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| Guernica by Pablo Picasso |
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| Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao designed by Frank Gehry. |
Because we will be traveling in less urban areas, we’ve been
boning up on Spanish through the use of the Pimsleur audio method of language
acquisition. This being my first time to learn Spanish, my goal of mastering
Spanish 1 will, hopefully, allow me to show respect for another culture. My
daily 30-minute lesson right after lunch has become a sort of game as I enjoy
the auditory puzzles it presents. Karen has studied Spanish before so she set a
goal of mastering Spanish 2. We will be relying on her ability to read Spanish
to get us on the right trains and buses.
West of Bilbao
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| Upon seeing the cave art at Altamira, Picasso exclaimed that artists have achieved nothing since then. |
Seeing cave art at Altamira and in other near-by caves in the province of Cantabria has long been a goal of mine. My paternal ancestral
journey followed the northern edge of the Mediterranean Sea and spent time in
the Iberian Peninsula during one of the last ice ages. Also this
pre-agricultural site allows me to prepare for creating the Northern European
section of my project tracing our human migrations from East Africa to all
parts of the world.
Karen and I recommend the film Finding
Altamira for some historical perspective on how professional hubris can get
in the way of authentic knowledge.
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| Gaudi's architecture has given us the derogatory term'gaudy' that completely misses the point of his revolutionary concepts. |
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| I think we will see this in Comillas. |
We’ll be staying in the town of Santillano in Cantabria for our cave art exploration. A side trip over to Comillas will allow us to see some of
Gaudi’s very first architecture. While Teilhard de Chardin is famous for saying
the universe abhors a vacuum, Gaudi believed that nature abhors a straight
line. If you can imagine what that does to architecture you can understand how
Frank Gehry was chosen to design the Guggenheim Museum.
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| The Human Evolution Museum in Burgos. Phoenicians, Romans, and Arabs are some of those who passed through Spain after the Neanderthals. |
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| The archeological site at Atapuercas that formed the basis for the Human Evolution Museum. |
The town of Burgos in the province of Castile and Leon will give us a
chance to visit their Human Evolution Museum as well as the archeological dig
site where remains of pre-Homo Sapiens have been found. I think you know why we don't have such a museum in the United States. Burgos is also one of
the stopping points on the Camino de Santiago (Pilgrimage Way). We hope to at least set a
foot on the Camino even though we will not be walking it west to the ocean
where St. Andrew's remains are believed to be enshrined in the cathedral.
East of Bilbao
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| The town and beach of San Sebastian. |
After all the dust and bones of the archeological site, we
will leave Castile and Leon and return to Basque territory where the coastal town
of San Sebastian is said to be one of the most beautiful sites in the world. We will visit the town of Guernica which is famous for Picasso’s painting of the
saturation bombing of the village. It is now home to a Peace Museum. We plan a day in Vittoria, a town that has been a leader in eco-friendly urban planning with a
section where vehicles are banned.
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| Vittoria is an hour south of Bilbao. |
While much planning has gone into preparing for this
rendezvous with history, we are open to being unexpectedly surprised. One never
knows when synchronicity will happen and awe will strike. Three years ago I could never have
planned to arrive in Palermo, Sicily in time for the amazing Mediterranean exhibition that
happened to be showing in the same building as the Palatine Chapel. That synchronicity provided a high point for my travels in Southern Italy.
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| I have made our own tour book for details about accommodations and travel and with pockets to hold copies of pages from different travel books we have studied. |
