Wednesday, June 29, 2011

My final post about our experiences in Spain and France


We rented this Citroen Picasso at the Barcelona Airport and drove north into the Spanish Pyrenees, then the French Pyrenees, Montpellier and back to Barcelona. Lloyd is mighty pleased with himself in this image--he has just succeeded in parallel parking on the left side of the road.

It seems that every village, town and city in southern France has avenues of plane trees. Apparently many of them were planted in Napoleon's time and so of course now they're very big trees. It wasn't unusual to see memorials attached to some of the trees indicating that there had been MVA deaths--the roads are considerably narrower in these avenues.


This was Lastours and the site of one of the last stands of the Cathars just north east of Carcassonne.


Rooftops in the village of Beget in the Spanish Pyrenees, just north of Oix and Olot.


These fabulous swirling columns are at Parc Guell, in the northern part of Barcelona city. This was designed by Gaudi. Probably a more famous image from this park is the merandering ceramic bench that is on the terrace above this "Hall of Columns". When we were in the park, it seemed like every tourist had flocked there as well, and to the ceramic bench in particular. So we beat a retreat to the less populated areas like this one...and I found it less gaudy as well...


Finally, in Monserrat (a mountain-top monastery just north of Barcelona) this is a wonderful statue of Pau Casals, world famous cellist and composer, who was very proud of his Catalan roots...and who was an inspiration to my cello-playing father. I grew up listening to a lot of his music!



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