Jeanne in Figeac

Jeanne on the trail.

Have you ever thought about the goats that goat cheese comes from? Check out those udders!

Jeanne above Cajarc

The river in Cajarc

A prehistoric burial site.

Abandoned building along the trail.

Cahors

The famous bridge in Cahors

Carcassonne

Avignon's famous bridge.

Southern France

I'm having technical difficulties, and unfortunately am having troubles getting my photos up. I'll try again later this week--some of them look spectacular.

I loved southern France. Avignon wins the prize for city that I'd most like to live in.

After leaving Figeac, we hiked for three days through tiny little towns until we reached Cahors. I'd definitely recommend the hike that we did, or even a drive through the area. The first two days were very tough, the third almost impossible, largely because of the weather--it was 75 degrees the first 2 days, and over 100 on the third. We wandered along dirt trails and old roman roads past churches, hamlets, hundreds of cows, prehistoric burial mounds, and field after field of the most beautiful wildflowers I've ever seen.

My favorite quotes from my sister:
"This is more intense than I expected"
"I've never had a workout that made my legs this sore"

Both are quite apt. Oddly, what hurt the most for me were my hips, I think because of the weight of my pack. I also have blistered feet, abrasions on my back from the pack rubbing, and bruises on my sternum from the pack as well. It was definitely a very physical experience! I'm really glad we made it as far as we did. I feel quite proud of our efforts.

Favorite places along the way:

Faycelles: a "town of flowers." It consists of about 20 homes positively overflowing with flowers.

Grealou: about 10 houses with a stunning graveyard.

Cajarc: average town with a way-above-average river view. There's a campground right next to the river with canoe rentals, and mountain climbing right behind it. It would be a great place to spend a few days.

Varaire: possibly my favorite town along the route. It's a small farming community with 1 hostel and a great restaurant. We had dinner family style with a dozen other hikers from Germany, Spain, Holland, France, and Switzerland, all of whom had hiked other areas of the trail before. I really enjoyed talking to them. Useful pieces of information: after three days, your muscles adjust to the walking, and the spanish portion of the trail is much easier.

Cahors: the obvious highlight of Cahors is Pont Valentre, a massive bridge built in the 14th century. It's remarkably well preserved. I particularly enjoyed walking through the medieval quarter, a maze of narrow streets and ancient homes. We learned a bit about local history from a young Frenchman eager to practice his English. It was the first time that I've been told that I have a strong accent, which I suppose I do if you're used to hearing the queen's english.

On Saturday we caught a train to Carcassonne, one of the best preserved walled towns in all of europe. It's breath-taking, and extremely hard to take at the same time. After several days of being away from the tourist track, I was completely overwhelmed by the crowds. The best way to do Carcassonne? Spend the day exploring the countryside and arrive in the town after 5. The church and museum are skipable, and you could easily explore the town by night.

Below the walled city is the living town of Carcassonne, which deserves a visit as well. It's missing the castle and walls, but is equally old--the central market has existed in the same location for nearly 1000 years.

From Carcassonne, we took another train to Avignon, the city of my dreams. It has the elegance and history of Paris--it was the seat of the catholic church in the 13th century--all the charm and friendliness of a small town, and is in the curve of a spectacular river. I didn't see anyone practicing water sports, but it looked ideal for waterskiing. It's also were Cote du Rhone wine comes from, and a lot of amazing cheese.

I'm back in Paris now, and plan to stay put until my flight home on the 28th. I can't believe the journey is almost over!

The Chemin de St. Jacques, Days 1-3

I just finished the three most intense hiking days of my life. I'm a swollen, bruised mess, but am very proud of myself for making it this far.

My sister (I'll post pictures next week for those of you that don't know her) arrived in Paris on Sunday, and we took a long train ride to Figeac (it's near Cahors in southern France, if you'd like to look it up) on Tuesday. It's an ancient town--many of the buildings are over 800 years old. If you're into medieval architecture, Figeac is the place to go. The plan: hike from Figeac to Mossaic in six days along the traditional pilgrimage route. The Chemin de St. Jacques has multiple routes throughout europe, culminating at the northwesternmost tip of Spain. The route (especially the Spanish portion) has gained a lot of popularity in recent years.

We've survived the first three days, traveling from Figeac to Cahors.
Day 1: 31 km
Day 2: 27 km
Day 3: 31 km

Jeanne and I are completely exhausted. I'm actually too tired to write for long, but promise a complete update in a few days. The countryside is gorgeous beyond belief, and we've made numerous friends along the way. I think we're throwing in the towel tomorrow, and plan to take the train to Avignon for a few days to let the blisters heal.

More to come...

Welcome Charlotte Claire Stokes

I think many of you have met, or heard of, Hayden's sister Jessica. She just had a beautiful baby girl on June 7th--7 lbs, 8 oz., 19.5 inches.

Bordeaux

I didn't love Bordeaux--it's very similar in appearance to Paris, just a bit more run down and with three times the dog poop on the street. I got the impression that the Bordeaux region is the place to visit, not the city itself.

I did like visiting the belfry of the Basilique St-Michel. At one time, it was a notorious prison--after the criminals died, their bodies were placed outside, for all to see. The pictures were disturbing, to say the least--dozens of rotting corpses propped against the wall. Now it's just a bell tower, but one that includes access to the inner workings of the bells. I enjoyed watching how everything works.

El Escorial

I really enjoyed seeing El Escorial. In addition to holding one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, it has amazing art, a massive series of burial chambers, and a spectacular cathedral (including a crucifix of Jesus with real hair, which I don't think I've ever seen before). It goes on and on. There's a carefully marked path that visitors have to follow, and for good reason--it's quite possible that you could get lost and never find your way out. Oddly, there were hardly any other tourists at all. Everything is thoughtfully labeled in English.

El Escorial

Inside the Hall of Battles. I carefully planned my outfit to match the walls.

Alicante

Alicante

The beach to the left is where we spent our days. Alicante is on a major shipping line--I enjoyed watching the freighters pass by, like the one in the back of this picture.

Toledo

The entire town looks just like this--ancient, well-maintained 2-4 story buildings, narrow passageways, and huge tarps overhead. It's a smart idea--it was over 100 degrees the day we visited, and the shade really helped.

Toledo

Toledo, the old town, is atop a hill surrounded by medieval walls. Immediately outside the walls in every direction there's a fair amount of modern construction, as you can see here.

Night view of the Alhambra

This is taken from the San Nicolas viewpoint that I mentioned earlier--it's well worth the climb to see.

The Generalife, Granada

This section (the gardens) the Alhambra was by far the most attractive, in my opinion. Everything else is incredibly dry and dusty. Doesn't "generalife" sound like the name of an insurance company?

Granada

Inside the Alhambra.

Switzerland

Sun Hee, Elese, and Alicia on the Thun See.

Grindelwald

I don't know if Heidi was actually supposed to be from Grindelwald (they do have a Heidi museum), but doesn't this look exactly how the story describes?

Innsbruck

If you can believe it, this isn't even the top. We took yet another cable car after this point.

Innsbruck

This is about 2/3s of the way up the mountain. Austria, like Switzerland, is a country that believes any place worth visiting deserves a bar. I'm sitting on the balcony of one.

Innsbruck

Innsbruck is stunning. Elese is standing at the base of the cable car that takes you to the top of the mountain. As you can tell from what Elese is wearing, the valley itself manages to stay quite warm while the Alps retain much of their snow layer.

Salzberg

Salzberg--it rained the entire time. This picture pretty much sums up the experience there.

Hallstatt

Directly across the lake from Hallstatt--much flatter terrain. There are year-round ice caves in the mountains right behind me.

Hallstatt

Here's Elese on one of our numerous hikes in the area. We actually went much higher, but there gives you a good idea of what the views were like. The church below is next to the 12th century chapel with skulls that I mentioned earlier, and surrounded by beautifully maintained, contemporary gravesites. The whole skull thing came about as a practicality--the graveyard was too small to accomodate new bodies. After twelve years, you were dug up and added to the collection in the chapel. These days (the population is much smaller), you need to specifically request in your will do be placed there.

Madrid (Museums)-Toledo-Alicante

The art in Madrid is amazing. Mind-blowing. Spectacular. I´m actually struggling for adjectives here--let´s just say that I´ve seen some of the best art of my trip. I´d recommend spending at least 3-4 days in the city, and doing one museum a day, rather than packing them all in and risking brain overload.

My favorite is the Thyssen Bornemisza, recommended by my friend Jessica Walling-Stokes. I was initially skeptical when she told me it was one of her top three of all time, but I have to agree. It covers art from about 1600 to the present (earlier work from the collection is at the MNAC in Barcelona) and includes more than 800 paintings. The collection is arranged in such a way that it´s possible to see the development of numerous art styles. The audioguide explains why changes occurred, and also goes into considerable depth about the contributions and talents of individual artists. I´m proud to say that I finally understand Rothko.

I also visited the Prado, which was overwhelming in size (here´s a staggering fact for you: the Prado only has room to display about 1,700 of the 19,000 plus works in its collection. Plans are underway to make a space large enough for it all. Can you imagine trying to see all of that in one day?). The Prado is much more specific in scope and artists (I think there were 8 rooms devoted to El Greco, for example), and much more crowded. If forced to choose, I´d definitely say that the Thyssen collection is better, but why choose? Any trip to Madrid is worth seeing both.

I´ve noticed over the years that people generally have a strong preference for Madrid or Barcelona. I´m definitely in the Madrid camp. The city is organized, easy to explore (really good public transportation system), and full of interesting people. Elese and I spent a lot of time wandering and discovering new things--a large music market outside the Prado, numerous squares filled with cafes, foreign language movie theaters (we saw Star Wars, which was quite watchable).

A note on the food in Spain: how do people survive on it? I´m ready to eat some fruit and veggies--everything here is fried or a starch. It´s quite good, but leaves you feeling very vitamin deprived. I´m reading ¨The New Spaniards,¨which talks about how the Spanish diet has actually dramatically improved in the last two decades--it used to be almost entirely potato and bread based. I´ve also found that Spain is a three drink a day place (at least)--most people have their first cocktail at lunch and continue on through the small hours of the night.

Elese and I took a day trip to Toledo on the 4th. The town is charming, very medieval, and incredibly hot. For the first time in our trip, it topped 100 degrees. I loved being there, and was glad to just be there for the day, if that makes sense. It´s actually the first town in Spain I´ve been in that I thought I could tolerate studying abroad in. The tourist sights are limited and disappointing, but the place itself could be fun to live in.

The highlight of our day there? We stumbled across an art opening for Donovan Wylie and Art Chantry. Chantry wasn´t there, but I did get up the nerve to talk to Wylie (he´s an Irish photographer). I´ve really had a hard time finding new people to relate to in Spain, and this opening was packed with ¨our people.¨Finally people over 20! That care about art! They even served free food and drinks.

We´re now in Alicante for three days, and will return to Madrid for a final trip to El Escorial before Elese flies out. Alicante is on the Costa Blanca, near Valencia. It´s clearly a tourist destination, but more of a place that Spanish people vacation, not foreigners. I feel incredibly relaxed here. The food has been wonderful (we ate at an upscale restaurant called Entre Tapas y Vino last night and had local cheese, local wine, and several delicious fish dishes), and the beach is clean, sandy, and full of interesting people to look at. Both of us are sporting odd red spots from the places we missed covering with sunscreen, but we´re pretty happy.

Elese says she´s very happy and loves the beach here. She´s hoping she´s not too sunburned...

Granada-Madrid

I mentioned in my last post that my initial impression of Granada was quite favorable. I´ve decided that Ronda is still holding the top Spain position, but Granada is a close second. It´s very different from the other cities I´ve been in--gritty, full of life, a bit untamed. I frequently felt that something--anything--could happen there. Elese and I witnessed our first bag snatching (Elese was actually pushed out of the way by the sprinting thief), saw homes built in caves, wandered through a gypsy neighborhood, and had numerous other unique experiences.

Tourists (lots of them) go to Granada to see the Alhambra. I´d highly recommend going there, but don´t make it your primary reason for visiting--the city itself is more interesting. The Alhambra, like the Alcazar in Seville, is a massive palace complex inMoorish style (in the case of the Alhambra, it´s authentic; at the Alcazar it´s someone´s idea of what Moorish style should look like). All you see is the physical structure. I wish that someone would put some time into bringing the place to life, either through the audioguide or through some furnishings or pictures. It´s very hard to visualize what the place looked like when occupied. The gardens are lovely, and have great views of the city.

This isn´t to say that I didn´t like the Alhambra; I just was a bit bored by it. I definitely preferred the two walks Elese and I took up into Sacromonte (the gypsy neighborhood with cave houses) and the Albayzin (an ancient Moorish neighborhood with winding streets and a phenomenal view of the Alhambra. We watched the sunset from the San Nicolas viewpoint, a view made famous by President Clinton´s visit while he was in office. Sacromonte was fascinating--it didn´t exactly feel unsafe, just unpredictable. I didn´t see many gypsies living there (Granada apparently has a population of 50,000 gypsies, the largest in Spain)--the area has been taken over by ¨drop-outs¨, for lack of a better term. Granada teemed with these people--a youngish, international crowd of unwashed, dreadlocked, haven´t-called-home-in-several-years crew. I definitely got the feeling that the city is a place you can disappear in.

Another reason to love Granada: free food. Bars serve a dish (we had fried fish, paella, and numerous small sandwiches) with every drink you order. It´s awesome--the beers cost about $1.50, and you can nibble all night.

The weather is still coolish (though rapidly getting hotter), which has actually worked in our favor. It´s much easier to tour cities this way (I can´t imagine how tourists normally deal with the Alhambra--we were in the direct sun for 6 hours there, which is hard enough to take when the weather is below 80, let alone 100). We´ve changed our plans yet again to take advantage--Madrid, Toledo, the beach on Sunday and Monday, then back to Madrid.

We´re touring Madrid at a leisurely place. Last night we visited the Reina Sofia (modern art) Museum. I really enjoyed it, despite the fact that I only liked 2 sculptures and 3 paintings out of the entire collection. Odd. I can´t quite put my finger on why it was still a good experience--maybe the setting? The lighting was great, and the crowds were minimal.

So far today we´ve walked from el centro (where we´re staying) through the various famous plazas to the plaza de espana and back along the gran via, the main shopping street. We stopped at the Palacio Real (royal palace) for a brief tour. If you´re into palaces, it´s a painless one to visit, and is quite attractive (it´s the third best in Europe, after Versailles and the Schonbrunn in Vienna). The crowds were nothing like those I battled at Versailles.

We much preferred an art exhibit we stumbled into across the street. The new cathedral (a spectacular work of modern architecture) had been completely turned into a museum space dedicated to works about the Virgin Mary (pretty much just her--no pictures of her holding the baby Jesus). They were grouped thematically--Mary with Saint Anne, Mary standing on top of a snake, Mary in dark blue, Mary in light blue, Mary with angels, etc. It was fascinating. Each piece listed where it was from--whoever curated the show really pillaged the churches of Spain. These weren´t small works--many were 20 foot statues or 40 foot paintings.

We also more-or-less stumbled into a publishing exhibit on Don Quixote at the National Library (Elese likes libraries, so we went a bit out of our way to see this one). The lower level was dedicated to first editions of the book--over 300 of them. The first printing ever, the first illustrated edition, the first Africaans edition, the first edition in two parts, etc., plus numerous hand printed and bound copies. Oddly, they didn´t have the edition illustrated by Picasso, the art from which is plastered all over Spain.

This afternoon: the Thyssen Museum. We´re saving a day next week for the Prado.

Elese´s comments:
As usual Alicia sums things up very well. I agree with Alicia that the Alhambra wasn´t all I was expecting it to be - the gardens at the Alcazar in Seville were definitely more stunning - but I don´t want to give short shrift to the beautiful tile work and ceilings in the actual palace (Palacio Nazaries) in the Alhambra. I loved Granada in general. It felt very "other" and exotic.

Alicia has been very game to trek to see libraries so far on this trip & I would like to thank her for that. The last library on the list is in El Escorial (a day trip away from Madrid) ...

A few more unordered thoughts about Spain:
- The big male hairstyle here, and in Austria & Switzerland, is the Duck - a mix of mullet, faux-hawk & rat-tail. It´s awful and it´s everywhere.
- There appear to be no paper products in Spain, outside of toilet paper.
- After a full day of sightseeing, it´s difficult to stay up late enough to take advantage of the Spanish nightlife.

Oh and I´m adding these comments to the post after we visited the Thyssen-Bornemizsa Museum & I know that Alicia will have a lot to say about it but I give it two thumbs way up. I was overwhelmed. It was inspiring.

Nerja

The "Balcony of Europe." Even on a gray day, Nerja is a very pretty place. The balcony juts out over the cliffs, with beaches on either side.

Ronda

Ronda's famed medieval view--it's worth visiting just to see this in person.

Ronda--the bullfighting ring

I'm in my bullfighting stance, ready for action.