Cagey's "Run" to Spain and Portugal
(May/June, 1998)

When I get juiced on going somewhere new, it's like a "carrot on the end of the stick" in the months prior to leaving. Travel for me is one of the few pure joys in life, and I find it difficult to concentrate on little else as the departure date draws near.

Having visited Europe some half-dozen times in the last 12 years, there were still a few countries that I hadn't visited. I'd always dreamed of seeing Spain, but if I was going to go at all I wanted to try to do it right. With each prior trip overseas it was always, "Well, we have a few extra days here, or a few days there... maybe we could pop down...." Somehow I knew this wouldn't be enough time to see even a small chip of the Iberian peninsula. And because I'm no longer able to do that "After-College, Put-Reality-Off-and-Be-A-Gypsy" trip, my wife and I decided to wait until we could accumulate enough vacation time - 3 weeks with an extra week tacked on without pay - to check out Spain and perhaps part of Portugal. (We Yanks are so goddamned overworked!)

Trying to squeeze in all the key sights of Spain was never the issue - we knew it to be impossible in the time frame we had. But we guessed that in a month's time, we could at least do some of the highlights fairly easily. We couldn't have been more wrong.

We rented a car for a majority of the trip, excluding our first and last days in Madrid. (Wise move as it turned out.) And even though the roads are good throughout most of Spain, the distances can be deceiving. For example, the drive from Salamanca to Cordoba took us nearly 6 1/2 hours, and I was really "balling the jack," so to speak. Nothing like overtaking tanker trucks on two-lane roads in a 4-cylinder to really test one's mettle. And while high speed trains are a great means of travel between the major cities (Barcelona, Madrid, Cordoba, Sevilla), the intercity trains take longer than one would think, and you don't have the convenience of a car once you arrive at your destination. We found that having a car was a huge plus in getting to the smaller towns in our limited time frame.

Qualifying Paragraph   Read no further if you're looking for tales of of slumming it on the Balaeric Islands or Malaga for $10 a night Euro-hippies soaked in patchouli-oil, or grinding it out cheek-to-cheek with freaks, trannies, and the Great Unwashed in some whack beach disco.

Many people who plan a trip to Spain (or even Europe) tend to romanticize it and are often disappointed when the myth doesn't match the reality. I think this is true of some Americans who visit Europe, but in all fairness, I see a lot of starry-eyed Europeans who come to the States in search of the American Cowboy Myth (or some other rubbish like that), and who subsequently wind up on Hollywood Boulevard or Venice Beach like there's some bullshit Cultural Insight to be found there.

So yes, most of the "rural charm" and quaintness of old-world Europe vanished some 40 or 50 years ago when World War II washed the slate clean. Even Spain is a country that's fully engulfed in modernism, with all it's ills, conveniences, "generics," and hard realities of any large, modern country. If you come here looking for the Spain of Hemingway, Don Quixote, or one of El Greco's soft-textured scenic paintings of a few centuries ago, you're likely to be disappointed. Some towns, such as Toledo, even resemble a "working museum" - it's streets and buildings evoke a mystical past, but it's relevance and importance is completely lost in the 20th century. Spain felt like a modern world that was plugged into a medieval shell. But the ancient idiosyncracies still remain. I found that when we hung our for a few days in each place, and scratched under the surface a bit, we found a superb vacation.

In that pretentious vein, we concentrated on visiting the more "authentic" cities and towns, and avoided the Eurotrash hangouts like the Costa del Sol (Malaga) and the Balearic Islands (Ibiza, Mallorca, etc). I have lived at the beach all my life and have seen my share of out-of-their-element tourists. Add to that my disdain for grinding discos (so I'm dated - I don't give a shit) and the whole Planet Party crap, and that pretty much sums up our destination goals for this trip. Goa and Anjuna have plenty of rave parties going on, so maybe do a Google search for that if you're interested. (And if you're reading this at age 22 and laughing, hang tight for about 17 years.)

Everyone, whether they'd been to Spain or not, had "advice" on where to go. "You HAVE to go to Barcelona!" or, "Don't miss such-and-such." We tried to avoid getting bogged down in hitting all the major cities. (I'm much happier hanging out in a "spit-and-sawdust" bar in some small town, rather than in some flashy, over-the-top Trendybar filled with American college kids and Eurosnobs.) I'm sure we missed that part of Spain (the "rave-all-night-and-sleep-on- the-beach-all-day" scene), but I've been there and done that. It gets old. The way I look at it, folks who spend their week or two Barcelona or Malaga have missed a helluva lot too. But to each his own, and if I've offended.... well, too bad? :)

On to Madrid......