The World is a Garden - Spain and England 2010

John Steinbeck said, "People don't take trips - trips take people". Bitten by the travel bug seven years ago, I was always content to return to the UK year after year so I admit to a smidgen of disappointment when our class voted to go to Spain for our trip abroad. As I started investigating, planning, and honing the itinerary, the disappointed evaporated and by the time our departure date arrived, I was really excited about going! The fact that two of my classmates and I were extending our travels to England as well just made the sense of excitement even more tangible.

How often have my classmate Emma and I looked at each other and declared ourselves to be the Luckiest People on the Planet (LPOTP for short)? Well, it happened again - and again, and again, and again - while we were traveling through Spain and England this month. Since it was a business trip, not a vacation (but still a welcome and much needed break from the stresses of the program), we kept a travel blog to chronicle our adventures. Since blogging occurred at the end of the day when the bloggers were pretty much exhausted, the posts are short and sweet. Some places we visited have incredible stories behind them and those posts, as well composed as they are, don't begin to scratch the surface and some sites and experiences merit much more in the way of narrative.

I'm also a camera nut so I snapped lots of photos. My classmate and fellow camera nut Hudson and I were in an unspoken competition to see who would shoot the most pictures (2,627 so far, including our week in England. I'm still hunting for the memory card from my pocket camera!). In the coming days (weeks?) I'll try to capture the memories as they flit by and impart them here.

So grab a chair, a cup of cafe con leche (I honestly don't know what they put in the coffee in Spain but it was positively ambrosial!) and enjoy the journey.

We begin in Barcelona...