BOX 241: Sheboygan, Madrid, Segovia.

You're standing at the edge of the city of Segovia, Spain, looking at the mountains beyond the lovely trees and what might be a farm building. I took this slide photo in May 2003, near the start of a trip that Anne and I took to several European countries. We'd flown to Madrid and then taken a bus (or train?) to Segovia, about an hour from the capital, to check it out as the base for our upcoming UW-Sheboygan campus trip the next January.

In later posts I'll report on the rest of our 2003 trip, which took us to Barcelona, Venice, parts of Germany, and Amsterdam and Delft. For today I'll focus on Segovia, with a bit of Madrid to start.

First, though, I must show you the pictures I took during the preceding months to use up the roll that began with the last days of our campus trip to Canterbury that January (BOXES 239-240).

It looks like our grandsons, Sam and Forest, stayed overnight sometime in January. Here's another bath-in-the-sink photo, preceded by one of them sitting in a toy bin near the piano, with a glimpse of Aron's painted chair on the right:

The next photos are from Chinese New Year, which fell on Feb. 1 in 2003, when we went to a seafood banquet at our friends Andrea and Gary's restaurant. In the pics below you see Andrea holding Sam; friends of theirs holding both boys; and Andrea and Gary together:

The next photo I can only guess is from my birthday in March, but I have no memory of why there is a "2" candle on the cake that I seem to be blowing out while Aron and Sam watch.

This pic is followed by more grandson photos:

Much better pics than those, or at least more posed, are these of the boys sitting on our front porch in March or April weather:

I can date the next two photos to April 20, because that was Easter in 2003, and we went to the holiday brunch at Black Wolf Run. As I recall, the Easter Bunny was a former student of mine.

And now, on to Spain. Earlier in 2003--in fact, right after our Canterbury trip--my UWS colleagues and I were looking for a new European town for January 2004: i.e., one of modest size but great historical/cultural interest and also reasonably close to a capital city and other attractions. I recommended Segovia, which I remembered from 1987 when I visited Spain with my friend Gloria and her mother and kids. (See BOXES 170-171 for my first Segovia photos.) By April, thanks to the efforts of our campus Office of Continuing Education, we'd made the arrangements for flights, buses, hotel and tour guides. And now, after the end of spring semester, Anne and I were going to Segovia to meet with some of our hosts as part of our longer vacation.

In 1987 I'd had only a few hours to see Madrid before driving with the Garvin family to El Escorial and Avila, and then to Segovia; This time, Anne and I stayed for a couple of days. Our hotel was on a side street not far from the Prado Museum: a street like the one you see below, the first slide of the first roll of this trip. This district of Madrid had a number of narrow streets like this, with flowers in the apartment windows. (The delivery man in this photo may look like he's holding a flowering plant above his head, but his arm is hiding the tree trunk.)

There were wonderful tiled storefronts:

But I was most struck by the the profusion of imposing early-20th-Century buildings that lined the district's main avenues and intersections, with their exuberant mix of Victorian embellishment and Modernist sleekness. The next photo shows the tower of the Hotel Reina Victoria (1923) across the Plaza de Santa Ana:

The earlier (1911) Metropolis Building at the head of the Gran Via (Madrid's 'grandest' boulevard), is a landmark; I haven't been able to identify the more Modern building (with traditional touches) in the slide that follows

On another corner of the Gran Via a turn-of-the-20th-Century office building stands next to the older Church of San José:

My only other photo of Madrid from this trip shows the traffic-filled Calle de Alcalá, with landmark buildings to the left and right and more ordinary office towers in the background:

What I remember mostly from our time in Madrid is visiting the Prado, stopping at tapas bars and having a Madrid-style very late dinner, around 10:30pm, at a crowded outdoor terrace. The next day we were off to Segovia, where we stayed at the Hotel Infanta Isabel , where our campus group was booked for January 2004. The friendly staff gave Anne and me free accommodation for two nights, since we were our campus emissaries. (As we had found in our planning for Canterbury, Bruges and Siena, hotels in smaller cities were happy to get solid bookings in January.) The hotel was (still is) located on the Plaza Major, almost literally a stone's throw from the great Segovia Cathedral. In 1987 Gloria's mother drove us right up to our hotel on the Plaza Major (a different one from the Infanta Isabel);, but now the whole square was pedestrian only, except for service vehicles. I took a photo of the Infanta Isabel's exterior in the morning light, as street cleaners hosed off the plaza, and one of a staircase, to show the folks back home their future accommodations:

Our first stop after settling into our room was the Cathedral, built in honey-colored stone:

The Cathedral cloister is especially serene-looking:

Facing the Cathedral on the opposite side of the Plaza Mayor, beyond the bandstand, is the Teatro Juan Bravo, named after a local hero of the 1500s:

Segovia has a number of beautiful plazas and parks within the Old City. This one is the Plaza de la Merced:

From it you can see the spire of the Cathedral:

There are many paths and roadways you can take to get below the city walls and look up at it--beyond the flowering trees of May in the case of the next photo. (Segovia is a hill town, with the train station and modern buildings lying at the bottom of one end of the Old City.)

It might have been from this vantage point or nearby that I took the photo at the top of this post, looking away from the city at the mountains. Here's another view:

Segovia is famed not only for its Cathedral but for the Alcazar, built on a prow of rock at the high end of the Old City. On this visit, I now discover, I took no photos of the whole fortress from a distance (for such, again see BOXES 170-171 or wait for pics of our 2004 campus visit, when I took several); but here are some partial views:

I did a better job than I did in '87 of photographing the Moorish designs of one of the stately rooms:

From windows and parapets of the Alcazar you have great views of the countryside and such buildings as the Church of the Holy Cross (Iglesia de la Vera Cruz), founded in the early 1200s:

At the opposite and lower end of the Old City is the astonishingly well-preserved Roman aqueduct. Again you'll have to see my older or forthcoming slides for a fuller--or more 'touristy'--view of the aqueduct, but here it is with a carousel temporarily set up in front of it:

The merry-go-round had fantastic detail:

Walking uphill from the aqueduct toward the Plaza Major you pass through handsome streets and squares. The terrace with steps below features a statue of Juan Bravo:

You pass a number of attractive restaurants, including this one with its terrace view:

I think, though, it was a different restaurant where someone took this photo of Anne and me:

Our entrée was some kind of seafood stew:

I have two more slides from Segovia to show you: first, some storks nesting on a tower:

Second, the Cathedral at sunset:

We made one side trip while we were in Segovia--to the nearby La Granja de San Ildefonso, a spectacular palace with impressive gardens.

Here are parts of the formal (French-style) gardens:

The fountains were especially fancy:

My last photo of La Granja is of a peacock looking as if he owned the place:

You can tell from all the photos in this post that we had beautifully sunny weather that May in Spain (though there was still snow in the mountains in the last two pics). We were taken aback when we asked someone at the Segovia tourist agency what we could expect in January and he replied, "Horrible!"--snow and sleet. (Fortunately, the weather turned out to be just fine, as you'll see when I get to that trip.)

The next leg of our trip was Barcelona, which I had missed seeing during my first visit to Spain in '87. Anne and I were both excited to see the Catalan capital, and I ended up taking quite a few slide photos of its spectacular architecture. I'll save those for the next post.