jen, this is for you.

okay, so, as a little background to this, by the time we got to barcelona, we'd been on the road for two and a half weeks, and spain had not exactly opened its arms to welcome us. despite the ruggedly amazing terrain (which we seemingly drove through ALL of, starting at the pyrenees, wending through la mancha, finding our way to the sierra nevadas and the south coast and then back up the eastern coast en route to france), we felt utterly alien in spain. i don't know why this is; i'm loath to blame the feeling entirely on our lack of language skills, but i'm not discounting that completely. forunately, the tide started to turn during our brief respite in orgiva, where we met up with some of dom's friends for three days of rest, company, books in english, amazing food and just...being. we'd truly hit the point where all we wanted to do was stand still for a minute. and, frankly, there's nowhere better to do it than the sleepy southern mountain town of orgiva, especially in the company of a pair of people so amazingly wonderful, brilliant and generous as g and j. we were road-weary, tired of hotel beds, tired of driving, and tired of having to make every single bloody decision for ourselves in alien tongues--orgiva was a cold bottle of water when we needed it most.

but i digress.

barcelona was the last stop on our spanish sojourn; i'd been a few years ago, but i had only stayed a few days and all i'd gotten was a case of bronchitis. as such, i didn't have the pleasantest of memories; and i really wanted to change that. so, we booked ourselves into a hotel, prepared to have some fun in the sun in the catalan capital.

well, fun in the sun once we a) found our hotel, b) found a place to park the car and c) found a map so we could figure out where the hell we were, and where we were going (note to self: when going to a country where you don't know your way around and don't know the language, TRY NOT TO FORGET THE GUIDEBOOK AND THE PHRASEBOOK NEXT TIME). in case you haven't heard, parking in barcelona is. a. fucking. nightmare. eight hundred million cars, fifteen parking spots on the street. unless you want to get scuppered by the police, your only option is to stick your car in a garage and pay the exorbitant prices. which seems like a terrible idea at first, until you realize that the charge cap hits after ten hours, and if you stay for 24, you're only paying for ten.

then, parking garages seem like a good idea. however, we were obstinate for about a day before we gave into that.

however, give in we did, and thank goodness. in barcelona, we saw gaudi architecture (the segrada familia thing--gorgeous and weird, and thanks to the spanish civil war and its accompanying civic brutalities, in the process of being completely rebuilt--estimated time of completion, 2015), the view of the city from the top of El Corte Ingles (stunning), and the cathedral, and had a great wander around the remains of the Old City, stopping to catch our breath next to a fountain surrounded by orange trees. We had a glorious meander around the gothic quarter, which is absolutely gorgeous, and conveniently where we found the sushi restaurant where we had dinner.

you know, i can hear you scoffing from here. but let me tell you: you try eating nothing but ham and white bread and olives for three days, and tell me YOU wouldn't jump at the opportunity to eat your favorite food, even if you're far from home. yeah.

we were excited to find the sushi place; excited enough to overlook the fact that the avocado in the salmon avocado rolls was tough enough to be unchewable, forget inedible, and also to overlook that our waitress barely spoke any language other than japanese, which made ordering exciting. however, divine miso soup and an extremely large bottle of wine made the evening that much more enjoyable.

it doesn't sound as exciting when i write about it here; i know i'm not capturing how much i love barcelona's tree-lined streets, its gorgeous architecture and laid-back approach to the world. how absolutely beautiful i find it, and how in my haziest daydreams, i think i could imagine living there some day (in the way that i can imagine living in austin, or paris, or norwich). how one memory, of lunch in a perfect little square, with perfect tapas and perfect weather, will stay with me until the day i die, warming my toes whenever i think of it.

we worked hard to win spain's esteem, and to win our own esteem of spain. and while i can safely say that we're unlikely to settle there soon, i am very, very glad that we went.

jen, my lamb, what else would you like to know?

right then.

okay. sod the travelogue. i should have determined before now that i lack the attention span to see one of those things through, at least for a three week journey. suffice it to say, we went to verchocq, bayeux, fontenay le conte, bergerac (home of cyrano), beynac (where they filmed 'the messenger' with milla jovovich), bayonne (where i saw my first and only bullfight), cuenca (see the entry on fontenay le conte), orgiva (where we stayed with friends, eating home-cured olives and reading a lot), valencia (this was a driveby visit--we got swept off the freeway, took a look, said 'pretty' and then got back on the road), barcelona, sarlat, perpignan (i rode a carousel!), carcassonne...and that's about it. we booked it back to calais after that.

ANYWAY. sorry it wasn't more informative, but the dour looks it was giving me in response to its total neglect was preventing me from making such announcements as: after getting nearly a foot of it chopped off, i now have Agent Scully-circa-1998 hair (after seven years of trying). the pile left on the floor in the salon was a topic of comment and awe.

AND I'M COMING HOME IN A WEEK.

how's THAT for news!

moving swiftly through: fontenay le conte

you know, with a name as flowery and luxurious sounding as fontenay le conte, you'd think that the town would resemble something other than a borstal the size of a minor metropolitan area.

you'd think.

i hope you understand that when i say the less said about fontenay le conte, the better, at least where this trip is concerned. and so, i condense the experience thusly for you: we came. we saw. we stayed in a hostel. we rented sheets. we feared the bathroom. we slept badly in a single twin bed. we got the fuck out of town at first light.

and that's really all there is to say about our visit to fontenay le conte.

moving swiftly on: bayeux

after leaving the friendly embrace of verchocq, we decided to wend our way westwards to the town of bayeux. located in normandy, bayeux is small, charming, and packed to the gills with history. its main attraction (besides its massive cathedral) is the bayeux tapestry, a thirty-some-odd-foot length of linen embroidered with the tale of treacherous king harold and his subsequent death-by-arrow-through-the-eye-socket at the hands of william the conqueror; a pre-enlightenment storyboard, if you will.

for all of its traits as a legitimate piece of 'serious' history, the tapestry is actually quite bawdy at times--if you keep an eye on the illustrations in the margins, you will find depictions of naked men and women, exaggerated in all the usual ways, doin' it (and by 'it' i mean 'their thing'). not necessarily something your high school history books will make a note of, though the audio tour makes quite gleeful mention of it.

after viewing the tapestries, we decided to make a pilgrimage to one of normandy's other great, macabre attractions, the american cemetery at omaha beach. the cemetary is a visual spectacle: immaculately maintained, it is a testament to the beauty of simplicity, comprised solely of rows of simply hewn white marble laid out on a cool green field which overlooks the sea. to say it is tidy is to discredit the sense of orderly serenity that pervades the place; more appropriate (though ironic) would be to say that the cemetery seems pure. there are no garbage cans, but there is not a speck of litter to be found anywhere; it's as though, after all the filth that accompanied the war, the world wants this place, these memories, to stay clean.

appropriate, however, to honor the memories of those who died for something so much more important than oil.

we went to the cemetary to pay our respects, but we were also looking for someone. dom's friend B had a brother. they both fought in WWII, only B made it home. his brother H is buried in the cemetary at omaha; B has never seen his grave. we wanted, while we were there, to find H's grave and bring B back a few photographs of it, as he is getting on in years and unlikely to make it out to normandy himself. while as a gesture, it's not as good as being able to bring him there, we hope it will bring him some happiness, just to see the green hills where his brother rests.

our sojourn in bayeux lasted two days; long enough to get some culture and mangle some french, eat some tasty duck, knock the car into a concrete planter, do something good for someone, and brace ourselves to be hurled once again into the great unknown.

also, to resolve to bring a guidebook next time we came to france.

let's get it started: verchocq

we start this adventure in a gentle way, stopping off to take a few days' sojourn with friends in normandy before striking out on our own. the clan had rented a farmhouse in a town by the name of verchocq, which stood squarely in the middle of nowhere and qualified for the moniker 'town' only because it had a church, a middle school and two pubs, all of which stood within two hundred yards of one another on the same street, the only proper street in the village. the house was huge by anyone's standards, large enough to hold four families (consisting of eight parents and and something along the lines of seven children--i confess i lost count) and a handful of friends (dom, stu and i) happily. most impressively, however, was the fact that it had enough bathrooms to deal with all these people: two on each floor, which essentially meant that the tenant to bathroom ratio was something along the lines of 2.2:1. brilliant.

i will be the first to admit that i went into this leg of the journey with a slight niggling sensation in the back of my head--not only am i generally uncomfortable around children, but as we arrived i was slightly anxious about spending several days with this cast of dom's life. it would seem that, despite the fact that we are now married and therefore stuck with each other come hell or high water, i have a bit of a complex about whether or not his friends like me. never mind the fact that these friends live in norwich, that we rarely see them, that it makes no difference at this point if they actually hate me; it is of the utmost importance to me that we all get along famously.

fortunately for me, my worries were a total waste of time, as the group in verchocq is some of the easiest company i've come across. despite the fact that we were gatecrashing their family holiday, they made us feel right at home. which, quite frankly, we really needed after the whirlwind of activity that surrounded the wedding. we were knackered, and just wanted to relax, drink wine, hang out, mess around with guitars and play ping pong. recharge with some great people while we figured out our next move.

...which you will be hearing plenty about in due course.

journey's end.

and we're back!

after two and a half weeks roaming around france and spain, we have returned to merry olde to discover that england have, after sixteen years, reclaimed the ashes; all hell has broken loose (in various ways) in the united states; that i am, in fact, capable of driving on the left-hand side of the road (on a motorway, no less!) and that it is possible for us to spend twenty days in one another's exclusive company without going mad in one way or another.

also, that we have a sick dependency on the newspaper and the internet.

and so we return, and i return (hopefully with a bit more regularity) to these hallowed halls, to tell the story of just what the hell has been going on around here.

stay tuned.