València

Our hotel in the center of València

We left Barcelona thinking we may have visited the nicest city in the world.  Much to our surprise, we like València even better.  Located on the Mediterranean and founded around 138 BC by the Romans, València is Spain’s third largest city after Madrid and Barcelona.

Needless to say, it has an incredibly rich history that is reflected in the city’s compelling blend of ancient and fantastically modern architecture.  This was the site of conquest and crusades; with occupation by Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Moors and other Muslim dynasties, Christian Crusaders and the English to name a few.  It is worth noting given the world in which we live in today, that this city in the 13th century was the home of great conflict between its Muslim, Jewish and Christian inhabitants.

Like Barcelona, the first language spoken here is not Spanish.  Whereas the Barcelonan’s speak Castilian, the primary language here is Valèncian.  Unlike Barcelona where all the signs are in three languages, most of them here forego English.  Nevertheless, we find it easy to communicate and get around.  The metro system is again excellent.

Along the road to València

The four-hour drive along the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona was a real treat.  In addition to some splendid scenery, the roads are in excellent shape and Europeans are simply much better drivers than Americans.  They stay in the right lane exclusively, except to pass, and are uniformly courteous.  People are not driving while holding a cell phone to their ear, there is no road rage and all the drivers are actually using their rear view mirrors.  Having driven a car across most of Europe over the years I know that to be true throughout the continent.  We are driving an underpowered diesel (Opel Infinity) with a manual transmission, so I am usually staying at the recommended freeway speed of 120 kph (75 mph) and we are continually getting passed by Audi’s, BMW’s, Mercedes and the like.  Over 98% of the cars sold in the States come with an automatic transmission.  Throughout Europe, the reverse is true.  There are no speed cops on the roads.  Every so often there is a fixed radar installation monitoring speed and presumably sending you a speeding ticket in the mail if you are going too fast, but these are all clearly marked with large signs well ahead of time in order to give you the chance to slow down.  How civil is that!

The one mistake we made was to travel along a toll road.  When given the option on the GPS to avoid them we figured the toll roads would be easier and maybe cost us around $5.  Imagine our surprise when it costs us nearly $80!  We won’t make that mistake again.

Inside the central Cathedral

Babe and I agree that we could both live in this incredibly beautiful city.  If Barcelona is vibrant and sophisticated, València seems somehow more genuine, relaxed and less touristy.  Formula One runs the European Grand Prix in this city which is considered to be one of the gastronomic epicenters of Europe and the home of paella.  Nearby is where they grow the saffron and special rice that most Spaniards use to make this delicious staple.  We visit one of the elegant restaurants in town with an excellent reputation for serving seafood paella and are not disappointed.  Our meal is fabulous, helped along by the excellent Spanish wine.  Throughout our trip we sample the local wines; I’m drinking the full-bodied reds and Babe the whites or champagnes.  All of them are both sumptuous and inexpensive.

Science Museum Complex

Much of our time in the big cities is spent simply wandering the streets.  On our first day we wander into the famous València Cathedral.  The exterior walls date from the 13th century and look like the walls around a moat.  They belie the outstanding artwork inside; give the Catholic Church credit for supporting an endless source of artistic endeavor.  The central market here is throbbing.  Locals are here to buy staples and get deals; the tourists are here for souvenirs.

Returning from a bookstore where I stopped in to buy a climbing guidebook we walk down a street where several people are sitting around smoking crack.  It is only one block off the main square.  We politely decline when one of the dealers offers to sell us drugs and subsequently learn that Spain has become the new Amsterdam with respect to its lax drug laws.  Interestingly, the crack scene in València felt much safer than I have encountered in other places like Lawrence, Massachusetts.  Still, cocaine is one insidious and destructive drug.

Aquarium grounds

That night we sit outside for dinner next to a delightful couple from Norway and Germany.  We are dining around 10 PM as is the custom here, one we have heartily embraced.  They tell us about the Ciutat de les Arts I les Ciències (City of Arts and Sciences) and their visit to the aquarium there.  They are so enthusiastic about it that we decide to visit the next day.

Wow, we are not disappointed.  Designed by Santiago Calatrava and Felix Candela, the architecture rivals any in the world for its elegance and inspiration; the modern equivalent of Gaudi.  A least a dozen buildings devoted to education and entertainment show off the continuing brilliance of Spanish architects. 

Jellyfish like creature with incredible light show

We buy tickets to the Aquarium where we spend several hours in this outstanding venue.  The jellyfish and seahorse tanks are among our favorites, but the highlight is a dolphin show like you might find at Sea World, only the human trainers here are active participants in the show.  They ride the dolphins and get tossed up in the air up to 30 feet, incredible to watch and not something either of us has seen previously.

Yee Haw!

Next to the Aquarium is a Science Museum.  We don’t have time to see it, but do eat lunch there and play in large inflatable balls floating on one of the reflection pools.  These clear plastic balls are big enough to stand up in.  After you get in one, the attendant fills it with air and closes up the waterproof zipper, leaving you to flounder inside.  Both of us try “walking” on the water, but the instability inevitably causes us to fall and we are reduced to crawling inside.  It was a bit foolish, but fun nevertheless.  Babe is envious of my balance as she lurches around inside her ball like a drunken sailor.

On to Madrid.

Me gracefully showing Babe how it's done

Barcelona

Barcelona and the Mediterranean are spread out behind me

After three days in Barcelona we have failed in our search for a bad meal; can’t even find a mediocre one.  In fact, every bite of every meal is excellent.  And the red wine is superb as well as cheap.  Spain may have 25% unemployment and an economy that is ready to collapse but you couldn’t tell it from all the locals we meet.  They are uniformly polite, helpful and friendly.  The streets are clean, the traffic and pedestrians are well-mannered and the subway system is outstanding.  It is easy to get around the city.  We love the shop windows and ubiquitous street entertainers.  The streets are full of beautiful, dark eyed Spanish girls flaunting their gorgeous long legs with short skirts.  Babe informed me of that fact because now that I am married I, of course, didn’t notice.  Welcome to Spain.

One of the many entertainers frequenting the streets

I had visited here a year ago for work and fell in love with this vibrant city located on the shores of the Mediterranean.  Unfortunately, all three of the guys I traveled with then had their pockets picked so we are on guard and have no problems.  That is the only downside of Spain: they have a petty theft problem that is undoubtedly exacerbated by the poor economy.  That, and the fact that seemingly everyone smokes.  Although smoking is banned inside most buildings, you encounter it everywhere; whether having a bite to eat at a sidewalk bistro or just walking down the street.  The cost to their health care system must be significant.

Casa Batlló

Like most of our travels, our trip to Spain was meticulously planned.  Three weeks before the trip I bought plane tickets to/from Barcelona.  Four days before leaving I rented a car.  The day before we caught our flight from San Francisco we reserved a hotel room for our first night.  That’s it.  No agenda, no additional planning other than we brought climbing equipment and checked the 10-day weather forecast.  Life is short and best lived on edge.  It is nice to have found a partner that flows so easily with that style.

Storefront window, typical of the main boulevard La Ramba

Unlike most of my overseas travel locations the past few years (Egypt, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe), we are surrounded by American tourists.  Even Canada seemed to have far fewer Americans running around.  The Spaniards make it easy by including English on most signage, while I am making every effort to speak Spanish.  Either way, it is a piece of cake to communicate.

Barcelona features the incredible genius of the famed architect Antoni Gaudi.  His unique creations reflect a modernistic approach to design fused with his intense Catholic beliefs.  They are stunning, fascinating, fun and hugely influential throughout Barcelona and Spain (if not the world).  Gaudi’s gothic inspiration coupled with his unique use of light, profound attention to detail, immense practicality and innate environmental sensitivity are unparalleled.

A day in the park

La Sagrada Familia

La Sagrada Familia (The Holy Family), the large church in the center of the city is probably his most famous work.  His vision for that work, which seems to tell the whole story of the Bible in its statues and shapes, is still being constructed today as they work to complete the church.  It is a magnificent building but not our favorite.  We particularly love the immense Parc Güell and spend most of a day wandering through the park, marveling at every detail.  Casa Batlló is another of our favorites.  Not to be missed if you visit this remarkable city.

La Sagrada Familia renovation

Parc Güel.  Notice the attention to detail on next photo

Beautiful, highly functional railing/bench/gutter goes on for several hundred yards

Dali's Lady Godiva

Dali humor

I am a sucker for art of all kinds, so we spend a day at a museum devoted exclusively to the works of Salvador Dali.  Thanks to a mother that made sure her children grew up with an appreciation of art, Babe is a willing companion and equally appreciates the mastery we encounter.  At one point we find ourselves alone for an extended period in a darkened room that contains a number of Dali sculptures.  You can probably guess what happens next....  Spend 10 minutes with his work and there is no doubt Dali would have approved.  His erotic and fantastic images are some of my favorite.

Dinner plate emphasizes Dali's work in numerous media

Walking the streets of Barcelona for three days it is hard to imagine a more beautiful city. We are sad to leave it.

Elegant pharmacy

Married

Patriot jet team celebrating our marriage

I’m sitting next to Babe on an airplane listening to jazz: Forever by Chick Corea, Stanley Clark and Lenny White.  It is an excellent CD.  We are on the way to Barcelona for a few weeks of climbing in Spain and Sardinia.  Although I swore two years ago that I would never get married again, we are on our honeymoon.  Babe and I tied the knot last Friday night in Nevada where we spent three days at the Reno Air Races.  In attendance were my oldest son Colin and Lori’s sister Toni.  It took a total of 55 minutes from the time the limousine picked the four of us up at the hotel until we were dropped back off.  That included a stop to pick up our marriage license at the Court House that is open until midnight 365 days a year.  We had a nice little ceremony actually, with very friendly people at one of the many marriage establishments on the strip.  All marriage ceremonies should be so short.

Take me to the altar Elvis

Babe was stunning in her wedding dress provided by our good friend Gurs (Sangeet) Khalsa who owns Island Importers.  His company specializes in mail order wedding clothes made in Bali.  They are managed by another good friend and our neighbor Narayan who measured us and made sure everything arrived on time.  I was, of course, absolutely splendid in my linen suit that Gurs provided as well.  Only a few weeks earlier Gurs was frantically pounding on our door late at night as water from my condo flooded his business and inventory below after I left the water running in my stopped-up kitchen sink.  That he was there at all is somewhat of a miracle since he lives 30 miles away and rarely visits the business that late.  Fortunately, he caught it just in time and all the clothes were poly-bagged.  We spent the rest of the evening mopping up and drinking whiskey.

And under that dress she is wearing exactly: nothing.

Some of my friends have wondered out loud why I am getting married again.  Babe and I have been together exclusively for nearly three years and there was absolutely no pressure by either of us to formalize our relationship.  We were both divorced after 24 years of marriage; her divorce as nasty as they get, mine much more civil.  Certainly, I feel like I’ve met the perfect partner. In the words of Rumi, “Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.  They're in each other all along.”  That is so true in our case; Babe feels like the female version of me in many ways.

The Urban Dictionary defines Lori (her real name) as, “The most wonderful person in the world. Kind, sweet, beautiful, smart, funny, loving, caring, gentle, perfect in every way. The one you love for all your life. Crazy hot girl, Lori possesses attributes absent in 99.9% of women: truly a lucky find.”   That pretty much sums up how I feel about her, but none of that is reason enough to get married at our age with all five of our sons on their own or off to college.

Always the perfectionist, Babe had purchased the online book Blow by Blow (www.blowtips.com) that promised “Expert Tips on How to Give Mind-Blowing Blow Jobs”.  Seriously, how do you not fall in love with a woman that buys and studies a book like that, quizzes me endlessly on the subject and believes the key to success is practice, practice, practice?  (Turns out the book is full of great, practical advice and should probably be required reading for young wives).  Still, not enough of a reason to tie the knot.

Mr. and Mrs. Bowman

"We'll take the $211 package"

My parents just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary, my grandparents made it past their 50th before the death of my grandfather, and my brothers and sister are still happily married to their first spouses; all at least 20 years later.  I do admit to being a little envious of them, as I don’t like failing at anything.   I have no doubt Babe and I will be together until one of us dies, a feeling I have never had before.

But the primary reason for getting married is financial. Babe came out of her marriage over $75,000 in debt, under water on her mortgage and with no assets besides the clothes on her back and a 10-year old used car.  Whatever my ex-wife thinks about me, the one thing I know for sure is that her financial security is guaranteed for life.  Babe, on the other hand, can’t afford medical insurance and spends most of her free cash paying off her middle son’s student loan and helping her youngest son go to college.  Her far flung and estranged nuclear family is the polar opposite of my extremely close knit extended family; epitomized by the fact that her oldest son still won’t let her see her only grandchild.   The fact is that if I died tomorrow Babe would be out on the street well below the poverty line.  Given my penchant for high risk adventure, I just couldn’t live with that possibility.

Realizing that also caused me to reflect on the fact that some of our gay friends are in the same boat but don’t have the option of getting married.  That is simply not fair, compassionate or sensible.   It confounds me that we continue to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation in this day and age. 

Staying in Reno we are bombarded by political ads every time we turn on the TV.  Nevada is one of the battleground states this election and both sides are spewing bullshit at every opportunity.  I subscribe to Isaac Asimov’s theory that anyone who wants to run for political office shouldn’t be allowed to; the qualified should be dragged kicking and screaming into office to serve.  Kind of like the draft or jury selection.   But after throwing my vote away for years on the Libertarian Party, I now cast my independent vote on the lesser of two evils between the major party candidates.

Sign of the times

Like most people I was hoping Obama would pull our country together.   That hasn’t happened, and I am not happy with his plans to redistribute wealth by increasing the tax burden on high wage earners (although they should not be allowed to scam the system either).   As someone who has worked extensively with federal bureaucrats, I also don’t want the government running anything but essential social services.  The lack of accountability in the federal bureaucracy drives me crazy.  Many of my favorite politicians are Republican: Teddy Roosevelt being at the top of the list.   Obama would do well to take a page from Teddy’s book who pushed through some monumental changes in this country by taking on his own natural constituents when needed.  As a fiscal conservative who believes in a strong military, minimal federal oversight, the right to bear arms and personal freedom, I am a natural for the Republican Party.

But there is no way I can vote for a party that has been hijacked by the Evangelical Christian Right and Tea Party.  A founding principle of this country is the absolute separation between Church and State, something the far right wing in this country would like to change.  History clearly demonstrates that doesn’t work, anywhere.  Pandering to Christian fundamentalists is like funding Muslim extremists, the tact taken by our Saudi “allies”.   I don’t want to live under a government that requires us to be anywhere on the continuum between forcing a mother to have a child she doesn’t want and stoning a woman to death for infidelity.   Is it lost on everyone but me that the poorest, fattest and least educated states in this country are the spiritual epicenter of these hypocritical Christian bigots?  Sound familiar Afghanistan?

Not to mention that the Republicans stranded us in Afghanistan after necessarily striking there following 9/11, and took us to war in Iraq on false pretenses; resulting in the loss of thousands of American lives and destabilization of the whole world.  I much prefer Obama’s strategy of hunting down and killing with minimal collateral damage the actual terrorists who threaten our country.   And although I am about as far from a Socialist as you can get, unfettered Capitalism as currently preached by Romney doesn’t work either.  Greed inevitably gets in the way, and a small minority reaps enormous profits off the suffering of the majority.  Witness the fucked up mess Obama inherited from Bush.

As for the Tea Party, give me a break.  Anyone who has run a company, never mind a country, knows complex problems are only solved by intelligent people working together to forge solutions that are invariably rooted in compromises taking into account the diverse needs and best interests of all the stakeholders.   Today’s partisan politics, spearheaded by the Tea Party, allow for no such solutions on the complex issues that threaten our society like immigration, global competition, health care for an aging population, the environment, energy and over-population.  So this Bandito is voting for Obama, reluctantly.

Babe and I spent my 60th birthday, September 10th (the last normal day), with my parents in Seattle.  I thanked them for having me and learned that my birth had only cost them $150.   Talk about the deal of the century!  My Dad was in the Air Force at the time and had just flown 52 bombing missions in a B-29 over Korea which is why they got such a great price.  Babe completely stunned me two days later with a surprise birthday in Ashland where we stopped briefly to drop off our camping gear and rented Ford Explorer.  I was completely floored. It brought tears to my eyes when I answered the door and my parents walked in having driven down the day before from Seattle.   It was a great night with many of our good friends who took the time to come party with us on a Wednesday night. Thank you!

Life is risky

Sixty is enough of a milestone to make me pause and reflect on my life.  My attitude toward it is best summed up by the following Chinese proverb:

Life is risky; we are all acrobats
Tiptoeing over one bridge or another
To a tightrope walker
The rope is just like home
Having lived life at full tilt, I could die today with little regret despite my countless and continuing mistakes.  I’ve learned, to my chagrin, that mistakes are an inevitable consequence of being human; not making them means not trying.   But the most important thing I have learned is how lucky I am to be alive: an incredible gift.  Life is so short and I feel blessed every day to experience the miracle and diversity of it.  The older I get the more I value my relationships with other people.  With age has come the ability to look beyond most of my prejudices, and I am invariably amazed by the special talent that virtually every person possesses whenever I take the time to get to know them.  That doesn’t mean that I suffer fools gladly.

F-18 showing off

The other major thing I’ve learned is that most of the crap that bothered me over the years just didn’t matter in the long run.  The older I get the less I seem to need.  Happiness comes from hanging out with friends, solving the puzzle of a rock face, standing in a stream with a fishing pole in hand, hauling ass down snow covered slopes, surfing a wave in my kayak on a pristine river, and having sex with my lascivious wife.  Life has become a pursuit of the unexpected while learning to cherish simple pleasures.

"I'll take one of these please"

Reno has a desperate feeling to it.   The streets are empty.  Those we encounter at our hotel the Silver Legacy are invariably old, out of shape and sallow.  Not the most vital of us for sure.  There is a whitewater park running through the center of town that is quite nice which I hope to visit next spring, but Reno is a town that is down on its luck.

Cockpit of vintage Stearman

The air races, on the other hand, are fabulous.  While standing in line for the toilet I encounter a one-armed man smoking a cigar.   He lost his arm at these same races last year when one of the racers lost control and crashed into the crowd, killing 11 and severely wounding 58 others.  I talk with another guy who served as an EMT at that disaster.  It shook him to the core and required extensive time away from his job to begin healing.  Neither of them would think of being anywhere else a year later other than watching highly modified planes scream around pylons on edge at 500 mph, 50 feet off the ground.

Sitting in the vintage Stearman

Babe and I both delight at the beautiful vintage planes and state-of-the-art military jets (F-18’s & F-22’s).  The aerobatic performers and precision air teams all rock, and the awesome power and noise of an F-18 screaming down the runway a few feet off the ground at mach .94 brings a shout of pure joy.  Watching one of the aerobatic pilots flutter upside down to the ground with his engine purposely shut down floods me with memories of my own near misses including an engine failure in my Cessna T-210 when I was 9,000 feet over Rochester, NY.  Good stuff, especially when you live through it.

Sitting on this plane, however, is getting old.  I will be glad when we land in Barcelona in a few hours.