We’re up for our second visa renewal this year. When I reached out for advice from our good friends at YesValencia, Linda asked me if I had ever considered getting …
A Year of Yoga: Daily Practice
About 60 days into Spain’s CV-19 stay-at-home mandate, I realized something. Without making it a goal, I’d practiced yoga every single day for the entire time. Some sessions were shorter …
Uprooted! I didn’t have a checklist for that.
My first few months in Spain were hard. Susan and I had coffee with a fellow American who had recently arrived in Valencia. As our conversation unfurled he quietly admitted …
Deja Vu High School
As I sat down to write this post it dawned on me that it has been 50 years since I graduated from St. Catherine’s High School in Racine, Wisconsin. Fifty …
My Reckoning with Hidden Consumption Part 2 — Food Waste
In Part I of this series I examined my clothing purchase habits in order to reduce my contribution to the fashion industry’s environmentally unsustainable practices. Part II is a similar …
My Reckoning with Hidden Consumption: Part 1 — Clothing
One of my many interests and aspirations is to lower my impact on earth. I feel a little guilty that I’m just getting around to this with my new retired …
Our Gentle Values and Their Measures
We are trying to live gently in the world, more gently than we ever have. We’ve been at this point before, when we were young, and again, and yet again …
Our Unexpected Stay-at-Home in the Navarrés Region of the Valencia Communidad
Our escape from Las Fallas, version 2020, started with a week in the Spanish Pyrenees followed up with a week in the Basque Country. We planned for our third and …
Sabando, a remote village in the Basque Country of northern Spain
Late last year our friends Mat and Kathryn suggested we escape the noise and crowds of Valencia’s bacchanal, better known as Las Fallas. We spent the first week of our …
Fiscal, Aragón: A Quiet Village In the Spanish Pyrenees
Late last year when our friends Mat and Kat asked if we’d like to escape from Valencia with them for three weeks in March, we jumped at the chance. Not …
I’ll be using idioms until the cows come home.
Something I’ve learned during my time in Spain is that my speech is full of idioms. When Jamie called me out on this, I thought, well maybe I use these …
Before the sun: A photo project
It was early Sunday morning, the 29th day of December 2019. Lizzie, the best dog ever, and I were walking through the park. It was dark. Valencia had just begun …
Why not a self-organized family yoga retreat?
(Cats, dogs and a hippo, included) We decided to do something a little different with this post. We each independently wrote up the experiences and reactions we had to our …
Six Jam Packed Days at VaughanTown, Gredos
It’s early on a cold Sunday morning in Madrid. We join a group assembling on the street, half Spaniards, half Anglos. We’ll soon board a bus to an isolated hotel …
Spanish – English Conversation Exchanges: the struggles, the joys, and the beauty
When we planned our Spain move people repeatedly made two comments, “You’re so lucky to be immersed in the language every day,” or, “You’ll pick up Spanish so fast living …