20- Spain: From the frying pan to the flames

A few more flights, a few more steps closer to home. You know you’ve been travelling for a long time when your reflex in the bathroom is to look for the bin to put the toilet paper in! You mean we can throw stuff in the toilets again? Wow. And can we drink the water that comes out of the tap? Yes? The wonders of the world. How we forget how the other half lives! And with that introduction we arrive to the tap water drinking, sewerage working, toilets flushing utopia that is Spain. Welcome to paradise! 

First stop in lovely Espana was to the coastal town of Calpe, an hour from Malaga. We were there to bear witness to the phenomenon that is “two accountants who trained together in Deloitte Cork, then moved to Australia and then came back to Europe to get married”- these two certainly sound like they tick all the boxes! Good on them. We had a lovely couple of days relaxing and de-jet lagging around Calpe before the big day which was nice. The day itself was super as we were shuttled around the area and treated to a wonderful day and night out.

After the hospitality of the wedding, it was time to don the backpacks once again, or wheel them whichever you prefer, and head north as we hopped on the Spanish high speed train, the Ave (as in Ave Maria!) and headed to Barcelona. It’s a really super train system. Similar to Japan and definitely the best we’ve come across outside of there.

Barcelona itself is a very funky city and certainly lives up to its huge reputation as one of the coolest around. With heaps of arty monuments and buildings, as well as a wide variety of food, there’s a huge amount of things fighting for your attention. All of the cities highlights are well worth visiting with Park Guell, La Sagrada Familia cathedral, La Boqueria market and the Nou Camp all being great entertainment. The Nou Camp, the home of Barcelona FC is a good few hours. We’ve done a few tours like this before. This one took the mythmaking to whole new levels as they really pushed all their players past and present to deity level. Amusing the propaganda that’s written around the place- North Korea would be proud of some of it. I suppose somebody has to be employed to write the stuff. I was very impressed though when you get to the pitch they’ve actually covered over a bunch of seats for the summer and built a pitchside bar/ café. Having a coffee pitchside was a nice cherry on top of the tour.

Heading to the Boqueria market was a right treat. So much gorgeous food, I came very close to drowning on my own drool. Thankfully it didn’t come to that and we just had lunch instead!

It seems incredible that Barcelona has a population of just 1.5million people but attracts 7.5 million tourists a year. That’s 5 times the population, incredible. In comparison Ireland as a whole got 7 million tourists last year. Popular spot indeed.

From the Catalan capital we moved across to the official capital, Madrid to enjoy a few days there and celebrate one year of marriage. It’s being a pretty hectic year all things considered; amongst other things we’ve visited 21 countries in 12 months- not a bad return. We’ll be hard pressed to keep that pace up!

Madrid was great for the few days. It’s a royal city so similar to London in many ways with loads of palaces and royal monuments. Good to stroll around but the real delight we found was the tapas tour you can do. Madrid has a huge amount of tapas bars, so many that it is an appealing pastime for tourists to make their merry way from one bar to another, for a night getting merrier and merrier while doing it! A great way to spend some time sampling different tapas and pinxtos in various cafes while washing them down with some cheap Spanish drinks. What’s not to love about it.

From the royal capital we moved to the Catholic capital and got to Seville where we began to realize that the thermometers in Spain must be broken. It was very hot in Barcelona and Madrid, in Seville we began to realize why the Spanish invented siestas! The mercury was rising and so was the number of rest stops and drink stops we were taking just to get some shade. The delights of a Spanish summer.

Seville was quite a revelation to us. A really gorgeous city, lots of cathedrals, beautiful buildings, super food. Oh the food. Spain as a whole has a given us some of the best food of our trip. Just beautiful. It would be the number one reason why we’d go back there. 

Our final stop of the eight months was to the frying pan of Spain, Cordoba where we were the weather gave us a volcanic-like greeting and my sister and her family gave us..... a wonderfully warm welcome! 45 degrees to hit while we were. Amusing to be around the city in that temperature and realise that the only people out and about are tourists! All the locals are far too sensible to be anywhere outdoors in that temperature.

So after eight months on the road, we come to an end. We left our Australian family in October and our final stop was to our Spanish family- a fitting end and one that we arrived at reluctantly. 

"Are you sure we can't go on? Ah go on, just another few months?!?! Are you sure? Last chance....."

Our trip from Melbourne to Cork with many, many stops along the way is at an end. It’s been the most amazing adventure, one that we will never forget and hopefully one day we’ll hit the road again and add to these stories.

With heavy hearts we end our trip but we have many memories, over 12,000 photographs and 20 blogs with us for company, it’s time to unpack those boxes we shipped………

Click here to see a selection of photos from our Spanish trip

Our route:

Fly to Alicante, trains to Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Cordoba, fly Malaga to Cork

Our overall route:

Australia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Philippines, Hong Kong & Macau, New Zealand, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Cuba, USA, Spain, Ireland