Reuniting me with Anton Gaudi!

We just finished our brief time in Leon. I think we stop here just for the cathedral, pictured above and below. It opened in 1205 and contains 737 stained glass windows. Gothic churches are my absolute favorite. The combination of gothic architecture and stained glass is just about enough to do me in. I put one picture of the stained glass down below but it just never translates well into a picture so you’ll need to come to Leon to check this out.

Before we got to Leon, the Road Scholar bus stopped at Las Medulas, pictured below. It looks like a Grand Canyon-esque natural landscape but it’s actually an old gold mining site. The Romans – in 100AD – had an enormous gold mine here. They used a mining method called ruina montium (wreck the mountain) – basically undermining the integrity of the mountain with large amounts of water by boring tunnels into the mountain. The tunnels were connected to reservoirs, the force of the water collapsed the mountains, and the gold flowed out with the water. This place is a UNESCO site but, interestingly, Thailand, Germany, and Finland were against inclusion – because the site stems from environmental destruction, despite the ingenuity of the Romans.

We’re moving on to Segovia in a few minutes, which is the end of our Road Scholar tour. I’m taking over again and routing us to Barcelona. Barcelona is the home base of Anton Gaudi, pioneer of Art Nouveau and Modernisme in architecture, furniture, and art. His creations feature stained glass, tile work, and intricate iron scrollwork and are rooted in the Gothic, but merely as a starting point. You’ll be inundated with photo examples soon enough. But here’s me with Gaudi himself – who is sitting outside an early example of his work in Leon:

In preparation for our Barcelona arrival, Ron and I have been going over the pronunciation of Anton Gaudi’s name. So far, after working on it since our last visit to Barcelona, we are stuck at gaudy, which I know to be a typical Ron error – but I’m nervous that others will think it a condemnation of Gaudi’s genius and it will reflect poorly on my devotion to Modernisme.

And moreover, by way of overriding travel with Ron warnings, we’ve been in hotels in these cities – Lisbon, Porto, Amarante, Aveiro, Santiago de Compostela, and Leon. We have not had a totally functional shower in any of these hotels. We’ve had the 24-inch diameter shower/claustrophobia “tube”, we’ve had the shower curtain replaced with a partial glass barrier, and we’ve had the raised tubs that require a huge and terrifying (naked) step down, and then we had the shower in the Hotel Conde Luna in Leon. I actually thought it looked pretty encouraging – directable water flow, a partition between the shower area and general bathroom floor…

I fare better in these showers than Ron for some reason and I address this by always showering first, before Ron turns the room into a skating rink. But in Leon, I thought, surely Ron could keep the water in that (moderately reasonable) shower and so I set about installing a COVID-test app on his phone for our return to the US.

I found him, minutes later, in his Ex-Officio skivvies (so no picture for you), madly mopping up the floor. Not only had he directed water out of the shower – he had somehow sprayed enough water out that there was about a quarter inch of standing water covering the bathroom. He was diligently trying to address this with a single modest-sized European bath towel, which he was using to mop up the floor, then squeezing out into the sink, with the trailing end of the towel cascading down the side of the sink. The end result, of course, was that the water was flowing right back onto the floor and I was laughing/crying so hard that I could not verbalize anything coherent to point out the weak link in his clean up plan. A better blogger would have a video of this event to share.

More for you soon. We’re seeing at least six Modernista buildings in Barcelona and taking a day trip to Girona to see a Salvador Dali museum. In addition, we are meeting friends in Barcelona! They are not the librarian/medical provider combination that was so helpful in Lisbon but they are a psychologist/divorce attorney combination, which may be more helpful at this point, especially since I just shared that bathroom/flooding/underwear story with you!