Travel Day

Due to the pleasures of a small airport, I set a 4:00 am alarm for my 5:45 flight from Bozeman. My understanding wife drove me to the airport. Then Minneapolis, Atlanta, and arrive in Barcelona by 9:00 am Saturday (20 hours) for a bike assembly and 30 km ride down the coast to Stiges.

I have an affinity for travel writing; I started this trip with Pleasures and Landscapes: A Traveler’s Tales from Europe by Sybille Bedford, a collection of essays published in 2003. She offers a similar perspective on travel planning:

The dice, indeed, are once more loaded. It’s a sellers’ market. Take it or leave it, and if you don’t take it now it’ll be gone. So in February we buy or tickets for September. Yet the quintessence of good traveling is still freedom.  . . .  But no: the reservations.  . . .  Here is where they get us, tied hand and foot, playing our fears (not without cause) of finding ourselves without a bed or a booking.  . . . Travelers of the World Divide. Disperse, narrow your compass go underground.

It was in that spirit that I decided to make a journey, and unambitious journey . . . without a timetable or a single reservation.  . . . The thing is to choose one’s territory, get oneself across the Atlantic or the Channel, count one’s days, and make sure of a booking home. Within that framework, the choice—up to a point!—is ours.

—From The Quality of Travel, 1961

What a pleasure to get updates from others in the group. Before universal cell service and wifi, meet-ups were spotty. Now we locate lost spouses by cell at Costco. Stuart has already checked into our Stiges lodging; I'll share a room with him Saturday evening. Stuart and Stephen have been enjoying urban Barcelona, planning to take the train past El Prat Airport on Sunday and cycle the remainder of the distance into Stiges. With the train station within blocks of the hotel, I wonder exactly how far they will actually cycle.

Small Beer.  After a complicated journey from the airport to the city, we had a late lunch of big beers and small food.—Stephen Blagg