Note plain dark pants; sensible shoes, hat, shirt jacket are the same

Note: raffia hat, fanny pack as purse, bulging pockets of cargo pants

I found my packing list for the Spanish trip today.  Reviewing, these are the things which jumped out as having been most useful:

A fanny pack. Mine is a dark color that can double as a purse or shoulder bag. It has lots of zippers, easy-access compartments, an adjustable strap with a sturdy clasp, and room for a water bottle.

A flashlight in the fanny pack –  in Spanish toilets  sometimes the light is on a timer and goes out unexpectedly, sometimes the switch is on the outside and a well-meaning user turns the lights off on exiting, sometimes there is no window and you need a flashlight to find the light switch.

Bandaids and anti-biotic – you hope you won’t need these, but in my case , both came in handy when I bumped the mirror in our Caceras hotel room and then caught it one-handed as it bounced. It only sliced a bit of the web between two fingers, and the Band-Aids and ointment eased both pain and anxiety.

A shirt jacket with a pocket on the front big enough to carry your camera – easy to get to, but out of sight, so you don’t scream “Tourist!” to every passerby. A dark color looks dressier in an urban setting, and is practical; a light color is more comfortable in heat.

Sensible shoes  The best are shoes that can pass for urban wear, but stay comfortable on a hiking trail or after a day trekking in museums. I swear by SAS Freetime, the classic worn by nurses in white and little old ladies in beige and me at countless trade shows and on myriad business trips in black or navy.

Six layers of clothing are rounding me out and keeping me smiling in the snow!

Cargo pants These are great for wear in rural areas where you are hiking, biking, or scrambling over cobblestones. The extra pockets can carry what you need and leave hands free.

Dark Casual Pants.  These should have deep pockets for your wallet, but  look like ordinary daywear for the urban areas where you don’t want to advertise that you are a  tourist.

Kleenex packs – you cannot count on finding tissues in the hotel, or toilet paper in those bathrooms.

Compact tablet computer.  I filled mine with free books and read them on the plane and bus trips.  W loaded hers  with tour books.  In both cases, we saved space by not carrying the actual books which are heavy and bulky. And of course don’t forget to bring the charger.

International Transformer/Adapter American plugs don’t work in Spain, and American power requirements can cause a hotel blackout in rural areas.  In a larger hotel in Madrid you can borrow an adapter from the concierge, but not in the smaller towns.

Laundry Soap packets (they work better than the hotel shampoo and don’t leave your clothes smelling of citrus or jasmine or whatever.)

Lots of Layers of clothing!!!. Maybe it’s climate change, maybe it’s not, but we went from 80 degrees. F. to 30 degrees F. in one day more than once.  I packed:

Bottoms: regular underwear, silk long-johns, and lined pants

Tops: regular underwear, silk long-johns, a knit turtleneck, a long-sleeved collared cotton shirt, a long-sleeved knit crew-neck shirt, a fitted knit hoodie, and a water-proof hooded wind-breaker. I never had to use all 7 top layers, but I came close.

Map Even if you have a GPS in the car, even if you have Google Maps on your  iPhone, a real paper map is invaluable for giving an understanding of distance and direction.  You can see how the distance you plan to travel today compares to the distance you traveled yesterday.  You can see whether a suggested side trip is a reasonable distance.  If the map is a good one, it will also give you an idea of the topography, and tell you the names of those distant mountains.  The one I brought was folded and re-folded until it was falling apart at the seams.

Scarves/Buff – neck warmers are key to sealing in whatever warmth your poor body can generate when you are caught in a cold drizzle or snow flurry.  A Buff can double as a hat or earmuffs.

Sun Hat.  If you are traveling with a friend, make your hats distinctive so you can find each other in a crowd.   W and I had nearly identical raffia hats, which we grew adept at spotting a la “Where’s Waldo?”

Collapsible Suitcase/Tote Bag Here’s a space-saving trick to provide extra carry power: Pack two large poly-fiber grocery bags (the kind you take to the market instead of getting paper or plastic).  They take up scarcely any space. One of these can serve as a handy carry-all for a day trip.  If you have purchased presents that overflow your suitcase for the return trip, you can pack the presents into one of the bags, put the second bag upside down over the first one, then invert the whole thing and you have a tidy package with handles which you can carry on as a personal item.

Fernando and his brothers were rapscallions to the core, and their fellow Trujillanos breathed sighs of relief when they shipped off to the New World in emulation of Cortez. Imagine their dismay when the black sheep returned with piles of Inca gold and an Incan princess under each arm. Most of the Pizarros  eventually died ingloriously in the New World, but not before bringing home a lot of plunder. Some of this was donated to the local church in the form of gold and silver reliquaries and altar pieces in an attempt to buy off the damnation they surely deserved.
The survivor, Hernando, probably escaped death only because  during his volatile twenties and thirties he was already serving time in prison for murder.  On release he married his brother Fernando’s daughter by the Incan princess whose brother  Fernando had betrayed and burned at the stake.  The couple corralled the Pizarro fortune and spent it in the old home town on building a lavish public plaza and a huge mansion decorated with bas-reliefs of themselves. and their families . In your face, Trujillo!

The  huge statue of Fernando Pizarro on horseback in the public plaza is actually an impostor.  The statue was originally commissioned by the Government of France as a statue of Hernando Cortez to be presented as a gift to the Government of Mexico.  The French were embarrassed to discover that Mexicans didn’t appreciate being conquered by Cortez and wanted no part of a statue honoring him.  Being both thrifty and resourceful, the French renamed the statue as Fernando Pizarro and sent it to Spain , where Pizarro is warmly remembered despite his wayward youth and unsavory exploits in the New World.

Trujillo’s  old Castillo, originally a Moorish fortification, is  positioned on the top of the  highest hill with its medieval walls either intact or restored.  We walked the entire battlement with some back-tracing and could see for miles across the country.  I understand why the Spanish from this region felt at home in their New World colonies – the green foothills with their rocky protrusions look quite similar to the Sierra foothills of California in spring, even to the serpentine color of the rocks.

Trujillo is small and walkable and only a 45 minute bus ride from Caceres, so it makes for a perfect day trip with plenty of time for a siesta before venturing out for tapas in the evening.

The Old Town is very old indeed, with Hapsburg castles built on Castilian palaces built on Moorish forts built on Roman walls.  We wandered through maybe a quarter of the
Old Town, taking in the Visitor Center (highly recommended)  in a 14th century lookout tower outside  the wall and the Church of Santa Maria with its carved reredos and 14th century
Christo Negro.   This area was the home of Pizarro and Cortez (more on them later) and the church museum is full of silver and gold reliquaries and croziers made from New World gold and silver.

At the Plaza San Jorge we spotted our first bride of the day, dressed in a very modern white gown – above the knee in front and trailing to the ground in back  -  posing on the step with her family including a tiny ring-bearer who was doing his version of  Gangnam Style   in the front row.

The cathedral of St. Francis Xavier  has a three story gilded reredos studded with saints.  In case there was not enough gilt on view, this particular weekend also featured  a special exhibition of icons from around the world.  In this setting all that glitters is not gold, but might well be ruby, emerald, or mother-of-pearl.

After being dazzled, we  squeezed our way up a two-story wrought iron spiral staircase (not for the vertiginous!) and then up the spiral stone steps of the two towers, from which one could peer across to say hello to storks guarding their nests at eye level.    A beautiful day  allowed us to look across the green valley to the peaks of the Greda range still well-covered with snow.

Second church, second bride (see above leftf).  At the Plaza San Mateo we found a VERY upscale wedding, with the female guests wearing Jimmy Choos and fascinators a la Kate and William’s wedding, and the male guests wearing silk ties which coordinated with their wives’/girlfriends’ dresses.  When the bride and groom emerged the air was full of red and white rice-paper hearts which were carried everywhere and up by the wind.

Taxis whisked the most important guests to the reception, while the other female guests tottered off over the cobblestones in their 5 inch heels. Some had to be assisted on both sides to keep from falling, just like the Chinese ladies of old with their bound feet.  To each her own torture.

We hit the Cultural Center (also recommended)  and the Artisan Coop (interesting local art, but pricey!)  and headed for our hotel in  time to catch the 3rd bride exiting from the church of San Juan just outside the old city -  more fascinators, more silk gowns.  I felt way under-dressed in my well-traveled raffia hat and cargo pants, but that didn’t stop my snapping pictures of the elegant display.  And no one preening in their finery seemed to object to becoming part of my travel story – no Mafia dons in Spain?

Wow!  Those Romans were some engineers!  Stuff they built 2000 years ago is still being used  in Merida, such as a magical open air theatre where we happened upon a kind of rock n roll High School Musical version of “The Rape of Europa” (That giant white caterpillar with black antennae is supposed to be Jupiter as a white bull).

The Temple of Diana has a 15th Century villa built INSIDE.

A graceful bridge across the Guardiana River is used now by pedestrians and bicycles as part of an extensive trail network.

Cars still rumble under Trajan’s Arch.

In many places the original Roman roads form the substrata for current city streets.

I

And there is a great museum next to the theatre and amphitheater which makes sense of it all.

You can google “Caceres dragon” and get a pretty good idea of the festivities – videos from this year may be posted soon but don’t bother to look for me. We are way back under the arcades opposite the guys juggling torches.

The dragon-burning was fun. W and I were mostly surrounded by tall people and people with kids on their shoulders, but we did get a good view of St. George as he waited in the wings on his white horse behind the fire engines (can’t be too careful around a fire-breathing dragon!), and during the subsequent sections the main action was projected on the castle walls so all could see. After the dragon was lit and St. George and his horse had taken their bows everyone headed for the exits at once. We stopped for a helado once we were free of the crowd and ambled back to the hotel alternately looking upward at the  fireworks visible between the buildings on the narrow streets and looking downward at our ice cream.Can you spot St. George on his white horse gloating from the balcony?

“Extremadura” simply means “beyond the Madura River”.  It takes in the broad plains and mountain ridges between Madrid and the Portuguese border. The province is ringed by mountains, so during the Peninsular Wars Wellington’s troops swung north, leaving the medieval fortress walls of Caceras and Trujillo and the  Roman ruins of Merida unscathed. If you dream of going back in time, in Extremadura you can almost pick your century.

The bus ride from Madrid  to Caceras, the center of Extremadura, takes a little over four hours with one half-hour and one five-minute stop.  After an unusually wet spring  it was a lovely ride, with the snowcapped peaks of the Sierra de Gredos rising above the rolling green plains of La Mancha, – only missing some windmills to tilt at.  As we moved into Extremadura the landscape looked more and more like spring in California’s Sierra foothills  – pools of blue flowers that weren’t lupine, shrubs covered with big white flowers that weren’t matilja poppies, recognizable Scotch broom and mustard and unrecognizable pink and lavender flowers, all  painting the slopes beautiful.

Our home base for the week is the Hotel Don Carlos, just off the Plaza Mayor (Main Square) and steps from the medieval Old City which earned Caceras its World Heritage Site designation.  Our first two nights were spent in a spacious room with a luxurious bath,  facing the narrow cobbled pedestrians-only street, with a cute balcony and view down the twisting lane to the restaurant on the corner.  The first night we slept as befits travelers who have been on the road for twenty hours.  The second night we slept as befits those whose open window is just down the street from a bar patronized by soccer fans who are cheering, drinking, and arguing raucously until at least 4AM.  We asked for a change, which happened seamlessly while we were out sight-seeing.  The following nights were spent in a smaller room facing the inside courtyard, with no balcony or bidet but lots of blessed quiet.

Note to travelers in Spain:  The American work schedule has not penetrated past the Pyrenees.  Spaniards snack at 8 AM, take a two hour lunch break 12-2PM, work til 7PM, hang out on the Plaza until at least 9PM, maybe think about dinner after 9PM, and after dinner hang out some more.  Don’t even think about looking for dinner before 9PM.

On our first evening we walked through the neighboring church plaza spotting storks nesting on the church steeple, swallow chicks chirping in the nests built in cracks in the church facade, swallows swooping and dodging after gnats to feed to the chirping chicks, and lots of folks of various sizes, shapes, and colors strolling, sipping, socializing in the empty open walking and sitting spaces.

The helpful desk clerk had recommended a tapas bar just beyond the church plaza.  Not being accustomed to Spanish hours, we were the first customers.  We  asked for three of the four featured tapas and got enough food to feed four people comfortably, including the best anchovies either of us had ever eaten or imagined, assorted wonderful local cured pork, and a local soft cheese whose deliciousness defies description.   A walk around the Plaza Major shook down enough space within to make room for   a tiny cup of exotically flavored gelato after the post-tapas stroll.

It was 10PM and the Plaza was just getting going, but the lure of a warm shower and a soft bed has us postponing our adjustment to Spanish time for one more day.

Next: Medieval Meandering in Caceras

- Faraway Places – Margaret Whiting hit song of 1948

Castles in Spain – My childhood friend  W mentioned that she was planning to make a trip to the area in Spain from which emigrated some of the families she had known during her Peace Corps service in Peru. She thought maybe she would stay an extra week in Madrid to see the art museums.  Naturally, I invited myself to come along.

My contribution to the trip was a further extension of a third week to accommodate a visit to my niece J who lives with her Spanish husband and two children in a smallish town in northern Spain. We planned to travel mostly by bus and train, except for the visit to the smallish town, where we would need to rent a car – something I had never done in all my foreign travel.

Smart thing I did:  Hang my plane tickets and passport in an easy access pouch around my neck, so they were visibly THERE at all times and easy to get to even though I was using carry-on luggage.

Dumb thing I did: Omit the last-minute-before-you-leave-the-house check for all necessary documents. Thus I failed to notice that my wallet-on-a-string had snagged itself on a towel bar in the kitchen as I zoomed past and had been pulled out of my fanny pack. Panic in the car on the way to the airport.  Go home? Risk missing the plane? Decision to rely on W for credit and ATM for a few days, assuming Capable Husband could find and FEDEX the missing wallet.

Smart thing we did: Book our first full week staying in one hotel central to Extremedura, so we could settle in – and the wallet could catch up with me (which it did, a day earlier than I had thought possible. Blessings on CH and FEDEX!)

Eighteen hours after leaving my house, via car, plane, subway, bus, and taxi, W and I arrived in Caceras, equipped with two Kindles, an iPad, a MacBook, and a cheap cell phone purchased at the bus station for making calls to my niece.  We were to become very attached to this phone.

Travel Trivia: Caceras, with its intact medieval Old City, was the second World Heritage Site created in Europe.

• The San Luis mission – we visited  just as it opened. A mother with three toddlers in tow was inspecting the kid-friendly fountain in the plaza which shows a mother bear with two cubs and a little girl playing together. The mission is one of the more humble in the California String of Missions, but with lovingly painted interior decoration including fool-the-eye columns, and a dormant mission garden which must be lovely when the arbors and trellises are in bloom.

•  The flamboyant old Fremont theatre, an art-deco mashup that looks like it was assembled from carousel leftovers.  At night, the vintage neon lights up the whole street.

• Phoenix Books – this labyrinth  of used books is organized eccentrically – e.g. the historical novels of Bernard Cornwell can be found in the Mystery section, snuggled  next to the crime novels written by Patricia Cornwelll. Why? ”Because they are married, don’t you think they should be together?” explains the owner. Bernard’s wife is named Judy, but that  is beside the point - The oddities of categorization only encourage browsing for the perfect book to be reading by the fire in our cosy B&B.

• The upscale pedestrian mall which is tucked unobtrusively in between Monterey and Higueroa Streets.  The architecture is designed to blend in unobtrusively with  the mission and all those 1890’s buildings, but it includes a movie multiplex,  Chico’s, California Pizza Kitchen, and of course a Peet’s coffee on one corner and a Starbuck’s on the other, if you’ve had enough of organic and artisan for awhile.

• Tiny Bubble Gum Alley off Higueroa between Garden Street and Broad Street. Someone stuck a piece of chewed bubble gum on the wall of this narrow walkway – then others copied this action about one million times – and there it is.

•  .Tthe  elaborate trusses of the pedestrian overcrossing at the Railway Station which allows you to hike from downtown to one of the friendly rounded hills over looking the town and the campus without having to dodge cars or trains.

• Down at the foot of Higueroa Street at the other end from the mall, you will see a family waving at you from the balcony of a homely 50′s motel… but wait!  that’s a mural!

Feeling hungry?  We liked:

• the Big Sky Café – wonderful local produce, seafood, dairy, in a large, informal, bustling, and friendly  space – we ate here twice and didn’t run out of items we wished we still had room to try.
• Ciopinot :   Definitely not the college hangout – mostly graying couples like us, or groups of thirty-somethings celebrating.  Excellent sea food, including “No Work Cioppino”  (that means pre-shelled clams and crabs – no bibs required!)
• Novo :  if weather permits, opt for dining outside next to meandering San Luis Obispo creek, under trees hung with lanterns,  and walls decked with bougainvillea in bloom.
• House of Bread (on Marsh Street at the foot of downtown) – the perfect place to buy bread to go with that artisanal cheese you bought at the Farmer’s Market.

NOTE:  I will be setting off on another adventure next week, so there will be a hiatus.  Read some past posts and stand by for further freeway-free travel!

After walking Higueroa Street on both sides, plus several side excursions, we were beginning to be footsore, so we sought out Wally’s Bike Works at the far end of Higueroa street, and rented a couple of bikes ($30 for 24 hours, including helmets, a lock, and a bike route map. )

The next morning we pedal through the craftsman shingle or stucco bungalows of SLO up  to the campus.   For those accustomed to the  pseudo-mission sandstone and tile roofs of Stanford, UC Berkeley, and San Jose  State, or the pseudo-Gothic granite of the Ivy League and Duke, Cal Poly is a  shock – all modern techno-architecture accented with corrugated siding and solar panels, suitable for the generation that buys  its efficient minimalist furniture from IKEA rather than from thrift stores.   We parked our bikes and began to explore.

We cross wiry  suspension bridges between the buildings, dodging construction sites, and  gradually move toward the campus center along with a stream of students  – it is nearly lunchtime. The dining commons features every student’s basic fare:  pizza, hamburgers, Chinese take-out, sandwiches, plus a salad bar for visiting parents.  The bookstore sells a wide variety of Mustang-logo’d apparel, and also sells postcards (for non-visiting parents?) There is a band playing in the plaza.  A housing fair is happening on the lawn.  A student spots us consulting our campus map and asks if she can help us find something.  It’s that kind of place.

Even on a chilly February evening, the student energy helps light up the renowned Thursday night farmers market on Higueroa Street.  We pass bales of kale and columns of cauliflower, but stop  at the Cal Poly Dairy Science Department stall to sample and buy some student-crafted cheese for our train trip home.  We taste some local micro-brew, watch as another student chef crafts giant Nutella crepes for a drooling kiddie clientale, and ogle the ribs on what may be the state’s largest barbecue grill – a circle of smoldering charcoal carpeted with ribs and chicken parts, at least ten feet across (the grill, not the chicken.) Town and Gown – what a wonderful blend, when SLO-cooked!

When we set off from our B&B to explore nearby Higueroa Street, the main drag of SLO, wea walked past the funky Candy and Comix shop pictured above.  Downton,  here are some of the shops whose open doors invited us in:

An old warehouse converted to a gallery/boutique center

Classic car restoration palace

Don’t you want to come and explore more?

A classic cigar store complete with wooden Indian

Tapas bar with lantern glowing through waterfall wall

An organic gift shop