On the Road Again - Adventures from an Empty Nest

We have stalled out – in the best of all possible ways.   Joe and I spent the month of March running from wind and rain, moving every few days.   Everywhere in Spain and Portugal, it seemed, high winds and torrential rains arrived just after we did.   Brief moments of glorious sunshine would get our hopes up for spring, and the arctic winds would blow in again.   Locals and fellow travelers bemoaned the “worst March ever” in Europe.   It hasn’t been too bad, really. Armed with our iPhone weather app, campground finder app and good GPS (thank you, Diane), we have aimed ourselves for – and found – the brief pockets of warmth and sunshine before the cold found us again, forcing us to move on.   We’ve walked miles every day, visited medieval towns and castles, explored Moorish history and strolled along the beaches – often in our jackets, scarves and hats. All three of us had birthdays – March 8 (Joe), 21 (Jacob) and 25 (me). A week ago (and still), so...

We are continuing to travel through amazing places, with no plans or preparation, and finding it a really fun way to live. Last night Joe discovered that we were camping within three miles of some of the oldest cave paintings known – in the Maltravieso Cave in Céceres in central Spain. The earliest painting in the cave – a hand outlined in red – has just been found to have been painted by Neanderthals, shaking up science's assumptions about humans and art and creativity  (good article here) !  From the article:  "The team analyzed the drawing of a hand outline made 66,700 years ago in a cave in Maltravieso in Spain's Cáceres province; a mineral deposit covered in paint on the wall of a cave in Adales in Málaga; and a line symbol, similar to a ladder, drawn at least 64,800 years ago in a cave in La Pasiega in Cantabria. These are the oldest known artworks on the planet." The cave itself, re-discovered by modern humans after a mining blast in th...

Yesterday, I watched live Facebook streaming of the Charlottesville student walkout from a parking lot in Fátima, Portugal, the town where, in 1917, three teenagers reported that they had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary.   Today, thousands of pilgrims pour into Fátima every year because they believed those young people.   I can only hope that the young people today who see a vision of a nation where they can be free to go to school without the fear of gun violence will be heard, too.   That is my fervent prayer. I am writing this from a tiny campground high in the mountains of rural northern Portugal. It is really tiny.   I mean, we are the only campers, and the man at the desk went home last night and left us here behind the locked gate.   To get here, we drove up a steep, switch-backing, narrow drive that certainly didn’t look like it was leading to anything.   But at the top we were greeted by the very nice manager and his enormous German sheph...

We are in Portugal, and the tree peepers are celebrating the arrival of spring!   It’s still cloudy, and rained a fair bit today as we drove from Seville, Spain, to Albufeira, but the frogs know that there is no turning back toward winter now.   After two and a half weeks in Spain, we are trying to pick up the nuances of yet another country without benefit of speaking the language.   We have taken a very different approach to Portugal, following back roads between small towns as we traveled across the southern coast. In Spain, w e consulted our camper’s GPS navigator between destinations, and she consistently recommended the quickest route, generally involving a four-lane highway with tolls and quick pull-off rest areas.   The countryside sped by in a blur, orange trees and olives and the people working them visible, but not experienced.   Our two days in Seville were a little different.   We parked in a campervan lot right beside the river, just a...