Saturday, September 23, 2001

The only way to accurately describe where we are is to say that we are in a state of shock. The events of September 11, 2001 will live with us forever. We have tried to put our feelings into words and found that no matter what we write it is not sufficient.

Physically we are in France en route to southern Spain for the winter where we plan to go back to school to continue our Spanish language lessons. We left Germany on the 21st of September on the AutoZug. Lots of Harley’s at the station waiting for the train to Livorna, Italy.

We had traveled the reverse of this route in July from Bordeaux, France to Neu-Isenburg, Germany. This trip to Bordeaux was unique. Our departure was delayed more than an hour and one half due to a bomb threat. Once the train was moving we traveled not more than 70 kilometers before the train made an abrupt, sudden stop. We sat for thirty minutes and then the police and ambulance vehicles approached the train through a farmer’s field. After about three hours the train moved on. We learned that someone had jumped in front of the train - an apparent suicide.

We arrived in Bordeaux 4 hours late just in time for the first rain storm of the fall season that had passed through Portugal and Spain to arrive in the south of France. This means we have been traveling on the bike in rain since the first of September. Jim continues to live up to his new nickname of “Rain Man Junior”.

Monday, September 25, 2001                           Top of Page

We hung out in Bordeaux Saturday and Sunday because the weather was miserable and fortunately for us, time is not an issue. On Monday we left Bordeaux and rode to Lourdes, France. A nice day and a nice ride. See the Lourdes page in the France subsection of Our Travels for more information.

Monday, October 1, 2001                                Top of Page

We left Lourdes on Wednesday and rode to Andorra. Managed to spend a day there and not buy anything. We departed Andorra in the rain and rode southeast for the remainder of the week, in the rain, arriving in Mijas, Spain Sunday afternoon. As this is written, the sun is back and the temperature is 31 degrees C. We are now engaged in the search for an appartment with garage for the winter. Once we find a place to live we will then enrool in more Spanish classes.

We left Alicante Saturday, April, 14, 2001. Four and one half months later we are back in the south of Spain. During this time we have visited France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Austria and the Czech Republic and traveled a bit over 15,000 miles. A nice summer vacation. Not bad when we think that we were going to spend this time in Spain and Portugal.

Saturday, October 6, 2001                                  Top of Page

As the year 2001 draws to a close, we have:

• been on the road full time for 21 months
• traveled 41,000 miles on the bikes
• visited 15 countries on three continents
• and met some of the most wonderful people we have ever encountered.

We have found a home for the winter (see picture below). We arrived here October 6, 2001 and will be here until March 1, 2002 . We are in the foothills below the picturesque white village of Mijas, Spain about midway between Malaga and Marbella.

Unfortunately there is no telephone. As a result we can only access our e-mail from Internet Cafes.

We find the house to be very comfortable - it is wonderful to have more than one room to wander through or crawl into and out of in the case of the tent! And to have a decent kitchen - both of us are happy about that; Verna from a preparation perspective and Jim from a consuming perspective. It is really nice to cook our own food as simple or as complex as we like. We have found a fairly large market near town that has just about everything we need, so we know few limits. However, the house is about 10 minutes from town on the bike, so we have to plan ahead with supplies as we can't just walk to the market. Our first two trips to the market required taking both bikes as we stocked up on all the necessities. We got quite a few inquiring looks and comments as we packed a full grocery cart of food into the side and top boxes. And the hardest part for us is remembering to take our bags of trash with us when we leave as the trash collection area is about a mile away from the house. For information about this and other homes in the area you can check the Homes in Spain web site.

Admittedly, the area here is not the "real" Spain. There are probably as many non-Spanish as Spanish people. There are many holiday homes and apartments catering to the English and Belgians especially as well as numerous Germans and Swedes. We have met many English folks who have been living here for 10 to 20 years. Why live in those northern climes when you can have sunshine for most of the year?

We have enrolled in more Spanish classes. This time we are at the University of Malaga. We have also located the local BMW shop - the two necessities in our life.

The weather has to cooled down and has been wet — lots of rain since the first of November. We have had several storms which had ferocious winds in excess of 50MPH. The electric service is negatively impacted by this weather. We have 3 hot feeds of electricity which come into the house from a pole in the street. Different circuits in the house are fed from each of the feeds. When the wind blows we watch the wires between the poles in the street "dance" in the wind. They jump up and down and crash into one another. When this happens, the power fails. Fortunately the circuit breakers at the power distribution station reset and it comes back on. Well, for a while at least. After several iterations of this the circuit breakers at the power company fail completely and we are left without power on one, two or three of the incoming lines. So, as each of the three feeds fail we lose power to varying parts of the house. The real bad news is that everything in the house is electric. When the power fails we have no hot water, no stove with which to cook, no refrigeration or lights. It was difficult understanding why only certain parts of the house had no power. Thankfully this multiple lead thing was explained to us; very different wiring than we have become accustomed to.

Now, weather permitting, we will do some exploring of the surrounding area and hope to get in a fair number of walks in some of the local Parque Naturales. And Jim will do some work on the bikes.

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