Ready, set, takeoff - I left Boston, Massachusetts, where I’d been visiting my family, on Tuesday, October 27th, 2015. I really should have packed the night before, but I’m a bit of a procrastinator (I find if I leave everything until the last minute, I’m more efficient)—so I stuffed the last of my clothes into my backpack about 15 […]
First stop: Barcelona - When I finally arrived at Blanca’s apartment right off Plaza Real in the Barrio Gótico I took a nice 5 hour nap, followed by some tapas (small plates of food—so you get to order a lot of them), and then about 14 more hours of sleep! The next day to gradually ease into a new […]
A Montessori Encounter - On Tuesday, November 3rd I arrived for 10 days at Arterra Bizimodu, which is a “collective”—a group of people that hope to live better by sharing a lot of their day-to-day living including cooking, activities, and living spaces. The community at Arterra came together a couple of years ago to rent out a giant building […]
Lakabe Ecovillage - My account of my time at Arterra would not be complete without mentioning the trip I took with Linda and Jesus to visit a neighboring community (30 minute drive away), called Lakabe. Lakabe is a famous (and fantastic!) example of an “Ecovillage.” The “Eco” because it consists of people who have chosen to live together in […]
Marvelous Madrid - On Thursday, November 12th (my half birthday), I took a bus back to Madrid to meet up with a Very Important Person and my travel companion for the adventures ahead: David just finished a 6-week training course for Rock Climbing Guides called “Mountain Training School.” He was climbing very difficult rock cliffs all over Spain from […]
A Spanish Road Trip (with a visit to Portugal) - David and I were having a hard time choosing where to go from Madrid. We decided in order to stay as flexible as possible with our plans for the next six weeks, we would rent a car and explore Spain a bit longer before we bought a flight anywhere. As a bonus, Portugal is so […]
Road Trip, part II - Since we’re in “Porto,” we’ve been told we must try the Port, which is a sweet-tasting wine, often served as dessert. Unfortunately, on our way to the recommended Port winery, Google Maps takes us to literally the middle of nowhere and says, “You’ve arrived at your destination.” Data does not work on my phone in […]
Adventures in Amsterdam - At the beginning of December I bit the bullet and finally left my beloved Spain for a place with a much trickier language (at least for me): Amsterdam. Amsterdam is the capital of The Netherlands, a country which some people erroneously call “Holland”; however, Holland is not the name of a country, it is a province in The Netherlands (in […]
Bright Green Ireland - We landed in Cork not having planned anything, not even where we’d be staying that night. But Cork is in the south of Ireland, so it made sense to us to rent a car at the airport and work our way North to Dublin, where I discovered I had cousins (although they’re not Irish-they moved to Dublin from Boston […]
School in Scotland - Remember the blog post I wrote back in November about the Montessori school at Arterra Bizimodu in Spain? I heard about that project from a friend of mine, Ethan, whose job sends him all over Europe and Asia (and sometimes South America and Africa too) helping communities called “Ecovillages” to grow and develop (I’ll explain more about ecovillages below). Ethan spends […]
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