CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

…and in conclusion, let me say…

So, we’re leav­ing Madrid tomor­row in the morn­ing — the trip has run its course.

Once we got here, I was so tired that I ust dropped off the face of the blo­gos­phere — so sorry about that.

The time here was rel­a­tively quiet, we pretty much just recu­per­atd from all the adven­tures, stayed in the hotel a bit and left things casual.

Angie’s friend Lulu, and her mom, Kristi, came to join us in Madrid, which was a lot of fun. Angie and Lulu were pretty close last year, but then Kristi moved back to Spain to be closer to Lulu’s father and their other child. Being here, they were able to catch up with us and have a good time — it was fun.

We tried to check out the bull­fight­ing museum, but it was a non-starter — closed early by the time we got there (that seems to be a Span­ish thing to do — close at Siesta time — and then, close early any­way and never re-open.

We all went to the Palace, which is still an active palace, even though the oyal fam­ily lives some­where else. It was pretty awe­some to see all the fancy rooms (like the giant din­ing room from some­thing out of a period movie of Lords and Ladies all dressed up at a table for 100. But the best part for me and Nate was the Armory — with all the amaz­ing armor and weapons from as far back as the 7th cen­tury (!) … alas, no pic­tures allowed — so we just have to tell you that it was awe­some. Armor suits and horse armor and all sorts of amaz­ing stuff.

Here are a few pho­tos that you might enjoy:

Angie, Nate, and Lulu have it out in the Madrid Hotel

Kathy and Angie in Paris at one of Kathy’s favorite places

Angie — somewhere

Angie and Lulu and Donald

The clos­est we came to a bull­fight (meh)

Lulu!                                                                                        Lulu and Kristi

Oh, I guess nobody told Kathy that we couldn’t take pic­tures at the armory

Ummm…?


Peo­ple going absolutely NUTS when Spain won against Germany!


Count us all in!


As we drove from Barcelona to Madrid, the were just every­where — it’s about 40 feet high (it’s a billboard)


This is the Gaudi Church in Barcelona — it’s quite beau­ti­ful — pre­tend the crane and ad for eclipse aren’t there

I think we’d say we had a good time … thanks for watch­ing the blog with us.

God Bless, all — see you soon.

Barcelona Rocks

Ok — some­one told me that Barcelona was like Tacoma — they were so nuts, it’s not even funny.

Barcelona is not only beau­ti­ful, it’s fun — and yes, while we’re stay­ing in a swanked out super hotel — I think we’d be hav­ing a pretty good time any­way, since the city is so nice. We’ll have to come back some other time and really enjoy it for what it is — a great city. Come here now!

Tomor­row, we travel to Madrid, where we stay for the remain­der of our trip and then fly home. I’m still dread­ing the flight because we don’t have upgrades on our seats or any­thing — but who knows, maybe some­thing good will hap­pen anyway.

I got a good work­out in today, which made me pretty happy — it was tough to get to the gym in most of the other places — but here in the heart of civ­i­liza­tion they actu­ally have health clubs with weights and every­thing (the last place had some sort of phys­i­cal ther­apy chairs that didn’t have any resis­tance — it was sad and weird.

We went to the Picasso museum, which made me feel like a huge slacker — but maybe it’ll get me off my duff and start writ­ing again… or ever

Once we get to Madrid and I get a few days rest, I’ll do a big photo-spread in the blog so you can see every­thing. This is a small post because it’s late, and I want to get up tomor­row and go to the gym and then (woohoo) drive for 6 hours to Madrid.

Life is good again. Had a lit­tle trou­ble find­ing a decent din­ner, but came back to the hotel and had a grandiose room ser­vice com­plete with ridicu­lous things like caviar and foie gras — yes — that’s insane, I know — but well … it was a fun recovery.

Happy Fourth of July from out here in the rest of the world!

A pox on Sardinia and all they stand for

So, after a day of dejec­tion and dis­ap­point­ment — Kathy spent the morn­ing reor­ga­niz­ing our trip to get us back on track. Since Sar­din­ian for “spa” is “crapolini” … we decided it’d be nice to stay at a nice place when we get out of here. This morn­ing, Kathy called the orga­ni­za­tion that did the great hotel in Flo­rence (I think it’s called some­thing like “Great­est Hotels in the World ™” (I kid you not)), and sched­uled for our stay in Barcelona to be only a few days, then we spend a longer time in Madrid, which we hear is pretty cool as cities go.

So, suf­fice to say — we were pretty excited about that, she and I — and the day started out well. We had a lit­tle pep in our step and decided to just “punt” on Sar­dinia, not try to do too much, and get outta here in one piece.

After our deli­ciously cold break­fast (com­plete with oily cheese slices!), we decided we’d go to another beach and see if we couldn’t find a way to get a lit­tle snor­kel­ing in, since Nate was pretty avid about that (being that he was just cer­ti­fied in the Bain­bridge Island pool, and wants to be able to tell his bud­dies sto­ries about his great swim­ming escapades). So we asked the peo­ple behind the desk about a place to snorkel … and they gave us the name of some dive shop nearby that seemed to look pretty good in the brochure (and did end up being good overall…).

We headed off to the dive shop, saw that it was near a beach, and thought we’d have some fun going to the beach after get­ting the snorkel setup going.

When we got there, we soon learned that this was pri­mar­ily a scuba dive shop (which we knew), but they had a pri­vate area we could snorkel in that was filled with inter­est­ing stuff (pre­sum­ably). They gave us wet suits (mine was a full body scuba suit because they had noth­ing else), and before we knew it — we were heft­ing about 30 pounds of gear down to the water for a “quick snorkel.”

In short order, this became a trial — Angie didn’t like the taste of her snorkel, the wet suits were too hot, the water was actu­ally up against a cliff with a plat­form — no beach — and it was all get­ting a lit­tle hairball.

After a lit­tle grap­pling, I was in the water, help­ing the kids into the water, and Kathy was strug­gling to fig­ure out how to fit her glasses on under her mask because she’s basi­cally blind with­out them. She even­tu­ally opted to leave the glasses on the plat­form and just make do anyway.

So there I am, stand­ing in water up to my neck in a wet­suit with all the snorkel gear and fins, Angie is float­ing around face down nearby in a wet­suit shorty, fuss­ing with her mask and snorkel, Nate is cling­ing to my side, the lad­der and back and forth (valiantly, I might add, con­sid­er­ing his trep­i­da­tion about swim­ming in open water), and Kathy’s func­tion­ally blind. Rock on! Let’s swim!

We headed out around a sail­boat that was anchored nearby, with Nate swim­ming tan­dem with me while I dragged the dive buoy (did I men­tion that I had a weighted buoy with me, a require­ment of the dive shop?), Angie’s splash­ing ahead with mom, and we’re get­ting along some­what ok, all things con­sid­ered. I think at some point, Kathy took the buoy and we set it up as we got around the far side of the sail­boat (which was a 30 footer, I believe).

Now we’re in 20 ft of water, try­ing to “get the joy” going on the snorkel stuff (our orig­i­nal vision was like walk­ing off a beach with a tube in our mouths to look at lit­tle crabs, not this) … we swim over to a cliff face, and I’m teach­ing Nate to float face down with his tube up and just dan­gle from the rock. He’s a bit freaked out, but get­ting into it a bit — when Angie and Kathy just start hair­balling over Angie’s mask. She’s fuss­ing and flip­ping out, and com­plain­ing that it tastes bad and that water was get­ting into her mask and fuss, fuss, fuss. So brave Nate wraps his arms around a rock and says, “I’m ok Dad, you can go ahead.” I’m proud of him for that. I swam over to Angie and Kathy, who were grap­pling with her mask.

Given that I’ve done a bunch of scuba, etc. — I was also act­ing as the portable dive plat­form — any time some­one needed a break in open water, they’d hang on me and I’d just float and kick, keep­ing us all afloat (ver­ti­cal, not like an actual plat­form, thanks).

So, I come over, wrap my arm around Angie and am start­ing to help her adjust her mask (again), when she starts shriek­ing that some­thing bit her and then just starts shriek­ing that it hurts, it hurts.

I imme­di­ately swim us back about five feet and check the water, only to see that there’s a jel­ly­fish about the size of a foot­ball right where we were. She’s been stung.

It’s float­ing towards Kathy, so I tell her to come out towards me and swim around it (she’s blind, mind you) — which she does just fine. Angie is now apoplec­tic with pain and shriek­ing (justifiably).

At this point, Nate is rapidly devolv­ing into brain­stem sur­vival mode — filled with com­plete and absolute dread. He’s in deep water, which he hates, hang­ing on a rock, not sure what is in the water, and well … he’s flip­ping out. Mean­while, I’ve got an arm­ful of shriek­ing Angie, and a func­tion­ally blind wife. We paid cash for this expe­ri­ence, mind you.

So Kathy gets over to Nate pretty quick, and he’s yelling that he doesn’t want to die, and she’s telling him he’s not going to die, and I see that the thing is float­ing towards them — so he’s even more freaked out … and I tell her that I’m get­ting Angie out of there, and she does like­wise with Nate.

So the two of us swim on our backs and rescue-swim the kids back around the sail­boat, back to the plat­form — me, I’m going about a mil­lion miles an hour, Kathy’s only doing about half a mil­lion — I think we were at the plat­form in under a two min­utes. I pull the fins off Angie in the water, she climbs out, and her arm, from a few inches above her elbow to a few inches below, on the inside, is cov­ered with angry red welts and white swelling — it looked just like the red marks on Dory from Find­ing Nemo — I kid you not.

Kathy and I got the kids out of the water, got Kathy out of the water, and I swam back to get that stu­pid buoy. I hate that buoy. I hate this island.

Kathy imme­di­ately took Angie back up the cliff path to the dive shop, where they knew what to do (they poured ammo­nia on the thing to neu­tral­ize the acid) — and Angie started calm­ing down. Nate stuck around with me to help me carry all the gear back up the hill … and while we were going up, he valiantly said that he’d let Angie play the com­puter games when we got back to the hotel

So … with all that excite­ment, we opted to skip the beach for the rest of the day. We made a lot of jokes about Find­ing Nemo, called Angie “Jelly Girl” a lot — and talked about “thrill issues” and so forth, and got past it.

Later in the day, Nate wanted to go down to the pool — and he and I had a great time in the water, which was a big plus for block­ing any water fear he might have had from this — but I fear the kids may be a lit­tle jumpy about the open sea if we don’t do some­thing soon — so I’m hop­ing we’ll get a chance to get them in the water unvent­fully pretty soon.

We ended up hav­ing a good din­ner — we got back here exhausted — I had the joy of dri­ving in the dark with Ital­ian dri­vers — and all is rel­a­tively quiet.

I fought a lot of urges to ask God to smite this island. Smite smite smite.

Well — what­ever, we’re leav­ing soon. I don’t think I’ll ever want to come back. Kathy says she might some­day with her sis­ter or some­thing. I have no idea why.

Stu­pid island full of sullen … whatever…

by the way — Ital­ian for jel­ly­fish is Meduse … that’s fitting.

Angie’s arm is still cov­ered with big angry red marks.

Good night.