Lightning Strikes Bilbao Our Turkish tour guide Kaz, a well-educated and very enlightened man of the world sent us an article from The Guardian today on the subject of the twentieth anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao. Given the enlightened journalistic presence of The Guardian, that message reminds me that Kaz is a first rate guru to follow, not only in his native land of Turkey (where we last saw him), but almost anywhere…
Iconic Art and Wealth I am sitting in my hotel room in Bilbao, Spain, looking out our window directly at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. We arrived here after a short, but magnificent ride along the northern coast of the Basque Country, starting in Donostia – San Sebastian. That ride is a mere 160 kms., but it bounced along the Cantabrian Sea, which is the southern part of the Bay of Biscay bounded by the north…
Storming the Storm As we hope for no rain today, we make our way to the Atlantic coast at San Sebastián. We are reading and watching the devastation in Florida from Hurricane Ian. We have in-laws who live in the Tampa area, where the Hurricane was waffling between a Cat 4 and Cat 5 as it came ashore. They had to evacuate to a hotel in Orlando, the nearest available safe harbor to where they…
Living Large Today was the sixth day of our Viva Espana tour and the fourth riding day. It was our transition day out of the dramatic Pyrenees Mountains and into the north-central part of the country. Normally we would have probably gone to Pamplona whether the bulls were running or not, since it is a well-known spot. But our tour director, Kaz, does not settle for the ordinary very often and he found us a…
End of the Trail Ahhh, the lovely Pyrenees. I’ve been to Spain many times, but never to the Pyrenees or Basque Country. As for the Pyrenees, they seem to me to be a combination of bits of Switzerland, the Tyrol, the Dolomites and the Maritime Alps all rolled into one. They are at once verdant and sweet valleys and craggy and dramatic rock outcroppings. The views at every turn are spectacular and I suspect we…
Infrastructure Fantasy Yesterday, as we rode through the countryside north of Barcelona up into the Pyrenees Mountain area, it was hard to miss how lovely it all was. Yes, the weather was perfect, which for a motorcycle tour is paramount, but there was also the issue of the roads. The first half of the journey sort of went from urban to industrial (I didn’t really see so much of what we think of as suburban,…
Meanwhile, Back in the School Cafeteria Sometimes an entire group of people can be in such a good mood that they lose themselves to a situation and just have a great time in an odd circumstance. Today was really the start of our motorcycle ride through the Pyrenees. We are actually going from Barcelona up into the Pyrenees and then up to the Basque Country to trek across the top of the Spanish coastline, called…
Camera Obscura Cameras have been around for a long time. In their most basic form of image projection, it is said that they may have existed as long ago as 500 BC with the first one taking the form of pinholes in tents where light came through and was cast on another tarp or tent surface. Some go so far as to say there may have been similar Stone Age versions that gave rise to…
Gaudí or Gaudy? Yesterday we toured Barcelona and it is impossible to do so without spending an inordinate amount of time seeing and contemplating the works of Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect who seems to have almost single-handedly defined this most trendy city on the European continent. We are staying in the most central location of the city on the Passeig de Gracia, where several of Gaudí‘s earlier buildings are located. The style, to me,…
A Mandarin Lemon I taught hospitality economics at the Cornell School of Hotel Management back when it was called that and I was in business school. I found it interesting to come up with hospitality examples of fundamental economic concepts and, of course, I have always enjoyed the teaching process. I have spent the last fifty years staying in every type and manner of hotel you can imagine. I have stayed in my early motorcycling…