This was our last night at the parador and we knew it was our last hurrah in Spain as we were headed for a Madrid airport hotel the next day. So we treated ourselves to a tasting menu at the hotel. You'd think a kid ordered this ridiculous dessert--nope, it was me! But I gave each kid his own cone.
The next day Ben fed the lion postbox one last time. We had a beautiful drive out of Cuenca and back to Madrid, with all those sunflowers facing us (ok, and the sun too).
Our last hotel doesn't really merit much attention other than to say that it was called the High Tech Hotel and we had no air-conditioning for 8 hours of the afternoon/night. And when Ed went to complain that it was 30 degrees Celsius in our room, the front desk guy said to him, "it is not 30 degrees, it is 30.5 degrees Celsius!" That would be about 90 degrees Fahrenheit in a tiny, tiny room. He had the gall to suggest we go to the pool. Uh, yeah.
The plane to Portugal, which we dreaded because of the kids' motion sickness, was uneventful but sadly the plane from Porto to Newark was really rough for the last couple hours. Ben, Nate and I were very sick. Plus the plane dropped like a stone at one point. Nate and several other people on the plane threw up; Ben and I just turned a wicked shade of green. Even the taxi'ing was awful (jerky, endless, etc.) I think the pilots were pretty lame. As one of my colleagues said back in June when I said we were flying TAP Air, "Buckle Up!" Even kind, sweet Ben told me not to thank the pilot.
Finally, we made it to the car rental place and Ed drove the 3 hours to Camp Hill, PA to see my parents. So very tired.
I have a couple more posts in me and then we'll put the blog to bed!
The last of our doors. The first two in Cuenca at the cathedral: a fish doorknob and a side view of the pointy ornamentation on an outer door. Door 3 is Casa Batllo in Barcelona, 4 is in the Alcazar in Sevilla, and 5 is Casa Amatller in Barcelona. 
We're juvenile, we admit it. Spitting fountains and those that gave Ed the opportunity to hop up and act like a foolish teenager? Well, we have a lot of those shots... Or how about these police officers in Valencia (3) who appeared to be about to hop onto this clown bike... Actually we only saw a handful of police officers during the whole trip (over 2000 miles and we only saw 2 on the highway). The Spanish sure seem to follow the rules or the police are just well-hidden somewhere.
The last of the manhole art from Ed's collection:
We saw some amazing butterflies in Spain but it can be dang difficult to catch them mid-flight. I had a lot of air or ground shots that I wondered what they were...and then remembered--oh yes, the butterfly with the weirdly long "tail" or with the orange markings. This was the only butterfly I managed to shoot--and not very well--but it's representative of so many more. We also happened on a lot of large or colorful beetles (2, 3, 4). And of course there were the various cockroach run-ins...yuck! We'll spare you those photos.
Barcelona dragon (1) and lion (2) doors were pretty cool but Zaragoza wins out for most ornamentation. The medusa (3), if that's who she is, and the lion (4) were just two of many I found in that long, hot wander looking for an open restaurant in Zaragoza (yes, perhaps I was looking too much at closed doors in retrospect...). The very fancy door (5) opens the Ayuntamiento de Leon--essentially it's a city office building. Leave it to Leon to dress up even their modern doors.
There are a lot of fascinating doors in Spain, some old, some new but a lot of ornamentation that you just don't see in the U.S. #1 is from the Alhambra and the next 3 photos are from Elx (!), and the last is from Barcelona (I think it was on a side door of a church, which kind of explains the laden-down dude celebrated here).
This was our last night at the parador and we knew it was our last hurrah in Spain as we were headed for a Madrid airport hotel the next day. So we treated ourselves to a tasting menu at the hotel. You'd think a kid ordered this ridiculous dessert--nope, it was me! But I gave each kid his own cone.
