In the summer of 1998, my girlfriend and I loaded up our little Nissan and left Krakow for Spain with the Lonely Dog-eared Planet in Polish and a map, which we had referenced for the first time on a deserted Carpathian road in Slovakia. Only an hour from home and was lost. On the other side of our constituency there is a blue Skoda, an old couple inside. The woman with the pink honeycomb scarf was in the passenger seat while the husband in the pancake hat stepped out of the scarf, ran over to us, and leaned deep into my open window. . The smell of onions, garlic, and sweat filled the car.
“Where are you from?” he asked in Slovak.
“Krakow.”
“Krakow,” he repeated, scratching his gray beard. “Tell me, how much is a kilo of cucumbers in Krakow?”
“Excuse me?” my girlfriend asked, not sure if something was lost in the translation.
“Krakow. Cucumber. Kilo. How much?”
With an almost straight face, she said, “Three zlotys?”
“Three zlotys?”
He leaned out of the window, grabbed his hat and scratched it. “Three zlotys,” he mumbled and waddled toward his wife.
We folded the map like last week’s newspaper, stuffed it in a glove box and drove laughing through Austria and took the wrong turn to Slovenia, where we stayed at a rustic roadside inn, and then zigzagged through Italy. , where hunger took us to a little mom and pop grocer, where we bought two of the best sandwiches – ever – and ate them on the curb, under the bridge cross the highway.
We had all summer, or at least until we ran out of money, and we lined up around Spain, pursuing nothing more than our impulses and curiosity. The guidebook helped us locate our accommodation and karma taking us on our best and worst dives, all with iron legs dangling from the ceiling, marinating ourselves. in the mist of cigarette smoke. Some of the grease dripped onto the handy little yellow plastic catchers, others stuck to the bar, our heads, our drinks. A bar in Estella is decorated with Elvis paintings and has the first jukebox I’ve ever seen in Europe, mostly Elvis and Screaming Jay Hawkins songs. The owner had Elvis sideburns and a shaggy coat, and he invited us on a motorcycle excursion to picnic in France with his friends the next day. It was an epic vacation, our first time together and completely unplanned.
My partner and I have always been forced to travel impulsively. Before we met in Krakow, where I visited in 1991 and later moved, she hitchhiked to Spain and will do so again. In 2001, the urge took us to Tbilisi, a rudimentary, modern, functioning city that was completely out of business at the time, and a city we found impossible to leave. We certainly became journalists, a gig that allowed us to experience the world for a living, even though the job was never a day off. But we still travel in many forms: visit friends, family, go to work vacations; however, rarely do we have enough time to spread wings for legendary adventures like we once were.
While our travel style has changed (no more acid splashing on the night bus from La Paz to Tijuana), the information age has emerged to make our travel experience better. Those tattered Lonely Planets trying to survive on our shelves have become dusty relics of a lost era, souvenirs. Today, we turn on our computers and do half a trip before leaving home. On a family trip to Rome a few years ago, we booked flights, rented cars, found rooms, and purchased tickets for a tour of the Colosseum online. I’ve been deeply involved in the world wide web’s discoverability, I’ve dived straight down the rabbit hole of Tripadvisor and Google reviews to get general feedback from other travelers like TJMule and TravelBunny to find a good restaurant in the Eternal City. Without realizing it, I clicked all the spontaneity into our trip and guaranteed a terrible dining experience, to boot.
This June, we are back in Spain after a 25-year hiatus to have a wedding in Andalusia with no guidebooks, nor maps. Technology will be our friend, not our master. We rented a car online and used GPS, which for better or worse kept us from getting off the road and away from curious cucumber farmers. Like the old days, we close our eyes and put our finger on the map, except it’s on the screen. “Come to Ronda!” Using the web to book an Airbnb, we left Málaga and “discovered” an ancient Celtic city on the edge of the spectacular El Tajo gorge.
Two and a half decades is a long time for a tapas bar and I wanted our daughter’s first time to be unforgettable, so I checked out a few local blogs. Both recommend Bodega San Francisco, a delightfully lively and hospitable neighborhood just two minutes from our dugout. If a Western tourist were to revisit it, they would no doubt have a problem with the two plasma screens displaying low budget zombie movies with erotic graphics and likely ignore the stunning success of Gambas. al Pil-Pil. Our 12 year old didn’t want to eat anywhere else.
“But honey, there are so many places to try!”
Ronda is not an easy city to retreat to, but we had a glorious three-day wedding in Jerez de la Frontera. The ride took us to the bodegas of Castillo de Machamudo and Tio Pepe and the SAAM Club de Mar by the sea. After frolicking, we skipped the site and wandered the late afternoon streets around the 11th-century Alcázar de Jerez. Stomach rumbling, we sat down at a restaurant along the Plaza del Arenal, adjoining the square. the main school of the city. 500 years ago, they fought duels and bullfighting in this square. Today there is a huge monument to the 1920s dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja. A bored waiter drops greasy menus with generic pictures of what they serve. We looked at them, at each other, and left. An alley near the square leads us into a cozy, colorful courtyard occupied by Mulai Jerez, an artistic oasis of Spanish fusion and lots of wine. Their oxtail wonton is what a dumpling dreams of, while the tuna tartare melts through each tastebud to end up in that special place of great culinary memory.
We spent our last days in Sanlúcar de Barremeda, where conquerors once set out to plunder the New World. Author Matt Goulding, who corroded Spain from the inside out, takes us to the legendary Casa Balbino, whose living torches are just as spectacular as he claims to be. For the rest of the trip, we relied on the advice of locals, tracking our inclinations, and Google maps, which helped me locate the Sanlucar fish market, a super feeling. Temptation forced me to buy a handful of fresh shrimp and cuttlefish to sauté on our Airbnb cookware.
One afternoon, while the girls took a late afternoon nap, I rambled the barrio into delicious bodegas, less sociable dives and Taberna der Guerrita, a local’s hideaway that had refilled wine glasses. in 40 years. The next day, I shared my favorite discoveries with my wife and stopped at Guerrita, where we moaned chorizo stuffed mushrooms curled toe by toe. We returned the next day for our last dinner in Spain.
If I wasn’t too shy, I would have known that Taberna der Guerrita has an extensive Spanish wine collection, an exceptional tasting room in the back, and is a destination for some of the land’s big wine enthusiasts. country. However, knowing it in advance will only derail a happy, if short, if not happy family vacation. “No! Don’t repeat!” they will say over and over a familiar chorus. “There are so many places for us to try!”
