The rest of our group had just arrived that day, the 31st, so they were all pretty beat. But, to their credit, they powered through on limited sleep for a great night. Our first priority was to stock up on some provisions for the next few days. The ladies were charged with getting food, wine, and other essentials while myself and the boys and went to pick up beer and get a bite to eat. Predictably the place we stopped for a sandwich doubled as a bar (everywhere serves alchohol here, I mean everywhere), and so a few mugs of beer later we resumed our quest for, ahem, more beer. We didn't find a supermarket, so we literally cleaned a shop out of all of their beer, which the workers found to be comical. We met back up at the apartment with everyone and began getting ready for New Year's Eve in Barcelona. We played a few rounds of Apples to Apples (fun with the right group), had a few beers and passed out the party favors the ladies had purchased (noise makers, clown noses, masks etc.) Like Anne and I, our group was very casual, and not into over planning things. So we had no set plans for New Year's except find a bar where we could all fit comfortably and that wouldn't charge us through the nose for drinks. We walked for a few blocks, and I began to get the feeling we were going to wind up spending midnight on the street looking for a place, luckily we found a small pub which wasn't terribly busy and could accomodate all of us. Drinks were reasonable, and there was no cover which suited all of us just fine. As midnight approached champagned, or more likely cava, flowed and they had the Dick Clark equivalent up on the TV. In Spain the tradition is to eat grapes as mignight approaches, 12 to be exact and you're supposed to eat one every second for the last 12 seconds of the year. Anne and I both got them down, but the last 4 or 5 I was basically swallowing whole. Afterward, there was some dancing, more drinking, and I basically paid for the rest of my beers wagering on some games of foosball. We reconvened at the apartment, and drank until the wee hours, though none of us made it long enough for the American New Year's (6AM local time).
The next day we spent seeing various sights in Barcelona, including the famous works of Gaudi, notably the still-to-be-finished Sagrada de Familia. A massive cathedral that has been under construction for over 100 years and isn't scheduled to be finished for another 20 or something like that (still under active construction). These were the most impressive sights, we thought. We went with the group through the city center, and had some lunch with our friends. Notable dishes from this meal were cuddlefish with bacon and peppers, and some excellent Iberico ham. After a trip home and a nap, the group split up as some people went to see a Flamenco show (not us), and we went to dinner at a restuarant with some excellent seafood paella. We then went out to a bar called, oddly, Obama bar. Nothing inside appeared to have anything to do with our president, but the bar had clearly been recently renamed. The beers were cold and the group got into a wildly entertaining (and inappropriate) game of going around the circle and saying different euphemisms for male and female genitalia, this was hilarious.
The next day, Anne and I broke off from the group and went to Guella Park. An entire park designed by Gaudi. The city is wild over Gaudi I might add, and rightly so. His architecture is incredibly unique and interesting to see. The park is really cool, a great view of the city of Barcelona and the park itself is beautiful. We headed back to the city center afterward and went to the central food market, a must for Anne and I in any city. Such a cool way to see what the locals eat, and the places are always so interesting. We ate at a small restaurant in the market where I had a rare steak topped with a massive piece of griddled foie gras, absolutely delicious. Anne had some excellent meat balls in a savory sauce that was wonderful. We headed back to the apartment, and met up with the others.
For our meal on our last night we went out to white table cloth type place with the two of us and our good friend Anni (she had been before and recommended this place). This meal was again amazing (and surprisingly affordable given the atmosphere). We started with some flash fried baby calamari and a salmon carpaccio. The baby calamari were awesome, so tender and rather than sliced up they were whole and little bite sized pieces of heaven. For entrees we had veal, pork, and all sorts of delicious stuff which we shared with each other. It was truly an excellent meal. We met up with the others and ended up at a small bar called Dow Jones, which was very weird and had a picture of the New York Stock Exchange, only it had been photoshopped to look on fire. Slightly unnerved that maybe we weren't welcome there (although everyone was friendly and nothing else made us feel that way) we didn't stay terribly long. It was off to bed afterward, and on our way back home.
Aside from a really long line through security (thanks to the terror attempts the week before) the flight home was infinitely better than on the way there. No screaming baby's, and nice and quiet. Top to bottom, it was an excellent vacation. Going in the offseason made it extremely affordable, and much less hectic. I would recommend to spend it like we did, with the majority of our time exploring outside of Barcelona. Probably the best eating experience we had overall was our time in and around Begur, save the one meal, everything was outstanding. I apologize for this being so long, hopefully I didn't bore everyone to death. Until next time...