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On the train to Madrid, Tyler struck up a conversation with some Spaniards and discovered that the festival of San Fermin, or the running of the bulls, was still happening. For Tyler the running of the bulls represents the pinnacle of what a trip like this should be for a few reasons. First, we had to modify our schedule and timeline for the trip in order to make it to Pamplona, which instantly creates adventure. Second, running with the bulls is inherently dangerous, so it’s exciting. Third, everybody has heard of it so we will all be able to tell a great story about it someday.

Getting to Pamplona turned out to be much more involved than a three-hour train ride. In Madrid I was waiting for Tyler and Joey in a café, working on this very blog, oblivious to the time, when they rushed in scrambling, new white clothes for the bull run in hand, asking me why I wasn’t ready to go. It turned out we only had 20 minutes to make it to the apartment we were staying in, collect our things, make it to the train station, buy our tickets, go through security, and board the train. Clearly we didn’t think this through.

After sprinting through a metro station, after bounding up the stairs, after flagging down a cab, after speeding to the train station, after Tyler had to run down the same cab to reclaim his camera, after running full speed with all our gear to the ticket office, after panting in line waiting for tickets, after hurtling to the train and through security, we arrived on the train panting and soaking with sweat, claiming we would never do such a thing ever again. Somehow we had made it.

We arrived in Pamplona on the last night of the 8-day festival, so everyone there looked a little weary. Their white pants and shirts were dusty. Their red scarf’s and sashes a little rough around the edges. The night before the last run we walked around the city square to take in the festival itself and to eat some dinner. What we saw was men and women throwing up and urinating in alleyways, and many weary people who had been drinking nonstop for over a week. I knew then why people were gored by bulls—they could barely stand, much less walk, let alone run from a bull.

So we decided to sleep, so that we would be nice and rested for the bull run the next morning.

After waking up at 6:30 and groggily making our way through the streets, we saw the erected barriers that formed the path for the bulls to run. People were everywhere, sitting along and atop the barriers, milling in the rain soaked streets, accumulating in masses all around the path of the bulls. Most people it seemed hadn’t slept at all, so they weren’t hung over but still drunk. I expected a blood bath, so Joey and I found a perch to take it all in. I decided to videotape Tyler’s exploits instead of running, and Joey thought taking pictures would be a better use of his time.

Tyler ran with the bulls indeed, but we missed watching him do it, partly because the whole thing lasted about two minutes, and mainly because Tyler ended up starting ahead of our vantage point. At exactly 8 am a canon blasted and the runners in front of us started sprinting down the street. After about thirty seconds, we saw a group of 13 bulls or so, trotting (that’s right, trotting, not running) past us. And like that it was over. No one was trampled. I saw no one gored. It was just some bulls trotting down the street.

Tyler claims that one of the bulls was a mere couple of feet from his right side, but I’m not sure. You never know with Tyler.

Of course, my favorite parts of the event were cerebral, mostly because when we perched ourselves on a concrete ledge 40 minutes before the running, I had a lot of time to think. I fantasized about jumping from 10 feet above on top of a would be thief who would surely attempt to take Joey’s bag of lenses. But it never happened, so I directed my thoughts elsewhere, and as it happened while we were waiting we saw a man who looked remarkably similar to Ernest Hemingway.

This was pure serendipity. While not detracting from the media coverage of gorings and tramplings at the running of the bull’s, I have to say that any American who was at that festival was there, directly or indirectly, because of Hemingway’s portrayal of the event in The Sun Also Rises. He made this festival famous. I find this vastly interesting because ostensibly the festival venerates the patron saint of Pamplona, Saint Fermin, but it didn’t feel Christian at all. That’s not to say that it wasn’t religious—it was wrought with ceremony and ritual. After all bullfighting has its roots in pagan sacrifice, and the week long drunken revelry certainly felt like it was rooted in paganism. So by my count most people who were there were a few steps removed from anything having to do with the original reasons for the festival. Some were there because of Papa Hemmingway, possibly chasing some sort of validation in terms of his definitions of masculinity. And some were there just to drink and to have a good time. So why were we there?

We were there for a good story.

Travelers are story chasers and a trip finds completion in the telling and retelling of your exploits. But as I’ve thought about this motivation to travel, I have to ask myself, am I looking at and experiencing these things because I am moved by them and am learning something about life and humanity from them? Or am I simply marking them off a list so that I can feel culturally significant?

That may seem harsh, but it does come down to this simple question—do I experience the thing in the moment or do I experience it later when I get to tell someone I saw such and such painting? Obviously, there is a little bit of both. Certainly it isn’t wrong to share experiences with people. A vital aspect of travel is the social ceremony of sharing your experiences with others when you return. As all of us have noted on this trip, certain things don’t feel real until you talk about them with people that you care about. For the most part, people want to see your pictures and hear your stories. But there is a fine line between the communal sharing of experience and cashing in the cultural cache you’ve accumulated by being a world traveler. I’m still trying to figure out where I fall on that spectrum.

For more pictures from our adventures, go to Joseph’s website.

For our first full day in Madrid, we decided to visit the Prado Museum. This made me happy, since I am something of a museum junkie. I love how you can move through large, crisply lit rooms and know in a purely visual way what different artist’s cultures valued and what was beautiful to them. For example, you can see the non-dimensional, non-expressive faces of Gothic frescoes and know that these anonymous artists lived in time where God was emphasized and man was flat. You can stand before a Raphael painting, noting the stunning attention to anatomical detail, and know that he lived in a time when was beginning to become the measure of all things. Art, in all its forms, unlocks the values of a culture and allows you to step into a by-gone era. Plus, it looks cool.

At the Prado seeing works by El Greco and Bosch were particular highlights, but as we moved through the gallery spaces a particular theme emerged for me personally in the art—the fragility of man and the ravages of time. Two paintings particularly embodied this idea for me. One was Peter Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death.

This painting is a panorama of a burning landscape where Death and his minions have free reign of humanity. At the center is Death himself, scythe in hand, riding an emaciated horse, commanding a horde of skeleton soldiers who flood the entire landscape, each administering awful punishments. In one scene people are hanged on a makeshift gallows. In another people are beheaded. The whole ordeal is horrible, apocalyptic and gruesome, and most would describe it as morbid, but I saw in the painting a stirringly honest picture of an oft-forgot reality—that Death will come for us all. On this side of Eden, we are on the clock.

The idea of time leads me to the second painting. In Mark Buchannan’s The Rest of God, he describes the reality that we are slaves to time, and he illustrates this with the story of Chronos. Chronos was the Greek god of time, and in the myths, because he fears being usurped, he chooses to devour his children. Buchannan sees in this story our plight as humans—that we are all subject to time’s gnawing mouth. Goya captured this horrifying scene his painting Chronos (Saturn) Devouring His Children and when I saw the painting I instantly connected it with the Brueghel painting. They are really about the same thing. These paintings are vivid, if macabre reminders, that as children of Adam, we are slaves to time, and that in many ways time does devour us.

I know this is true in my own work, how there is never enough time to accomplish everything you think to do or even everything you have to do. But work isn’t the only thing that time devours. On this trip I came in thinking I would have scads of time to read, to blog, to reflect, and to see everything that I wanted, but it hasn’t been the case. In everything you always have to choose what you really want and even then you mostly run out of time. Both these paintings were reminders to me that in God’s scheme of things, we are no longer enslaved to time. Yes, death will come, but it will have no sting because there is a world coming were time does not exist and we will not decay. Sometimes it takes a glimpse of horror to remember that.

About a year ago Joey and I were at Barnes and Noble flipping through photography books on Europe. While looking at a book on Spain we came across a few sweeping panoramas of a tiny medieval town called Segovia. One look at the fortified walls, the forbidding castle, the jutting spires of the cathedral, and the endless arches of the aqueduct, and I knew that we had to go. Luckily, Segovia is a short bus ride away from Madrid and after our night in the inferno of Jeremy’s apartment, a day in medieval village sounded nice. We bought some food, boarded the bus, and headed to Segovia.

Segovia is beautiful and if you are in Madrid for any amount of time at all it is worth the bus ride. But I have to say, our time in Segovia solidified a shift I’ve sensed in myself concerning travel. I’ve been to Europe a handful of times and to other places where you travel in a similar way, namely, you stay in a major city, take in the major sights, enjoy the local cuisine or some of other culturally significant thing like flamenco or bullfighting.

But lately I’ve really just wanted to be outside, to hike and to enjoy the landscape of a place more than the things I’ve traditionally enjoyed. The castle was amazing and I always love cathedrals, but the best part of the day in Segovia was when we hiked around the perimeter of the city. At one point we were lost, so we cut across a field and down a hill through some trees, and that was the most fun I had all day.

I enjoyed it because it was restorative. I didn’t feel like I needed to accomplish anything other than enjoying the landscape. Much of the way I travel is reflective of how I live my life, namely that I am striving to learn and to accumulate information, purely for sake of having information. My number one strength is input. I collect information like middle school girls used to collect trolls—that is, crazily. Europe is great for that because everything has a story, everything has cultural weight. There is information everywhere and if you are wired like me, that can turn into work rather than pleasure.

One thing I’ve been learning this year spiritually is the difference between vacating and recreating. The vacation implies vacantness, that you are fleeing a space, fleeing your life. But that never works. If you are a workaholic at home then you are going to manifest those things on a trip. Vacating isn’t really possible in my opinion, and if it is then it certainly isn’t healthy because it is probably coupled with mind-altering substances. Recreation is different—it is re-creative. What this means is that when we travel or take any time for ourselves it should recreate us. Our day in Segovia was that for me.

We left Seville and reached Madrid by train in around 3 hours, which I think is the perfect amount of time to spend on a train. While enjoying the Spanish countryside, we learned from some Spaniards that the festival of San Fermin, including the running of the bulls, was still going on that we could be there with another 3-hour train ride. We decided that we would go after leaving Madrid, but more on that later.

We arrived in Madrid and made our way to the Plaza de Espana to meet Jeremy, our first couch surfing host. For those of you who don’t know, couch surfers are an internet community of people who offer their homes to travelers for free, and since you typically end up sleeping on their couch, they call it couch surfing. Joey and I have hosted a handful of travelers over the last year, and since none of them were serial killers or that weird at all, we decided that we would try it as travelers. At the very least we would save some money and meet some interesting people.

And we met Jeremy.  Jeremy is a French ex-pat who lives in Madrid, working as a language tutor. As you will see from the pictures, Jeremy is, in my opinion, very French looking. According to his profile, he considers himself an expert in English, but he is an earnest amateur at best. During one conversation it took me ten minutes to understand that in France three separate channels show Desperate Housewives.  Really?

Hardly worth the effort. I’m not criticizing him—Jeremy honestly loves language, he says he knows 8, and you can tell he hosts couch surfers, particularly English speakers, so that he can practice. I admire this for two reasons. One, if my French were at the level of his English, I would never dream of hosting a French speaker, so he is certainly brave. Two, though we struggled to understand each other, he genuinely wanted to communicate with us and he strove to make that happen. During conversations he would look up words and then ask us how to use certain phrases or verbs.

In all of that I didn’t ask him how to say one thing in French, and I realized we native English speakers aren’t very generous with other languages. For us other languages are more like novelties because we understand that English is the language of culture and commerce, and that in terms of cost benefit analysis, the effort necessary to really learn another language isn’t worth it since English is king. Traveling helps us see how the rest of the world perceives our language and our culture and how we perceive ourselves, and I love this because I don’t know if I would ever think about this if it weren’t for encountering people like Jeremy. I realized that Europeans are like distant cousins to us Americans, so even though we have relatives in common, our families are different, and it’s always interesting to see how other families raise their children, so to speak.

But Jeremy was only with us in Madrid for one night because he was going to a nude beach for a couple of days (true story). We thought this meant that we were getting kicked out after one night, but then something incredible happened—he gave us the keys to his apartment—and he told us we are welcome to come and go as we please. Crazy, really. But then I looked around and realized he had no fear of us taking anything. There was nothing to take, unless we wanted a PC laptop with a French keyboard. We didn’t.

Now to that first night. His apartment had three bedrooms, but one of them was inaccessible for reasons that remain inexplicable, and because Jeremy’s roommate had the other room, this meant that all four of us would be sleeping in Jeremy’s room—his tiny, tiny room with two mattresses and a fold out couch. It was kind of like if you combined a sleep over with a refugee camp in Africa, except hotter. Way hotter. Jeremy had no AC because Europeans love to sweat and love to smell like sweat. I’m serious—there was nary a fan, which blows my mind because it’s not like ceiling or floor fans are a big secret. That first night in Madrid may be the worst night of sleep I have ever had, if you can call having your eyes closed for eight hours pretending to sleep while you roll around in your own sweat sleep.  Hey, at least it was free.

Our flight from London to Seville was easy overall, aside from having to get up at 4 am to make the airport. This compounded our sleep debt and when we finally got to Seville the only thing we were able to see before taking a 6-hour nap was the Seville Cathedral. I knew for sure that I needed to sleep when trudging through the world’s largest cathedral felt like a chore more than a privilege. Christopher Columbus’ stunning tomb only inspired a mild response. We did see a wooden alligator hanging from one of the outdoor transepts. Though I should have been asking why there was a wooden alligator at a church, I instead named him Woody Allengator. Tyler and Joey both laughed, which is concrete evidence that we all needed to sleep. Clearly, we weren’t thinking straight.

So after a glorious 6-hour nap we enjoyed a meal at a 300-year-old tapas bar. The food was good but the surprise of the evening was discovering a half-formed pearl in one the oysters we ate. Actually, my teeth discovered it. And after realizing what it was, we decided to make it the trip mascot and to name it. We settled on Gary Lawrence of Iberia. Unlike Woody Allengator, the pearl’s name is absolutely brilliant. He was too small though, and I lost him the next morning. Tyler cried.

We planned to head to Madrid the following morning but Tyler found out that there would be a bullfight that night in Seville. This was exciting to all of us, since attending a bullfight was at the forefront of our imaginations from the planning stages of this trip. There seems to be nothing more quintessentially Spanish than a bullfight, and Seville is the world capital of bullfights.

But I have to say the overall experience was strange and a little unsettling for me. One bull, for instance, had blood gushing out of his mouth by the end of the fight and when the team of horses would drag the dead bull’s body away, it always felt like they were celebration was a little too extravagant. It’s not like the bull had a real chance.

The most fascinating aspect of the whole ordeal was the matadors themselves. I didn’t realize there was a team of matadors each with a different job. The main matador though is the most fascinating. He is the one who ends up killing the bull, and he occupies a strange masculine/feminine space. In one sense his main job is to seduce the bull, luring him into a hypnotic dance. His main weapon is a kind of dance, a dance full of graceful and strikingly feminine steps. The bull spins and lunges into an ever dizzying trance, and ends up utterly stunned, standing woozy in front of the matador, who then plunges a sword into the bull’s back. This is where the matador becomes decidedly masculine. What starts graceful and seductive ends forceful and aggressive. And though we saw one matador toppled end over end by a charging bull, I never felt like the bullfighters were in danger. The only one in danger was the bull. His fate was sealed as soon as he stepped into the arena. What I thought would be a true confrontation between man and beast was really more pageantry, a prelude to a known end—the death of the bull.

Now on to one of the reasons travel is so great. Edward de Bono describes the human brain as a “self-organizing system,” which means, among other things, that as your brain figures something out, a place, a process, etc., it creates neural shortcuts for that thing. These neural shortcuts self-organize so that when certain stimuli hit your brain, your brain knows exactly what to do, so that over a long enough period of time you can do certain things on autopilot. Think about driving in your hometown. For the most part you aren’t paying attention because your brain knows how to get around.

What this means is that to learn, to grow, to shake up your brain, you need new environments and challenges. Travel, especially in foreign countries, jump-starts your brain.

In London when we walked into Victoria station and there were thousands of people moving in every direction and I was on no sleep and I had to figure out what tube to take, my brain kicked into overdrive. And I loved it. I had to form new patterns or at least develop pathways between existing patterns in my mind. I’ve always described travel as heightened living. You do many of things that you do in your regular life, but you experience them in a heightened way. If your every day life is standard definition television, then travel is high definition television.

For more photos from our adventures go here.

All photos by Joseph Schalbs.

Dave gets married then Tyler gets shot down, only to rise again and dance with minor.  Watch the wedding and the fall of Superman here.

Watch as we indulge our inner rednecks as we shoot our way into the Lacey’s hearts.  Here is the sixth installment of our great American adventure here.

We leave St. Louis behind and make a dead sprint for Ohio to get Dave to his bride-to-be.  That’s not to say that we don’t have fun along the way because we do.  We very much do.  Check it out Day 5 here.

We almost drown in a sea of cardinal red and a very special guest arrives on the fourth day of our adventure.  There is song and dance galore on the latest episode of Ahoy Ohio.