Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain

Another day in (several) paradises. I left Michele and Modesta’s house on Tuesday, July 18 at the early hour of 9:00 am. This departure is a segment of my trip that will last a week or so and is an independent part of my trip. I will be foraging for myself, that is, no hotel reservations down the road, no idea of when or what I’ll eat or even where I’ll eat my next meal. The familiar daily shower will also become iffy.

The day started with a back-road adventure from just south of Toulouse to the West, driving for several hours with the Pyrenees over my left shoulder. I was heading for Bilbao, Spain with the primary objective of seeing the Guggenheim Museum – both the architecture and the art found within. From the pictures I’ve seen and stories I’ve read over the past 15 years, it is quite the engineering feat, not to mention the artistic appeal.

Bilboa is about 250 miles from Michel’s house and I was presented with the usual option of taking autoroutes (toll roads) which are very fast and come with toll booths along the way or taking what is today considered “back-roads”. These back-roads are really just the old highways that were replaced by these autoroutes. The old highways have plenty of turns, stop lights in the larger towns, round-abouts in every little village, trucks and tractors hauling hay, etc. down the road often at an escargot’s pace. The newer autoroutes have none of those obstacles, in fact, they have few entrance and exit ramps. If you miss your exit, you may have to go another 25 miles where you will exit, pay for the additional distance, turn around, get back on the toll-road and pay for the distance back to your missed opportunity.

The toll roads are fine examples of engineering feats as they often bend and curve around some mountains while tunneling right through others and often bridge the gorges on the other sides. Some tunnels are a mile long through solid rock and the bridges are often a quarter-mile high and over a mile long.

I like the toll roads for the obvious reasons of efficiency but the views are often bad or at best, fleeting with no opportunity to pull over and enjoy them. That is why I often take toll roads for segments of travel but then exit and move over to the old highway. I don’t have any statistics but my guess is that the drive-time increases three or four-fold. But, I have the opportunity to see much more from behind the wheel at the slower pace and there is usually a convenient spot to pull over, relax with the new-found scenery and maybe have a lunch and/or take some pictures.

My trip to Bilbao was a mix of these two roads with the added excitement of deliberately taking a very small road from Orthez, France (just a few miles west of Pau) up and over the Pyrenees to Pamplona, Spain. This 100-mile route took more than 4 hours but gave me an interesting perspective of how wide the Pyrenees are. In 1981, I had actually done some mountain skiing and down-hill skiing in the Pyrenees but did not have an idea of their true size. This mountain road also helped me understand how difficult travel was in much earlier times. It was a very exciting trip on several levels. I had to pay attention at every curve of which there were hundreds. It seems like there were that many small villages along the route too, displaying a really interesting contrast in architecture to that of the houses in the rolling hills in other parts of France. The houses in the rolling hills have flatter roofs while the mountain dwellings have steeper roofs to help keep the snow from building up and collapsing the roofs. In fact, as you drive from rolling hills to the foothills and then into the mountains, the roofs gradually get steeper.

I arrived in Pamplona, Spain in the early afternoon. I was lucky as the week-long San Fermine Festival called “Running-of-the-Bulls” had occurred a week earlier and the town had returned to normalcy. Besides, I had been there on my 6-week trip in 1974. I did not run with the bulls that time either. I spent a couple of hours there, tracing the 500-yard run that the 6 bulls and thousands of crazies take for 7 days in a row. I visited a lot of the stores along the route and they still had their usual display of photographs dating back to the 1940’s. Some of the photos are really quite graphic and served as a convincing argument to avoid this macho test of courage (stupidity?) back when I was last in Pamplona at the age of 28.

Bilbao was calling so I hopped onto the autoroute for the 150-mile trip. While getting gas at a stop along the way, a huge thunderstorm appeared so I decided to crawl in the back of my station wagon and get a bit of sleep until the storm passed. Well it rained all night so I had a good night’s sleep right there. Honest, it was great. I have plenty of room to stretch out along one side of the back with my back pack and food box along the other side. I have a light-weight sleeping bag, an inflatable back-packer’s mattress and one of those sheets that is sewn up into a sack - you know, like the one’s you get when you get a sleeper car on a French train. In fact, my sheet is the very same one I stole from the French train system in 1976!

I awoke about 7:00 AM for an early start to Bilbao, arriving about 8:00 AM. I told you those autoroutes were fast! I had two hours to kill before the Guggenheim opened so I strolled around the outlying neighborhoods and got some interesting pictures as a result of my foray. The Guggenheim building was even more interesting than I had expected. It was quite impressive and represented a unique blend of architecture and modern art. It made me wish I had stayed in the UT School of Architecture instead of getting that degree in International Business. Oh, well, fun-and-play with a BBA!

The first floor was a permanent exhibit of curves in all kinds of medium, including a variety of huge sheets of steel, 3-inches thick, as big as the walls of the outside of a house and rolled into all kinds of shapes. They were arranged in a vast array of shapes in the middle of a very large room. Most were arranged like walls so you could enter maze-like structures and enjoy being enveloped in 100,000 pounds of steel. Sorry, taking pictures was forbidden so you’ll have to see it for yourself or look it up on the Internet.

The second and third floors contained a traveling exhibit entitled “Russia” and contained what I believe is the definitive collection of Russian art – from the old masters through the art revolution after Stalin’s death, Kreuschev’s reigning in (again) of art and finally Gorbachev’s “Glasnost” policy that not only brought the Berlin Wall down but resulted in the demise of the Soviet Union. I bet you did not know I knew so much about Russian art. Well, I did not before seeing this exhibit.

I left Bilbao in the afternoon and headed for the French border, again mixing autoroutes and the more interesting highways.

Eye witness to Tour de France

NOTE: I am also placing some photos in an album in my MSN Group. If you care to see these additional pictures, you can go to > http://groups.msn.com/Jimtex/shoebox.msnw …and click on the album “Europe – 2006”

It is July 17. I’m still in the South of France because it is so comfortable here for many reasons. We are having a heat wave that is a bit hotter than normal. The temperature is in the 90’s every day so it is just like being home in Texas.

After about a month of seeing the southern central part of France, I’m now near Toulouse again. My friend Michel and his wife Modesta, invited me to stay at their chateau again and I’ve been taking day trips to interesting sights in the area.

Three days ago, I drove south about 60 miles to the countryside near Pamiers to see the 12th stage of the Tour de France. That was very exciting. I arrived early, (about 3 hours before the race passed by) at what I thought would be a good spot – just before a high peak where the riders would be going slower. It was also at a turn which would slow them down some more, perhaps letting me take extra photos. After an hour or so, the side of the small road was packed with the cars and vans of other spectators. About two hours before the riders would be passing by, at least 100 vehicles of all shapes and sizes came by with people inside throwing all kinds of items advertising everything from the newspaper to sausage. My location seemed to be ideal for collecting a bunch of stuff of which I have absolutely no use. After the caravan of advertisers came a hundred or so cars belonging to the press.

During all this time, I visited with the folks who had parked near me. I met a nice young French couple with a 7-year old son who were also attending their first Tour de France event. Several other folks heard my Texas accent butchering their beloved language and stopped by to chat. On my car, I had also placed a small Texas flag that I brought with me, just in case Lance Armstrong came out of retirement. He did not.

Finally, and somewhat anticlimactic, the riders passed by and even though it was at the end of a long uphill stretch and well into the race, they were FAST! I was able to take a video of the procession but had no time to reach for my other still camera. There were two groups: the small pack of 4 or 5 leaders followed by the rest. Within a minute or so, it was all over, except for the riders of course who had another 60 miles or so to go before reaching the day’s finish line in Carcassone. All the spectators then piled into their respective cars/vans and waited in line in the hot sun, going nowhere on a small country road for almost an hour.

Remember that I told you I had arrived early enough to find a good location? Well, that location included a nice big tree that provided me with plenty of shade so I sat on the back of my station wagon, sipped on a bottle of cool water and munched on a couple of breakfast bars containing some unknown (to me) fruit.

All this happened on the 14th of July and as everyone knows, France’s national independence day, so that evening I drove about 30 miles north to Toulouse to see the fireworks. The traffic, parking, crowds and fireworks were much like we experience in Austin. The fireworks lasted about 20 minutes and were well-coordinated with the music that was played on some very large speakers. The difference being that they played the French national anthem and the music was all classical (that means no Lee Greenwood or Willie).

This past weekend, Modesta’s relatives from Spain came to stay at her chateau. They came in two cars and there were 14 of us at the table for a bunch of meals. Now I was faced with additional communication problems: trying to get along in my French, trying to remember things from the three years of high-school Spanish and then trying to understand the Catalan pronunciation (it is different from the Spanish we learn in Texas). A good time was had by all as it was basically a family reunion and they had the additional entertainment provided by me trying to speak their language. The food and wine was fantastic too.

Speaking of wine, Michele is an experienced wine collector and has a wine cellar beneath his house that would be the envy of any collector. His “cave” holds 100’s of bottles of all kinds of wines, many quite old and most of the finest quality. I asked to be allowed to sleep in the cave one night, thinking that I would gain additional knowledge of fine wines by doing so – but he said my snoring might disturb the wine. He did allow me to take both still pictures and videos of his cave.

Finally, some news from Jim!

Howdy from the South of France.

You would have thought that during the past month of traveling, I could have found the time to make a lot of entries into this blog. Well, I’m sure I had many opportunities to do so but I’ve experienced something interesting and certainly unexpected while traveling.

I remember when I was planning this trip I thought, “wow, in 2006 I have all these tools available to share my daily adventures: email, this blog, my personal Web site, digital camera, digital video camera and on-line phone that only costs $.02/minute!” I diligently updated my email address files, created this blog, bought a digital video camera, All these things certainly did not exist in 1981 when I last traveled to Europe.

In spite of the ease of communication and these numerous ways to communicate via the Internet, I have not been compelled to utilize them. Yes, during the first week or so, I felt the need to maintain contact with family and friends and share events with them via email. I even sent digital video clips to a few folks. I also utilized the on-line phone software, Skype, to keep in touch with several family members. Often this meant packing up my laptop and finding an Internet Café and since at that time I did not have a car, walking or taking a bus some distances while following sketchy, at best, instructions from people eager to help, but not necessarily well-oriented to their own town.

An interesting transformation in my life has occurred. For some reason, I am becoming more inclined to enjoy the things this world has to offer in the moment they occur. Yes, I take lots of pictures and videos because first, old habits are hard to change and second, I always look at things with the thought of sharing them with family and friends and always thinking how they might enjoy seeing them. But now I find myself sitting on a rock fence, looking at some beautiful field of wheat, with the wind making those “waves of grain” and enjoying it at just that moment.

Since most of my professional career in Information Technology was spent working on long-term projects, living for the moment is certainly a different approach to life for me.

I wonder if this is also a part of the normal aging process?

We hear and read lots of philosophical discussions about “living for the moment”. I think it has a lot of merit because if we only think of the future, we never take the time to experience the reality of the moment - and our lives. It is like going to a movie and instead of watching each scene, always thinking of what will be in the next scene or even more distracting, how the movie will end. You miss out on the fruits of the director’s efforts – plot, cinematography, sound, etc.

Not having a vast knowledge of religions, it is my guess that a bunch of them also treat this topic with their own doctrine. Maybe someday I’ll look into that, but for the moment, I’m enjoying each day as it comes.

I’ll leave that topic for you to ponder.

Now, I’ll share some of the things I’ve experienced on this trip.

Arriving in Manchester, England on the 6th of June, 2006, I checked into a hotel not far from the University of Manchester. An English friend who, along with his girlfriend, happens to be working in Austin at the University of Texas, had made the trip to England a few days earlier to visit family and friends. He played in a concert that night and I got to attend.
Afterwards, it was the obligatory trip to a pub for a “pint” or two.

Several days later, other friends who play in our British Brass band in Austin, named “Austin Wonder Brass”, arrived to participate in the event known as Whit Friday. At this music festival, over 130 brass bands get on chartered buses and travel from town-to-town within the local area and play different pieces for their march from the bus to the contest area where they all play the same piece of music for the local judge. At the end of the day, the best bands are awarded CASH prizes from each of the over 20 towns. The purse from all the towns for this particular festival was over $20,000! Who says musicians never make any money? Sadly, that holds true for the musicians who participate in Whit Friday because only a few bands are awarded the cash prize in each town, there are a lot of towns and the same bands don’t necessarily win in each town. You do the math.

The real winners, however, are the folks in the small towns who get to hear all those bands by simply walking to their main street and sitting on the curb while these bands play as they march by. I’m not sure how they participate in contributing to the cash prize their town awards but it can’t be much money per person. Other folks, who don’t mind hearing the same contest piece, will bring their lawn chairs and sit in the contest area. The contest area could be a football pitch (soccer field), a town square or even a vacant lot. The judge is prevented from seeing/knowing what band is performing and is often sequestered in a small camping trailer, just a few feet from the band. The more clever judges will arrange for their location to be in a pub with the prescribed two curtains separating them from the bands.

While the “Sale Brass Band” did not garner any cash prizes, I can say that the four members of Austin Wonder Brass who were invited to participate in this contest, did themselves (and AWB) proud. This could be seen in their willingness to experience everything about the event including hoisting a pint or two with the more seasoned members of the band at the many pubs along the route.

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On June 10, 2006, I took the plane to Toulouse, France. I arrived in the evening and was greeted by my friend, Jean-Yves, whom I had not seen in 25 years. We went to a café and in an hour or two, tried to catch up on our respective lives. I got a great little hotel room, not far from the center of town where I had spent many days and evenings back in 1975 and again in 1981.

The next day, I was invited to Jean-Yves’ home for a birthday party (it was my 60th) where I got to see his wife for the first ime in 25 years and meet one of his daughters, son-in-law and two grand children. The grandchildren helped me blow out the birthday cake candles (two times).

After a week or so in Toulouse, I was invited to the home of Michele (a guy) and his wife Modesta. Their home is really a grand chateau about 20 miles south of Toulouse on the way to Spain/Andorra. They bought it 20 years ago and their ensuing renovation resulted in a beautiful, grand and typical mansion in the south of France.

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A few days later, Charlette, a French friend who lives in Austin and France, picked me up to take me to her house in the country, near the small town of Parisot which is just north of Toulouse and south of Albi. Her parents are staying there for the summer and the four of us have made various trips into the surrounding areas to visit great restaurants and see the sights.

Two weeks ago, I bought a car (1999 Renault Megane station wagon) and will use it on my trip to the west and north of France in the next week or so.

The geography is fabulous in this part of France with rolling hills planted with crops of wheat, maze, corn and sunflowers. The sunflower fields are particularly entertaining in the morning when the sun is behind you and you are facing all those flowers. It is as if you are being watched by thousands of wide opened eyes.

Some days ago, Charlette and I drove about 300 miles to the French Riviera for 10 days, staying with friends in Sanary and Antibes. We also visited Nice, St. Raphael, Frejus, Toulon and Bandol during that time. All these towns are on the coast, have unique harbors and most have forts or mountains situated to afford great views of the Mediterranean Sea.

After a week of living the good life on the Cote d’Azur (Riviera), we returned to Parisot in time for Charlette to get a booth at a flea market in a nearby town. The flea markets here are just like in the USA except that most items here are made in France and each booth has an exciting assortment of things. They may be ordinary items to the locals but they have great appeal to the eye of the only American tourist within miles. I managed to buy only a few items, one being a vintage wine-bottle opener.

This country is amazing. At every turn in a country road, there is some beautiful field of green, yellow or other color with a texture that begs to be photographed. In every little town, and believe me there is one every 5 miles or so, there are many unique architectural features – each one of which could grace the cover of any home-and-gardens magazine.

I hope you enjoy the attached photographs.

Regards,
Jim