Are We There, YET?

Thank goodness Cate and the girls enjoyed that day hike in May…

because it was the inspiration for our summer road trip. We scanned the map for mountains… and situated about 13 hours away the Pyrenees create the boarder between Spain and France. We set out with very neutral expectations. The travel books were all checked out but the librarian had good things to say (in between her incredulous exclamations about our lack of reserved lodging). In the least, we knew we would see some mountains and eat pastries, because we found a last minute Airbnb on the French side. It’s vacation girls, it’ll be fine!!

Tacking on a few hours to drive along the eastern side of Spain for the first time we loaded the car top carrier and set off on the first four-hour leg. Cue the Willie Nelson, snack requests, nursing stops, and a car accident. What?! Nothing like starting off with a bang, literally! We survived the fender bender without injury, except to the vacation budget.

More bangs would come… but only from a complete lack of personal space. Bring on the family time, sisters!!

And how about some celebratory cuisine?

Eat that flavor revolution up, girls, it’s parking garage tailgating from here on out. Jamon flavored chips, hand-torn baguette, and shade! Why do we never see anyone else doing this kind of thing??

Or this? Overflow luggage that can double as picnic baskets!

A few days of city hoping in Almeria, Valencia and Zaragoza helped with our fitness conditioning, but maybe took us a bit overboard on the budget traveler persona.

Lucy: “Am I close?”

Lucy: “Are you sure this is the child’s size cone I saw in the distance?”

Lucy: “I swear it looked much bigger…”

We felt the same about the Bio Museum in Valencia, the outside definitely put the inside to shame.

Pee-ew, it stunk!

The frequent stops kept us from road-weariness,

but everyone was excited to arrive, explore and take a few days off from the check-ins and outs, and the need to constantly empty a refrigerator.

Talk about contrasts… we drove from the desert landscapes of Spain, where they once filmed Spaghetti Westerns, and wound our way up… literally along the 2022 Tour de France route…

through lush pasture lands to stand in the clouds

and wait for the traffic to moooooove.

24 hours did not pass before we started talking about extending our trip. Maybe all this time on the plains of Spain, or maybe because the scenery really was sublime, either way, we booked the best option we could find for an additional week. There was simply too much to take in, hard as we tried, as full as we filled each day.

We sampled all the cheese(balls) and continued eliminating any doubt we were tourists.

We even returned to Lourdes for another special encounter and a healing that kept Lucy comfortably on Ken’s strained back for another week of hiking.

St. Bernadette, pray for us.