Jubilados Savouring the Journey
We (‘Spice’ and ‘Magellan’) are a newly retired couple with a passion for active independent travel. One of our first trips after turning 65 was to Spain, which explains its melodious word for retirees—jubilados—in our tagline.
What will you get by taking vicarious trips with us? Ideas, insight and inspiration.
Consider subscribing to our email Post Alert for stories of our adventures in Spain, Oman, Bhutan, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina…plus destinations closer to home like Osooyos and Pender Island here in beautiful British Columbia.
The Golden Spruce in 1984 (Photo: Mike Beauregard)
“I think he’s alive and living in the bush in Alaska like hundreds of other guys,” said Dale, the volunteer at the Port Clements Museum in his black fisherman’s cap and black T-shirt when I asked him if he thought Grant Hadwin was dead. “He left his pack above the high-tide mark; that’s the giveaway,” added Dale.
Do you know the story of the Golden Spruce and its tangled branches of mystery, myth and madness?
“Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all”
Forget the Gregorian calendar. For as long as I can remember it’s the first of September that heralds the new year on my calendar. The fall harvest ripening into hearty soups and long-simmering stews, festivals for writing and films with premiers of new novels and movies, dahlias in russet and gold, magazines thick with fashions for the fall season, the ideal time to travel to so many places, sweaters…
Nicoletta, the Duchess, in her kitchen
The first dish cited in our Insight guide to Sicily is Sarde a beccafico. I didn’t pay much attention, not being overly fond of sardines.
But when I read in that same guidebook that you could stay at Via Butera 28 in Palermo, part of Palazzo Lanza Tomasi where Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa lived while writing The Leopard, one of the world’s 100 best novels, one of my favourites, I was “estatico.” Insight noted that you could also “book a cookery course” at the Palazzo. That made me pause. I’ve had little desire to take cooking classes. As a decent home cook, I don’t want to spend my vacation chopping herbs, cooking onions or making dishes I probably have a recipe for or could find online. And cooking classes are expensive. My attitude changed when I checked out the Via Butera 28 website and discovered the class was conducted by the duchess herself, Nicoletta Lanza Tomasi!
Cliffhanger
What is it about mountain goats? Perhaps it’s their cross-species sociability. Their curious nature. Their direct gaze. And their amazing agility on steep mountainsides.
If you’ve followed this blog for awhile, you know that goats have been our travel companions on quite a few hiking trails. Their presence equalled the splendour of everything else on what’s considered one of the most spectacular hikes in Spain—Cares Gorge in the Picos de Europa National Park.
And that’s saying something because Cares Gorge has a lot going for it.
Balcony House (Photo: National Park Service)
“People of conspicuous elegance” is how the Ancestral Pueblo people of Mesa Verde have been described. Rarefied living, 8,300 feet above sea level on the Colorado Plateau, their cliff dwellings were the largest in the Southwestern US—there were thirty-eight rooms and three plazas in the Balcony House that Magellan and I toured.
If Architectural Digest had existed in 1200 AD, Mesa Verde would have been cover material.
And a photo of the thirteen-foot-long necklace found in a kiva here would have appeared in Vogue’s August 1275 issue.
At its height, fifty thousand people lived in the area, far more than nowadays. But in the 1290s Mesa Verde came to a sudden and mysterious end. What happened?
