A winning team does not consist of one member–but many–each sharing her or his gift to make the group succeed. This ideally analogizes people in my life: friends have made me be better than I ever could on my own. So who would be on my dream team? Excluding family–over the next eleven days I’ll …[ read more ]

     Peter Paul Rubens. How his name conjures images of hefty women–but this painter is so much more. His painting is luminescent, literally larger than life. And the Prado offered two massive rooms of his work. He is epic, mythic–taking the tales that have inspired mankind and translating them into oil on canvas.     At …[ read more ]

     Our visit turned up some delightful Spanish concepts–ones I think we would do well to adopt here in the U.S. 1.  They do not waste.      After we found the car we hid underground in Spain (see first Spanish blog), I couldn’t get the lights to turn on in my room. With no knowledge of …[ read more ]

Mountains outside Alicante The Calpe W         We left Ronda and traveled six hours to the coast. The scenery changed–often times becoming the bland rolling plains similar to central Spain . At the coast, things changed. Jagged, bare mountains rose to the left of us, the Mediterranean rolled out to the right.                …[ read more ]

     As my ship glided past in the night, I strained to see the mighty British rock guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean. Darkness swallowed it and we sailed on to Cadiz. This time in Spain, I would not only see Gibraltar, or Gib as the locals affectionately call it, I would climb it. Image …[ read more ]