2023 Iberia Trail of Escapes

I grow old, I grow old. Should I wear my ..uh…I’ve forgotten the next line. I’m starting to wonder if my recent difficulties while traveling are a sign of approaching senility or more a matter of travel becoming more and more difficult for everyone, no matter what their age. I’ve always been a thorough travel planner and disciplined in carrying out these plans. That doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. If I ever had serious travel problems when I first started traveling in the 1980’s…well, I don’t remember them. Maybe I made plenty of mistakes back then, but they didn’t upset me as much as they do now, and, as a result, I don’t remember them. I’m either forgetting how to plan and execute travel, or I’m forgetting that I never knew how. In either case, I’m worried about major brain leakage. I am certain, however, that I just don’t enjoy travel as much as I think I did. Of course, there are many new impediments to travel that exist in the real world beyond my suspect mind that make travel miserable for everyone else, both young and old. Aircraft pack more passengers into cramped seats, luggage routinely disappears, passengers are ruder or less interesting, the food we encounter while on planes, trains, or even the highway has become pretty awful, and we are sharing the travel world with more crying babies, odd odors, and political danger.

My latest travel project was to travel to Oporto Portugal, Salamanca Spain, and Barcelona Spain, explore these cities, and take photos or videos of what I found there. I would, of course, give my flawed opinion about what I experienced when I posted these photos and videos.

My general conclusions about the trip is 1) my growing older has made me less resilient and slower to anticipate potential problems, 2) international travel has become more difficult and frustrating, and 3) I simply experienced a lot of bad luck. This trip served up more unanticipated misery than any previous trip I’ve ever made. Maybe telling you about it will help you avoid similar unpleasantness when you travel in the future. Probably not.

I  have previously submitted a long series of posts about my difficulties on Facebook which I will cut and paste together to make up most of this chapter, though I’ve added a few photos and a some new text to these original submissions.

September 30, 2023- The Odyssey Begins and Headwinds Prevail.
The first leg of my journey involved taking Amtrak from Albany to Boston. I arrived at the Albany Amtrak station early, (12 noon), because I was anxious to be on my way, and felt that arriving early would allow me time to relax and perhaps enjoy some coffee and cheesecake at the station’s restaurant. This was a mistake. When I arrived, I was informed that the train had left Chicago late, had experienced some other delays, and would not arrive in Albany until around 5:00 pm. Unfortunately, the train’s delays started to snowball, and as the afternoon dragged on, later and later arrival times were predicted. Finally the train did show up a little after 7:00 pm. A voice over the public address system apologized for the delay but predicted the train to Boston would make up some of the lost time, because new tracks had been installed between Albany and Boston, and the train could travel faster over these sections. Instead, we lost more time stopping to let freight trains pass, and somehow got on the wrong track outside Wooster. I smelt trouble when I heard the train’s driver on the conductor’s walkie-talkie ask if maybe we could just not stop there if it looked like no one was getting off. Of course, this was unlikely, and in fact, I knew there was a little old lady in my car who had been talking on her cell phone to a friend who was waiting for her at the Wooster station. We then had to continue a mile or so past Wooster and then back up so we could let her and two others off next to a platform. This procedure took a long time to accomplish, and I didn’t arrive at my hotel until two in the morning. The hotel’s front door was locked and I could see through the glass door that no one was manning the reception desk. I proceeded to pound on the door and push every button I could find within 20 feet of the door, except pulling the fire alarm, (which I briefly considered). The sea breeze coming off the bay was cold, and the sidewalk would make a very uncomfortable bed. Finally the desk clerk came out of a back room rubbing her eyes. She let me in. What made this situation immeasurably worse was that this hotel was outrageously expensive. Okay, I have to accept some responsibility for ending up here. I didn’t try to book a hotel room in Boston until the week before I left home, not realizing that hordes of tourists would continue to pour into Boston after Labor Day. The other hotels I contacted were all fully booked. This hotel, (that I didn’t enter until after two in the morning), cost me over $1100 per night. To be fair, almost $300 of this amount consisted of the Boston hotel tax. Still…It wasn’t a bad hotel but was far from plush or luxurious. It was the former factory for the New England Confectionery Company that had been gutted and refurbished into a hotel. To sum up, it was only the first day of my trip and I was already exhausted and in a sour mood.

October 1 -My flight to Porto wasn’t scheduled to leave until 7:30 pm on the day I now arrived, so I spent the morning and afternoon enjoying Boston.

The city was slammed with tourists, but unlike the European cities I would later visit, they were well spread out across Boston.

I found them wherever I went, from the waterfront to the city center, to the public gardens, Boston Common, Newberry Street, (which was closed to vehicular traffic), and finally to the back bay.

Except for the first black and white photo below, I didn’t get any photos I really liked. I did, however, take several fun videos of various street performers. I wanted to use this trip to move away from landscape photography or photographing iconic landmarks and toward reflecting the human element I encountered in these cities instead. Being a bit of an introvert, I knew I would find it difficult to do this, so I left my wide-angle lens at home and took only a 50-200 zoom which would limit my ability to shoot broad vistas or large monuments. This worked to some degree, but I still found it difficult to photograph people directly. Barcelona in particular was overflowing with beautiful and interesting people, but I was never sure how they would react if I photographed them, and as a result walked away from some tempting shots. The question that was constantly stirring my brain was, “Are beautiful or interesting people proud of their looks and expect to be photographed, or are they tired of being the center of attention and value their privacy?” I felt a little more comfortable photographing people whom I would politely ask to photograph beforehand and/or whom I would pay a few dollars or euros. I received various responses but noticed that the pictures I took of paid and unpaid subjects each resulted in a very different vibe. They just felt different when you look at them. I will discuss what I learned and why I think the results were so different later in this chapter.

I paid this man to take his picture and asked him not to smile. He asked if he should look like he usually does when on the street, and I said “Yes”. So far asking and paying the model seemed to work.

That evening I left for the airport. It is relatively easy to travel from the wharf area to the airport. A Silver Line bus takes only about 8 minutes from there to the airport, and the reverse trip from the airport is free. A travel tip for those reading this post. If your recently purchased Charlie metro card inexplicably won’t open the door to the bus platform, and no one is around to sort out your problem, you could throw your carry-on bag over the door, and climb onto the turnstile and over the door. I, of course, would never follow such a course of action. It is illegal and simply wrong. I mention this to stress the benefits of traveling only with carry-on luggage.?? I made my flight with 10 minutes to spare.

October 2 – I Escape from Immigration Scylla’s Tentacles
I tried to sleep on the night flight over the Atlantic but I was too keyed up from the previous day’s experiences. Was I destined for more trouble? When I arrived at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport I learned that my connecting flight to Portugal left from the same terminal I was already in, and I had an hour and a half between connections. I took a deep breath and sighed in relief. All I had to do was pass through Immigration into the European Union and get on my flight. What could go wrong? I found the immigration area and its roped labyrinth that snaked back and forth across the room. It was about 8 rows deep, and filled with people! More people spilled out of it and down the hallway! I couldn’t see the end of the line from where I was standing. I walked and walked until I reached the end of the line and fell in. This line moved very, very slowly. I was like a goat passing through a python. After an hour and twenty minutes, I finally entered the roped-off maze. There was no way I was going to escape the snake in time to catch my plane. I would have to pay for a room I wouldn’t use in Portugal, and somehow find an alternate flight and lodging here in Amsterdam.
I don’t like jerks and don’t want to be one, but sometimes the only solution to a desperate problem is to be a jerk. I crawled under the ropes and got into the short line for residents of the European Union. They only had to flash their EU identification and immediately proceed to their flight. I took out my passport and waved it over my head as I quickly moved toward the checkpoint. Sure enough, a uniformed immigration officer immediately collared me to tell me I was in the wrong line. I showed her my ticket and explained I was about to miss my flight. She understood exactly why I had needed to escape the snake, and guided me through the crowd to the head of the immigration line. One minute later my passport was stamped and I was running for my gate. I haven’t run competitively since 2012, but I continue to jog 3 to 4 miles every other day. I was ready for the long run. I slalomed around people as I sprinted to my gate, the wheels on my carry-on roller bag squealing like a panicked rabbit behind me. I reached the gate just as the doors were about to shut. I was the last person allowed on the aircraft! The man sitting next to me on the plane said that he had missed his flight the day before due to a similar huge immigration line. Later when I took a train from Madrid to Barcelona a Dutch woman told me that the airport had been having the same problem all summer because the government refused to hire enough people to staff the immigration cubicles. My advice if you are traveling to Europe in the near future: Check your ticket and make sure you never have to set foot in Schiphol. I’m attaching some photos of Porto, my next destination, so you have something to look at after reading this note.

Still October 2- Porto, Portugal

Porto is not the most beautiful city in Europe, not by a long shot, but if you are like me and favor real-life experience over manufactured fantasies, you will be quite happy with the city. In fact, of the three cities I visited, it’s the only one in which I could see myself living happily. Yes, it is a gritty industrial town with narrow streets and slightly worn-out parks, but the residents have an energy and work ethic that I haven’t found in many other southern

European countries. In Porto, if you are on the street at 7:30 am you will see many men in coats and ties, and a few women in business-appropriate dress, on their way to work. In other Mediterranean countries, I don’t remember many people out until after 10:00 am when the shops opened up. Of course, like any major city, you also see some people who clearly are not on their way to work.

Many people also spoke English here, particularly people under thirty, and the police. Porto has established a close relationship with Great Britain by selling port wine to it since medieval times. Some Portuguese might even prefer you to speak English rather than Spanish. The languages are similar but different enough to cause some confusion, and if you thank someone by saying “muchas gracias” you will be quickly corrected with, “No, say Obrigado”.
Most residents appear to be slender and somber. They seem to be a little depressed until you ask them for help, and then they brighten up and cheerfully give it. I had a hard time finding my hotel which ended up located in a leafy suburb of the city, (another example of my sloppy planning), and the directions I received from the locals were always right on the money. (I had to ask several times because after about 10 blocks I would have forgotten what the next turn should be). This contrasts with the directions I would get from other tourists who would peer at their cell phones, turn them this way and that, and then send me off in the wrong direction.

Like all European cities, Porto was crowded with tourists, (a new fact of life is that there is hardly anywhere on earth where you can now avoid them). Yet Porto retained some of the atmosphere I first experienced elsewhere in Europe 30 years ago when I first started traveling. There has been a lot less construction of new apartment towers or office buildings here than you will find in any other major European city.

You will also find more small shops selling local victuals, and fewer outright tourist traps than in the other two cities

I visited. A few such traps do exist here in Porto. One is the most ornate and beautiful bookstore in the world, (it is said). One of the reasons I traveled to Porto was to photograph the bookshelves, staircases inside, and the store’s fabled stained glass skylight. Before she wrote the Harry Potter series J.K. Rowling lived in Porto and often visited the bookshop. It is said that she modeled a bookstore in her novels after this one. Alas, I don’t think this place functions as a bookstore anymore. You have to pay 12 Euros and stand in line for 20 minutes to get in. I don’t think anyone who actually wants to buy a book there would follow this procedure.

Real life Oporto is much more interesting.

October 4: Salamanca Spain

I left Porto, Portugal for Salamanca, Spain via Flexibus. I felt a bit queasy at the time, (perhaps I shouldn’t have consumed raw oysters from a food court vendor), and when I entered the bus I noticed that it did not contain a restroom. I, …er…, was a little worried that I might need one. I made it over the rocky mountains that separated Portugal and Spain with no problem, and after 6 hours on the bus, I started looking for my hotel in Salamanca.
I chose Salamanca for this trip solely because I had seen it out of a train window during my first trip to Europe 30 years ago. It looked like an interesting step back in time.

I imagined myself sitting in the original classrooms of Spain’s oldest university. Perhaps I’d drink in an ancient pub that had been frequented by students since the Middle Ages. I imagined that walking around Salamanca would be like visiting  colonial Williamsburg on a slow day,  and understanding what it was like to live in a medieval university town. But Time is a faithless bitch! Salamanca is no longer a quiet backwater of secular and religious thought. Each day the tour buses vomit out their insides, and the streets of the old town are packed with octogenarians stumbling over the town’s cobblestones while listening to beflagged tour guides trying to sound like they haven’t given the same spiel a thousand times before. Ice cream, souvenir, and cotton candy stands are tucked into every possible sandstone cubby-hole on the side of the streets.

In some ways, Salamanca is the opposite of Porto. Where Porto expresses real life, the Salamanca old town is mostly manufactured fantasy. It probably always was. The myriad churches, convents, monasteries, and religious schools were all built to fondle the egos of Spain’s religious and secular elite.

The old town also is not a particularly good place to take interesting photographs. All the buildings are built from the same reddish-colored sandstone at around the same period of time, so they all look similar.

They have also been photographed a trillion times before. I feel I have to post a few pictures of old Salamanca, but I tried to spend most of my time photographing the modern sections of what is a large city beyond the red sandstone relics.

Unfortunately my stomach problems had kicked in big time, and I would often have to run back to my hotel, and later walk back out to whatever I had been photographing before.

The nature of the old town changed dramatically at nightfall. The tour buses left, the shops closed and the old town became deserted. A few restaurants remained open, but the empty streets felt a little creepy. My hotel was in a great location next to the Vieja and Nueva Cathedrals. I could lie in bed listening to the Cathedrals’ bells well into the night. It was the only time I experienced what I had expected.

Nope, I feel no desire to ever return to Salamanca.

October 8: The Troubled Road to Barcelona

At this point in my trip, I had experienced several stressful and unsettling problems. If you have been following my posts, you know that I have identified the causes of these problems as Amtrak, a sleepy desk clerk, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Dutch immigration, and most of all the throngs of tourists that descended like a cloud of locusts on the cities I visited. However, I have been remiss not to mention that the second most important cause of my problems was..um..me. My plans for the trip were rather loose and sloppy, and I seemed to have lost my previous ability to anticipate problems before they occurred. My greatest mistake became apparent in Salamanca. I had booked all my transportation between destinations before I left home, EXCEPT, transport between Salamanca and Barcelona. My rationale was, “Salamanca is a large city and Barcelona is a huge one. Certainly, there will be many buses and trains that I can take when I need to leave. What I didn’t consider was that I needed to travel on a Friday when many families were heading to their vacation homes and that there would be hundreds of thousands of tourists still moving around Spain. When I went to the rail station to buy a ticket, I learned there were no tickets. No bus tickets either. I did find a ticket for the next day, Saturday, but I would need to book another night at the hotel I was staying at. I went to the lobby to discuss this possibility with Monica, the desk clerk. She never said that no rooms were available for Friday night, but she immediately proceeded to try to find me a ticket to Barcelona on the hotel’s computer. ?? At first, she didn’t believe that there was no direct transport between the cities on Friday, so she spent the next half hour searching for the same tickets I already knew no longer existed. After she found nothing, she asked me what travel application had I used to find a ticket to Barcelona on Saturday. I use Rome2Rio which is a great app. It even lists potential ride-shares. She went on the app, and after another 30 minutes found the following itinerary: A bus to Madrid, a taxi from one side of Madrid to the other, and a train to Barcelona. I was relieved, and I believe she was too. She didn’t have to locate a room for me on Friday night.
I arrived in Barcelona in mid-afternoon. I didn’t take any pictures of my transit through Madrid to get there, but I’ve attached pictures of the beaches I found near my hotel in Barcelona when I arrived.

Though the beaches look very clean, note that few people are actually swimming in the ocean. I attribute this to the fact that a busy port sat only two miles from these beaches and that almost everywhere you walked in Barcelona you could smell raw sewage flowing somewhere beneath the pavement. As the Jackson Browne song relates, the ocean is “downhill from everywhere”.

October 8:  Barcelona’s Rambla

Jackson Browne’s “A Song for Barcelona” celebrates Barcelona’s Rambla where “Grandmothers on the terrazzos” watch over their granddaughters below to ensure they are not consorting with the wrong sort of boy. Let me state that today there are no grandmothers on any terrazzos overlooking the Rambla, and their granddaughters are probably snogging with their boyfriends in some other part of the city. Instead, the Rambla is over-run with tourists milling about with no visible purpose, with junk souvenir shops, and with junky cafes serving junk food.

It appears a little worn out from all the traffic it suffers. I was worn out just standing in the middle of it for ten minutes.

The only positive comment I can make about Barcelona’s Rambla is that it sucks tourists away from other, more interesting parts of the city.
What did I expect? I was in San Sebastian, Spain 30 years ago when I saw the original purpose of a public walkway where people would “ramble”. In the early evenings families would take a circular walk around the city’s center to meet their neighbors and stop to chat. If a woman had bought a new dress or a man a new hat recently, they would wear them on this ramble to show them off. Single people or families with a little extra money would stop in tapas bars for a glass of wine and small portions of sauteed octopi, or other delicacies that were served on tiny plates. When it was time to pay, the bartender would count the plates to determine the bill. You could then move on to the next tapas bar. This activity would continue until around 9:30 pm when everyone would head off to dinner. Today, Barcelona’s restaurants serve tapas on much larger plates that contain much larger portions. This is done to justify much larger prices. There is also much less variety and originality in the tapas served today in Barcelona than was served in San Sebastian. Browne’s song implied that the old ways had continued in Barcelona, and I was greatly disappointed when I found that this was untrue. My advice to anyone visiting Barcelona? Avoid the Rambla! There was another Ramble-type boulevard in the north end of the city near my hotel. The restaurants were better, and local families would meet with their neighbors there, but their dress was much less formal than used to be the case: message tee shirts, flip-flops, and torn jeans. Sigh. You can never go back.

October 9: The People of Barcelona
You probably now think that I didn’t like Barcelona. That is not the case at all. It wasn’t what I expected, but it was still plenty interesting with lots to see and do there. It was a particularly good place to engage in people-watching, and, of course, in photographing them. It was here that I spent most of my time determining if the best photos of people came from !) asking to photograph for a fee first and then paying the subject after the picture was taken, 2) asking to photograph first with no provision for payment, or 3) neither asking or paying and simply shooting away. I found that asking and paying produced the most stilted and posed photos. Asking with no payment resulted in the most relaxed and happy pictures.

Stealth photography produced some surprising successes along with some flat and emotionless shots.

October 10: Barcelona’s Old Town

Barcelona’s Oldest Neighborhood Lies immediately west of the Rambla. It is, of course, loaded with tourists, but since it consists of several dozen blocks, and plenty of squares, foot traffic is much more fluid than on the Rambla itself. It is loaded with interesting things to photograph, both modern and medieval. It also hosts several art museums. Nothing is free in this tourist ghetto, except the streets themselves. So that is what I photographed. I left photos of church interiors and of the museums for the next time I visit. I focused more on the street entertainers this time:

Given the number of tourists who pass through each day, I am sure everything below has already been filmed a hundred thousand times, and I add my grain of sand to the dunes of photographs already taken here.

October11: The Best of Barcelona – Arc de Triomf/Jardin de Fontsiere i Mestre
I liked the old section of Barcelona that ran north of the Rambla, but it was not my favorite part of the city. Neither was Gaudi’s confection, the Sagrada Familia. (Riddle me this: Gaudi died in 1926, and the foundation of the cathedral was laid down in 1882, yet after 141 years, the builders are not even close to finishing the job. Yes, it sometimes took a hundred years to complete a cathedral during the Middle Ages, but today builders have cranes and other modern tools that should make short work of the construction. It certainly isn’t lagging for lack of money. Thousands of tourists each pay $57 to enter the cathedral every day). No, my favorite part of Barcelona was the Arc de Triomf and the Jardin de Fontiere i Mestre which sits across the street from the Arc de Triomf park. These are places where Barcelona residents retreat to get away from the tourist crowds. Here and the beach were the only two places where people were clearly having fun.

There were probably a few tourists mixed in with the locals, (after all I found the place), but it was primarily a location for family outings.

You

could rent a row boat, dance, or feed wild parakeets by hand in the Jardin.

The Arc also had balloon and soap bubble vendors. Below are the pictures and videos I recorded while strolling through this area. It really lifted my spirits after enduring the Rambla.

October 12: Back in Boston
I flew back via Charles DeGaulle airport and experienced no problems. Exiting France through Immigration took about 30 seconds. Delta put me onto partner airline, Air France, and Air France went above and beyond the normal perks to convince me to enroll in their frequent flyer program. I did. I stayed at the same hotel that originally locked me out in the middle of the night, I’m not someone to hold a grudge, (and I had booked them both at the same time – there probably wasn’t much available in Boston anyway). I slept well, and everything was happening the way it should. Travel was fun again.

October 13: Homeward Bound?
I arrived at the train station in the morning for the trip home, and learned that I my return ticket was for the previous day.Some how I had booked my return trip for the same day as my last night in Boston. My fault. No refunds for this mistake. When I attempted to buy a new ticket, I learned that the Boston to Albany train was fully booked. I could buy a Boston to New York City ticket and then a New York to Albany ticket, So I did. This trip would take an entire day to accomplish, and cost twice what my original ticket did, but I would get home, or so I thought. As the train left Rhode Island it stopped. I heard someone on the conductor’s walkie talkie say “Send out a mechanic. We can’t fix this.” And so it went. Yes, of course I eventually made it home. Sadder but wiser, if not dazed and confused. Despite everything I experienced I still believe that it’s never completely over until the fat lady sings. 🙂