Vagabond sunbirds

We in New England, like folks in many parts of the US, are having a rough winter. Snow that won't quit and brutal, sub-zero temps. ("These are good days to teach kids about negative numbers," said Joan, a yoga-mate and retired math teacher.) Meteorologists tell us we're looking down the barrel of our fourth major snowstorm in as many weeks.

Ever since we began traveling Mike and I have made mental notes of cities, towns or villages that would make nice havens in winter, knowing that at some point we'll want to flee Boston's cold for somewhere else's relative warmth. Every once in a while -- including recently, with cheap foreclosures flooding the market -- we've been tempted to buy a place in Florida. But we'd be tied to it, and that's not what we want.

Our plan is to spend the coldest months of our retirement years in various places, renting our way around the world. No mortgage, no furniture to buy, no taxes, no maintenance, no feelings of obligation to go or guilt if you don't. We'd rather find a beachfront cottage or apartment in some pretty place, pay a few months rent, and settle in for an extended stay, immersing ourselves in our temporary neighborhoods and living like the locals. Then, the next year, put down seasonal stakes in a new place.

The Mediterranean and Aegean will no doubt figure in our future sunbird plans. We've scouted beautiful, quiet places like Albufeira, Portugal; Menton, France; Italy's Ligurian coastline; Chania on the island of Crete; Nafplion in Greece's Peloponnese; history-rich Antalya, Turkey; and fishing villages like Spain's Calella de Palafrugell, pictured above.

It's February in Calella in these photos, yet warm and sunny enough for a stroll on the beach or a relaxing rest on a bench overlooking the harbor. It may not be sunbathing weather, but it sure beats shoveling.

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Outdoor art adventures

You don't have to go to a museum to find great art. There are marvelous outdoor pieces in cities and towns all over the world. (Think Calders just sitting there on the sidewalks of New York. There's one that looks like a big bunch of red lollipops downtown by City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge.)

Wherever you travel, keep your eyes open for interesting sculptures, murals and other outdoor installations - like this colorful piece near the castle walls in Tarragona, Spain.

If you live near Boston or are planning to visit, check out this story I wrote for a recent issue of Boston Parents Paper that tells you where to find some great al fresco art in Beantown.

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Spanish valentines

My first view of Seville's Plaza de Espana was in the pages of a 1980s National Geographic. I was so stunned by the beauty of this semi-circular space built for the 1929 Spanish-American Exposition that I put it on my target list of places to see in the world.

It lived up to its magazine image and is one of the most gorgeous public spaces I've ever seen. I loved it.

Lovers love it, too. Beneath the elegant buildings that stand over the sun-splashed plaza, lazy moat with rented boats, strolling families, teenage skateboarders, and bridges with porcelain balustrades, sits an arc of tiled alcoves, one for each of Spain's provinces.

When I visited, couples occupied many of the alcoves. They sat shoulder to shoulder in the ornately tiled, boldly colored alcoves and looked out at the plaza or into each others' eyes.

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Close, but no Gibraltar

With my parents, our family of four had rented an apartment in the El Capistrano complex in Nerja, Spain, just east of Malaga on the Costa del Sol. Our two-week vacation was filled with sun, history, fabulous food and more than passable three-dollar-a-bottle wine, which you could buy everywhere, even at gas stations.

I'd planned a host of day trips, and even though some destinations were far enough to require being on the road not long after dawn, everybody was game, and we visited places like Granada and its magical Alhambra, gleaming gold against the snow-dusted Sierra Nevada; Sevilla and the ornately tiled Plaza de Espana, one of the world's great public spaces; the high, white villages of the remote Alpujarras mountain range, where curing hams hung from the rafters of barns and houses; Ronda, where tourists line the Puente Nueve for the dizzying view of 300-foot-deep El Tajo gorge that falls away under your feet.

One morning we set out early for Gibraltar, driving west on the N-340, a road that parallels the sea and delivers the best and worst of Spain's Mediterranean coast: Quiet beaches, fishing towns and Moorish castles and watchtowers punctuated here and there by the concrete, high-rise hell (unless you like that sort of thing) of megaresorts like Torremolinos and Fuengirola.

We'd been on the road about two hours when we reached Tarifa and got our first glimpse of Gibraltar in the distance. The mighty rock looked like the great, gunmetal hull of a sinking ship. We came, finally, to the town of La Linea de la Concepcion, which sits at the border between Spain and Gibraltar, a British territory.

As we neared the Rock, I realized I'd forgotten my family's passports, which were locked up back at the apartment. I announced this grievous mistake to my fellow travelers and waited for them to justifiably take my head off. But they were gracious. They even laughed.

My parents had their passports, and I suggested they take the car into Gibraltar and enjoy themselves -- at least see the Barbary Apes -- while we occupied ourselves in La Linea.

They didn't want to go alone, so we decided to drive to the border and see if we could sweet talk our undocumented way onto the Rock. We queued up with a score of other cars at the crossing and made our way to the checkpoint. I told the border guard our story and asked if there were any possibility of our making a quick foray into the territory.

The border guard was very kind. He felt genuinely bad that I'd done such a stupid thing and had ruined everyone's road trip. "No, I'm sorry," he said. "It's not possible. And even if I were to let you in, there is no guarantee that the Spanish would permit you to reenter their country after your visit." Right. We'd forgotten about the small matter of the return. Being stuck on Gibraltar would likely lose its novelty after 15 minutes.

Since I was in the border crossing line and there were a dozen cars behind me, the only way for us to leave was to drive through the crossing and turn around. The guard watched us closely as I turned the car and went back into Spain. Technically, we were in Gibraltar, for about four seconds.

We spent the next hour moving around La Linea, looking at Gibraltar from all possible angles so we could pretend we'd really "seen" it. Every once in a while, one of us would point to a spot on a cliff and say, "Look! I see things moving up there! Must be the apes!" We thus convinced ourselves that we'd seen the famed simians, thereby helping to make our virtual visit to the Rock of Gibraltar and the hundreds of miles required to get there and back worthwhile.

We finally set out on the long road back to Nerja, stopping at a seaside restaurant in Tarifa for lunch. I asked for a table by the window, "con vista de Gibraltar, por favor," and we sat admiring the distant Rock as we ate platters of boquerones, fresh, white anchovies marinated in lemon juice and olive oil.

Meal over, we got back in the car and watched Gibraltar disappear in the rearview mirror.

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And so this is Christmas

This will be a short post. It's Christmas morning, and I have turkey to roast. The kids won't be up until noon, so there's time, but I'd also like to fit in a quick run to lose some of the salami, chocolate, deviled eggs and potato salad that I shoveled in at my mother's last night.

One Christmas in Girona, Spain, while the kids slept soundly, I laid awake watching the glow from colored lights in the street blink on and off against the walls of our high-ceilinged hotel room. The room had heavy, green metal blinds, but I couldn't get them to come down, so "Bones Festes," a Catalan Christmas greeting, flashed on and off in yellow and red and green above my head all through the night.

Bones festes.

And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?
Another year over, a new one just begun
A very merry Christmas and a happy new year
Let's hope it's a good one, without any fear.
War is over, if you want it, war is over now.
- John Lennon

Let's demand peace from our leaders in 2008.

Bones Festes.

Catalonia: Beyond Barcelona

I have an article on Spain's Costa Brava in a recent issue of International Living's The European. Click here to read the article. (You'll have to scroll through two stories to get to it.)

Once again, The European's editors changed my story title, once again to something I hate. I submitted the story as "Catalonia: Beyond Barcelona." It was published with the title "Homage to Catalonia: From The Surreal to The Spandex." Ouch.

But, I like working with this publication. They respond to submissions quickly, publish quickly, and pay quickly.

And my paychecks come from Ireland, so I get cool Irish stamps to add to my stamp collection...

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Montserrat's Escolania: Missed the boys by a bread's length

A compact range of jagged peaks pokes the sky southwest of Barcelona, and atop sits Montserrat, a monastery and city on high that legend pegs as a pilgrimage site since the 9th century.

If you have a rental car with plenty of gas and don’t mind puffing uphill behind mammoth tour buses, you can drive to the top of Montserrat. When we got to the base of the mountain, I had a quarter tank, which made an up and down attempt imprudent. So the kids and I hopped on the teleferico and rode one of its bright yellow aerial tram cars up through the brown-gray, serrated peaks to the fantastic, monastic aerie.

Montserrat is a religious site – monastery, basilica and shrine – gone commercial. And I mean that in the best way. It’s an incredible take. From Montserrat, panoramic views extend to the snow-capped Pyrenees and into Andorra, and the dramatic, rocky quarters in which the place itself is enclosed merit awe. Montserrat’s buildings, notably the basilica with its splendid painted ceiling and wall murals, are alone worth the trip to the top of the mountain. Visit during mass, and you’ll see priests and monks gathered at the altar under great chandeliers while scores of worshipers in tourists’ clothing file up to receive communion. Around the basilica’s perimeters, tourists not needing the sacrament snap pictures.

I’ll always think of Montserrat as one of the handful of places I’ve visited where I’ve been gyped, robbed by guidebooks I trusted.

Guidebooks are useful to a point. You can rely on them for the broad sweep – what’s generally good or lousy about a place. But don’t rely on them to tell you when the Escolania, Europe’s oldest boys’ choir – musically-gifted cherubs who live at Montserrat alongside Benedictine monks whose order has reigned at Montserrat for a thousand years – will sing.

They sang, and I missed them, because I trusted my guidebook. Boys whose collective voice equals or outdoes the Vienna Boys’ Choir, the Escolania is a human phenomenon. And I missed it. Even though I was there.

"The Escolania sings only at 7 A.M., on weekdays, in the basilica," said my guidebook. I had so wanted to hear them, but I ‘d already dragged my kids across the world. I couldn’t also drag them out of their Barcelona beds in twilight to get up to Montserrat in time for a 7 A.M. Escolania performance. They’d be on the therapist’s couch for years if I pulled such a thing. So I resigned myself to seeing Montserrat without hearing the Escolania. I’d have to settle for a CD from the Montserrat gift shop.

After the kids and I explored Montserrat – the basilica and the surrounding high peaks carved by nature into surreal, ethereal formations – we retreated to the tourist cafeteria for lunch. It was almost 1 p.m.

I ordered a ham sandwich, which came built upon a foot-long French baguette. The cafeteria wall bucked up against the basilica wall, and, as I ate my long sandwich, I intermittently pointed it at the wall, remarking that the beautiful church we’d just visited was "right through there, and that’s where the boys sing."

We rode the yellow tram back down through stupendous stone peaks to the teleferico parking lot. I’d picked up some brochures and tourist literature in the tram station and had stuffed them into my backpack.

That night, after the kids were asleep, I took out the brochures: "Escolania sings each weekday at 1 P.M.," they all said.

At 1 P.M., while I’d been eating my ham sandwich, the angel-throated boys had been singing on the other side of the wall.

Now, when I listen to the boys on my Escolania CD, I shake my head, knowing I’d been but a baguette and a bad guidebook away from hearing them live.


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Christmas in old, quiet places

There’s something deeply calming about spending Christmas week in an old European town whose cobbles and cathedrals have seen Christmases since the Middle Ages.

The swirl of white lights in the leaded window of an ornament shop in a walled city on Germany's Romantic Road; quiet candles casting a yellow glow inside a crumbling Portuguese church that sits on the sea; the slow, deliberate movement of two dozen Catalans celebrating the holiday by dancing their solemn sardana, arms linked, in front of La Seu, Barcelona's soaring Gothic cathedral.

In an ancient place, on a hushed winter afternoon or evening, such sights both stir and settle the soul. The simplest things often touch us most deeply.

In Tarragona, Spain (above), the unadorned, potted evergreens that sat along the narrow pedestrian passage leading to the cathedral were, there and then in that quiet alley half-hidden from the sun, the most beautiful Christmas trees I’d ever seen.


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Girona: Ask Lance Armstrong how many steps there are

Lance Armstrong has a home in Girona, but we didn’t see him. We visited this medieval gem of a city nestled between Barcelona and the Spanish Pyrenees just after Christmas, and Lance and the many other pro cyclists who make Girona their European training headquarters typically move in around February to prep for the race season and leave after October’s final two-wheeled battles.

So, with no spectacularly fit guys in Spandex around to distract me, I was able to devote my full concentration to Girona’s haunting medieval beauty and rich layers of history and architecture. Girona is one of my favorite small European cities. Quiet, less-traveled and overflowing with color, character and the simple, honest commerce of everyday life. (The city’s name is spelled Girona in Catalan, Gerona in Spanish. The traveler to fiercely proud Catalonia will find more doors and people open to him if he attempts Catalan first, Spanish second.)

The guidebooks said Girona was an hour by road from Barcelona. Because they show you nothing of a place, I eschew, unless time is of the essence, interstates, motorways, autoroutes, autobahns, autopistas and autostradas equally wherever in the world I find them, picking my way instead along small roads that poke and wind and wend their ways through a land’s real life. The kids and I took seven hours to travel 180 kilometers, meandering along the rugged Costa Brava and detouring up, down and into her villages, ruins and pine forests.

The beauty started at Tossa de Mar, its medieval battlement towering over beach and sea. (The stretch between Barcelona and Tossa was an ugly industrial wasteland.) We listened to CatalRadio, familiarizing our ears with the vaguely Portuguese-sounding Catalan. We bought cans of black olives and mussels (and a salami for Adam) at the supermercat in the resort town of San Felix de Guixols and picnicked on the broad oceanfront promenade. We found Calella, a fishing village bursting with color, where we collected sea glass and inspected tide pools. Pants and coats were called for on that crisp Costa Brava December day, but bundled-up Calellans were out in force. Old men and women sat in groups of three on benches high above the sea, families walked along the sandy beach in front of the wildy-hued line-up of old wooden boathouses, and young boys jumped from one grouping of sea boulders to another, surf crashing onto their pant legs, looking for the next place to cast their rods.

We drove into Girona just as the sun was igniting the ochre, amber, green and blue stucco houses lining the Onyar River into an architectural rainbow. Girona has been inhabited for two thousand years, and the old city (where Lance lives) serves up a dizzying menu of delights, from Roman walls to Arab baths to a mystical medieval Jewish quarter to gothic and baroque churches dating from the 14th to 17th centuries.

Adam sprinted up the massive, vertiginous baroque staircase that leads to Girona’s cathedral. According to the guidebooks -- the ones that declared the trip between Barcelona and Girona to be a one-hour drive -- there are 90 steps. Adam counted 91. My money’s on him.


Happy Birthday, Mom


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Copito de Nieve: Remembering Barcelona's sad Snowflake

Today is the last day of April school vacation. Adam’s home from Greece. (He bought me a white stone Cycladic goddess to join the other two goddesses, Greek and Maltese, atop the green marble table in our living room. He read the “Fat Lady of Malta” post before he left. Cool kid.). He and the other high school Argonauts had a fabulous journey. (Cruise the March archives for 10 posts about places the group visited on their Greek odyssey.)

While her brother was in Greece, Dana hung out with friends, went to the mall, spent a weekend on Cape Cod with pal Emily, had a sleepover, listened to music, watched TV, ate macaroni and cheese, jumped and cantered her way through a riding lesson. And went to the zoo.

For weeks, she’d been telling me how much she wanted to go to the zoo, so I took her and friends Alyssa and Micaela to Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo, dusted up, refurbished and proud of its place in Franklin Park, the first jewel in Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace, a string of green places that run from Boston’s heart to the Charles River. Ten years ago, the area was dangerous. Today, the Olmsted and Vaux-designed park is an active urban space that attracts golfers, track teams, walkers, runners, birdwatchers, sunseekers, picnickers, hikers, history buffs, families and zoo-goers.

The girls took off to find giraffes and, probably, 13-year-old boys, so I ventured into the Tropical Rain Forest, a soaring white structure that looks like two sails of the Sydney Opera House welded together. I came to the Western Lowland Gorilla exhibit and watched a new mother cradle her baby and drag it along the floor as she rustled through straw and grass looking for food tidbits. Spectators stood three deep trying to catch a glimpse of the newborn lying cupped in his mother’s great hands. He looked up at her with love and awe. Most of the time, mom had her back to us, as if hiding her baby from our prying eyes.

In the far right corner of the exhibit, which tried, like all well-meaning zoo exhibits, to be a comfortable, happy place for its prisoners, I saw another gorilla. Maybe he was the dad, maybe not. I stepped away from the crowd and stood near him. He turned his head and looked deeply into my eyes. He radiated a sadness that was utterly human. For seconds that felt like minutes, we stared at each other, he telling me something, I trying to tell him that I understood.

The sad gorilla reminded me of Snowflake, Copito de Nieve, who was euthanized by the Barcelona Zoo in November 2003. Snowflake, the world’s only albino gorilla, had been suffering from melanoma since 2001. Taken at age three from Equatorial Guinea, Snowflake, who died at 40 – 80 in human year equivalent – spent 37 years in captivity in his Spanish zoo-jail.

Adam, Dana and I visited Snowflake before he died, and we came away sad. I felt guilty at having paid to see this magnificent creature penned behind glass in a small space. I felt guiltier at having taken my children to see him. There was nothing happy about Snowflake. When he looked at us, it was with scorn, but most of the time he didn’t look at us. He sat, with his back to the “audience.” I wondered how early in his 37 captive years he’d learned that response to his situation. And I wondered whether I could be as strong as Snowflake, were I to lose my freedom as he did. I think I would long since have beaten my head silly against my cage’s Plexiglas walls or found a way to break through them.

I dislike zoos. Especially zoos in old, world-class cities like Barcelona that brim with rich cultural, historical and artistic treasures. Barcelona doesn’t need a zoo. There’s too much else to see and do there. Wild animals don’t belong in downtown Barcelona. If someone released them tomorrow, I venture no one would miss them.

Dana, as those who follow this blog know, is a true lover of animals. She relates to them and they to her. I've seen it scores of times, and it's uncanny. On the day we visited the Franklin Park Zoo, I bet the animals sent a secret message through the place, letting all the residents know that the girl, Dana, the animal whisperer, was in the park. I think Dana would be an awesome zoologist because she feels what animals feel. As long as we have to have zoos, perhaps she could work to make captivity, whether in Barcelona, Boston or elsewhere, a little easier for gorillas – and giraffes, leopards, lions, bats, tapirs, warthogs, wildebeest, ibex, camels, zebras, kangaroos, lemurs, prairie dogs, snakes, mandrills, peacocks, turtles, cockatoos... all the sad Snowflakes.

Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America