A Spanish Adventure

Seville, Spain.

I've been trying to upload photos but too many seem to fail in the upload for one reason or another. So there are a few below and more to come once we get home. We fly home actually tomorrow after 18 extraordinary days in Spain concentrating on Adalucia.

Spain is a mix of things, from the Costa del Sol, which inspired this trip with a time share we acquired in a charity auction (Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra). The Costa del Sol is both beautiful and wildly overdeveloped, what one magazine we read here called an "aesthetic and environmental disaster. But there are so many other things to compensate.

Five days in Madrid with its world class art in the Prado and particularly the Thyssen which we think outdoes the Prado in organiztion and display of equally prominant artists. Our adventure included a bullfight on horseback (a cultural necessity to attend we felt), flemnco on three occasions, a night at the majestic and magical Alhambra (the sultan's 13th century palace grounds), a jaunt into the Sierra Nevada (Europe's second highest mountains), a visit to Ronda, a gorgeous Andalucian village in the mountains, and, of course, Toledo, where Moslems, Jews and Christians co-existed in model tolerance until 1492 when Isabelle and Ferdinand (those of Columbus's patronage) expelled Jews and Moslems. We ended with 4 glorious days in Seville.

It has been a voyage of discovery, of palaces and mosques, synagogues and churches, of people and flowers, of architecture and art, of water running through magestic gardens. Certainly, we have only scratched the surface.

See you all soon,

Mel and Janet