Travel Planning

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General Notes on Spain

I’ve added a bunch of links to the Spain Resources page including all of the hotels we’ve currently booked. Also, some museums and tourist bureau sites for the places we are going to.

We have been focusing on getting the first week of the trip locked down because that’s the leg that my parents will be joining us on before they head off to Barcelona and we head off to Valencia (after spending an extra day in Sevilla). Now that we’ve finished booking hotels for that part of the trip, we can start to concentrate on the rest.

As I mentioned, I had a lot of trouble coming up with a workable itinerary because Spain is so big and the train system isn’t quite as extensive or fast as it has been in some of the other countries we’ve visited. What finally enabled me to come up with a plan was using the cheap flights offered by Vueling to mke a few of the larger hops between cities more doable and time efficient.

We’re a little over two months out, and at this point I’m getting pretty excited about the whole thing. I even bought a new lens for the trip. One with a wide range so I could wouldn’t have to be swapping out lenses on the fly. Between that and my Lensbaby I should be all set.

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Whimisical Gargoyles

From the Washington Post article on Salamanca:

We thought we’d been tricked. After studying the leaves and vines carved around the west door of Salamanca’s New Cathedral for 10 minutes, we still couldn’t locate the astronaut, the monkey with an ice cream cone or the stork carrying a branch in its beak. We decided that the purported carvings were urban legends, most likely concocted as a joke on gullible tourists.

Gargoyles are some of my favorite things to photograph, so you can bet I’ll be looking for these when we are in Salamanca in a few months.

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Planning on Spain

I’m knee deep in planning our upcoming trip to Spain and finding it all very difficult. This country frustrates all my attempts to plan out a logical route. It doesn’t help that we are flying into and out of Madrid which lies smack in the middle of the country.

The distance between some places makes some travel times prohibitive. I’ve all ready had to make the decision that Santiago de Compostela is just to far away to logically fit in. That does frees up a couple of days for other places though.

Also, my parents are meeting us there for the first week or so, which means I have to coordinate with their schedules as well.

I have never had this much trouble trying to map out a route before. If anybody has any suggestions, please feel free to pass them along.

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Washington Wine Country

Yakima Icon So I’ve just started planing our next mini vacation for June. We’re planing to go to Yakima to tour around wine country. My main resource for this trip right now is the Wine Trails NW web site and book.

I really can’t think why we have been there yet, it’s only a two and a half hour drive from Seattle.

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The Final Countdown

6 days and counting until we leave for Italy. Plans are made, hotels are booked and all that remains to be done is the packing. We are very excited.

I’ll hopefully be posting from the road, so check back often to see where we are and read about our trip.

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