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After a very toasty train ride from Vienna, we arrived in Prague. Tanner Hargrove, our good friend from Amarillo, had been studying in Prague for the last five weeks. We were glad to see a familiar face, and he was glad to have a reprieve from his studies. It had been a rough few weeks for him. Fortunately, he had acquainted himself with all the best the city had to offer. This made him the resident expert in places to see and places to eat, which was a huge boon to us at this point in the trip because I think we all needed to go on autopilot for a while. Figuring out logistics is one of the aspects of travel that most wears you down. At a certain point figuring out which restaurant offers the most authentic Czech cuisine becomes a chore. Now Tanner could just tell us where the best places to eat were.

All wasn’t roses though. Tanner’s accommodation fell through, and as a consequence so did ours, so we stayed in a centrally located hostel that Tanner found.

Now a hostel can mean a lot of different things. It can mean multiple bunk beds where you are constantly woken up by drunken Australians or snoring New Zealanders. It can mean disgusting communal bathrooms. And in my own experience, it can mean having your bed urinated on by a kid whose just been kicked out of the Peace Corp. True story.

I know that doesn’t paint the most appealing picture, but, I’ll admit it, I can be a tad snobby. Hostels are just very unappealing to me. I know the whole backpacking experience is supposed to include hostels so that you can rub elbows with fellow travelers and join the brotherhood of backpackers or whatever, but its just not for me. To me other backpackers aren’t colorful characters with interesting stories—they are generally just annoying. And even though our room wasn’t that bad, and even though it was in a great location, I would still rather not have to shower with flip-flops on. See. I’m a snob.  But I’m really not because nobody really wants the Swedish couple that parties all night and sleeps all day, snoring in their underwear, to stay in their hostel room. 

Still we had a good time. Because Tanner was quite home sick, he took us to a lot of places that satisfied that certain longing-for-home itch. For instance, there was a coffee shop that served real filtered coffee like in the States. For a coffee person like Joey, this was a huge deal. There was also a Tex-Mex restaurant that had ice tea with unlimited refills, both of which are generally unheard of in Europe. I think making ice might be illegal in certain parts of Europe, actually. I knew then for sure that I was homesick. When you start longing for the creature comforts of ice in your drinks and free refills, you may have been gone too long.

I know it sounds like I’m venting in this post, and I am, but we did have a really great time in Prague. The best thing about Prague is that the most satisfying part of being there is not seeing any particular thing, it’s just walking around. The city itself was relatively unscathed by the war so it’s historic buildings are intact. Walk down almost any street in Old Town and you will find beautiful buildings in all sorts of architectural style. My favorite thing was taking paddle boats down the Vlatava river for an hour.  You can take in the best parts of the city, Old Town and New Town, from the vantage point of the river.  Pretty cool.

Locals and tourists alike like to sit in the Old Town square at night, so we did that too.  That was quite fun as well.  Plus, Prague is home to some amazing gelato.  And as this trip has shown me, you can’t go to Europe without eating lots of ice cream. 

For more pictures, check out Joey’s website.

I can’t really say much about Vienna.  We did spend two days there, but we really didn’t do much.    In Vienna we all started to feel the weight of the trip.  We had covered a lot of miles, seen countless amazing things, and eaten numerous amazing meals, and in many ways we were just completely full in every sense of the word.  Plus, living like a gypsy out of a backpack takes its toll.

That’s not to say that we did nothing.  Doris, our couch surfing host, suggested a food market, an ice cream parlor, and a place to swim in the Danube river, and that’s pretty much all we did while we were in Vienna.

If I were explaining that to a non-travel weary version of myself, the fresh version of myself would probably say something like, “It doesn’t matter if you are tired.  Go see a classical concert.  Go to the Hapsburg palace.  Go see the Breughals paintings, for heaven sake.”  And it might sound crazy to you as a reader, but we were dead tired, and in travel there really is a law of diminishing returns.  You really can see too many churches, museums, historical sites, or whatever.

In this way travel is a great reminder that you can’t live life at full tilt.  A life of constant stimulation is ultimately futile because the stimulation that used to invigorate you is the same stimulation that exhausts you later on.  You need space.  You need distance.  You need rest.

Or to put it this way: I need space.  I need distance.  I need rest.

I was thinking about this idea of diminishing returns in terms to my approach to a particular place like a museum.  After a museum visit I was telling Joey how much more satisfying it would be to me if I had a membership to that museum, and visited it throughout the year to see a particular piece or a particular group of pieces after I had studied them on my own.  Then when you see the thing it isn’t about consuming it as a tourist, but enjoying it as an appreciator.  When you travel this way, so many places in a short span of time, you see most things as a consumer.   Honestly, the places and things I have enjoyed the most on this trip are not the surprises, but the things that I already knew something about, things that I already loved, like the Ghent Altarpiece or The Oath of the Horatii in the Louvre.

I went into this trip having down a minimum amount of research compared to previous trips.  This was for two reasons.  The main reason was that I had been to a large percentage of these cities before, and I already knew what to see and why it was important.  The second reason was that I thought being a little underprepared would add to the spontaneity of the trip.  I don’t know if that has been true or not, but either way, I wish I would have prepared myself more in terms of research.  For me enjoyment doesn’t come from just being in a place, but from understanding the place from a historical or artistic or philosophical perspective.  I have to have context, otherwise it is just a pretty place that feels strange and that I feel alienated from.

Anyway, I would like to go back to Vienna some day on the front end of a trip.  It really is a beautiful city.

Munich, in many ways, seems like a very large German annex at Epcot Center. The part of the city worth seeing is a self-enclosed square called Marienplatz, which all centers on a fantastic building called the Rat Haus. The opulent gothic spires, the glockenspiel, the dragon climbing the side, all make the building look like the entrance to a crazy ride, probably called “The Glockenspiel.” Adding to the amusement park-like feel is the church that supposedly bears an imprint of the devil’s footprint. Plus, everyone in the service industry wears traditional Bavarian garb. There’s nothing getting some brats and sauerkraut from a grown man in a lederhosen.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t begrudge this at all. I quite enjoyed it. I was just never sure if I was in Germany or on an elaborate movie set of Germany, a distinction that’s even harder to make when you visit a place like Neuschwanstein, a romantic castle nestled in the Alps, which is, interestingly enough, the basis for the Disney castle.

I hope none of this dissuades you to visit Munich because it really is an amazing city. I just found all of this kind of funny.

For sure, the castle is worth visiting. When your mind thinks of a castle, I’m pretty sure you picture something like Neuschwanstein. The idyllic alpine setting, the lofty ramparts and towers, the fantastic interiors, all come together to make pretty much the perfect castle. It even rained while we were touring the interior. We could hear the thunder echoing of the sides of the mountains. You couldn’t ask anything more of a castle tour.

Munich was an especially big deal for Joey. Due to a serendipitous entwining of time off and cheap flight, Joey was able to fly his girlfriend, Melissa, over to Munich for a few days. So for three days Tyler and I watched Joey be Mr. Romantic.

Actually, while Joey and Melissa were off being romantic and enjoying the city, Tyler and I were off being goofy and enjoying the city. We visited an amazing technology museum called the Deuthches Museum, walked along the river and in a large park, and spent most of the time speaking like 19^th century British explorers, claiming we’ve discovered things like indigenous drum tribes deep in parks of Munich. Basically, it was your run of the mill silliness, and it was quite fun.

I don’t know what it is about traveling overseas, but I find myself speaking in accents a lot of the time. Being with Tyler amplifies this, of course, but I think there are a couple of reasons why I do this. For one, it is my feeble attempt to “speak” another language, and more to the point, if I speak in a caricature of a language then I don’t feel as bad for not speaking that language. The second reason is that when you are deep in Bavaria, it is kind of cool to say silly things in British accent, like “It’s just around the bend. I’d bet my life on it,” because no one around you is going to understand. The language barrier affords you the opportunity to act like a kid again. Thanks, language barrier.

For more pics of Munich, see Joey’s website.

Our second full day in Paris was a lot like the first. We walked around the whole time stunned at how amazing the city was and shocked at how much money we were willingly spending. We went to the Louvre, enjoyed some shopping in a trendy neighborhood, had an amazing meal, and an amazing night walk along the river Seine.

I could describe it all but I really want to talk about Switzerland.

The next morning we headed to Lucerene, but first we had to settle our bill at the hotel in Paris. We had used the hotel’s laundry service to wash our all clothes, and when we went to pay out the receptionist informed us that we owed 300 euros. Gulp. That’s equivalent to $450, and was more than we had paid for the hotel itself. Apparently the French think washing other people’s underwear is the greatest and most luxurious service on the planet. I expected to pay a premium, of course, but not a king’s ransom just to get some clean clothes. The moral—always ask how much it costs. Alternative moral—don’t let the French wash your unmentionables.

We arrived by train in Lucerne where the couch surfing experiment continued. Our host this time was Natalie. If couch surfing were a business, Natalie should be its spokeswoman. She was an incredible host. She told us that when she was girl she used to dream about owning and running a hotel someday. If she did it would be the best hotel on the planet because she may be the most hospitable person I have ever met. She completely welcomed and integrated us into her life. She picked up from the train station, found us in her car when we were lost, gave us the keys to her flat, cooked us a traditional Swiss meal—I could go on and on about her hospitality, but the best part was talking with her.

When we were all chatting one night, she said something very interesting. We mentioned something about how trusting she was, and she replied, “I don’t think people have to earn trust, I think you just give it to them, you know?” This struck me as brilliant and as a pithy way of summing up a difference I have seen in European couch surfing culture and my own way of thinking. My thoughts on trust, and I would dare say this represents the American stance on trust, is that you distrust someone until they prove trustworthy. It is a guilty until proven innocent approach. And that is probably not the best way to treat people. Something to think about it.

The highlight in Switzerland was, of course, the Alps. The first day we went hiking on Mount Pilatus, a particular famous Alp near Lucerne. After riding the gondola up, we decided to hike down the backside. The first half of the hike was idyllic. It was peaceful, serene, where the only real sound was the jingling bells of the Swiss cows. The air was just cool enough and scenery was shockingly beautiful. The whole experience hardened my resolve that rest for me looks more like spending time in nature.

I mentioned in an earlier post that beauty is an echo of God’s Voice in the world. I also mentioned that art is an echo of the echo. I think one reason that I am connecting more with nature now is that it is one degree closer to the Voice itself. The heavens after all declare the glory of God. You would have to be sensory deprived not to see the truth of that verse in the Alps.

The next day we decided to take a train to Engleburg, a nearby town, to enjoy some adventure sports. We threw around the idea of biking and some other things, but what we really wanted to do was paraglide. So we signed up for a flight and soon enough we were on our way up a mountain to fly.

Like skydiving you have to tandem fly the first time. My pilot’s name was Ottmar. After a short gondola ride, he pulled out the glider and spread it out on a grassy plain on the edge of the cliff. He strapped me to the glider, counted to three and before I even knew it, Ottmar had me running off the side of the mountain. Just when I thought I would start plummeting down the mountain, the glider caught the wind, and we soared about twenty feet above the take off point. I was thousands of feet in the air. I was flying.

For the first minute or so I was in a state of shock, and Ottmar could tell. He kept saying, “The hard part is over. We have taken off and now we are flying,” in his most soothing Swiss accent. I was in such shock that I actualyl was flying, the best I could muster in response was, “Yes we are.”

It really was like flying in a dream. You don’t feel like you are tethered to anything. You feel like you are leisurely floating, which is a rush in itself, but add to that the stunning landscape of the Alps and the Swiss countryside, and you have yourself a dreamy 15 minutes of flight. Truly a highlight.

For pictures of Lucerene and of all our adventures, see Joseph’s website.

As a senior in high school, I took a humanities course. That complete immersion in the painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature of the Western world may have been what C.S. Lewis calls the baptism of my imagination. At the very least it created an appetite in me for culture and aesthetics, and I don’t know that I would be in Europe right now if it weren’t for that class.

One of the paintings I fell in love with in that class was Jan Van Eyck’s, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. I have been fortunate enough to see many of the world’s great masterpieces in the world’s greatest museums, but seeing this painting had always been at the top of my list. Part of my affection for the painting is that when I saw at as a high school student, it was one of the first times that I truly understood the ability of a painting to a tell a story. Even if you didn’t know the story of Christ, you could glean so much of what was going simply by looking at the subjects’ faces. I knew that I had to see it and since it was a short train ride away from Paris, we headed for Ghent, Belgium, home of the altarpiece and waffles. Clearly we were going to have a great day.

And it was.

Mostly.

It was windy, rainy, and overcast in Ghent, and because I sent all of my clothes to be cleaned, save for a short sleeve shirt and a pair of shorts, I was completely under dressed. I looked like Johnny America, Lord of the Tourists. I maybe saw one other person wearing shorts the whole day, and I think he was drunk. I decided to buy some pants.

I was so cold and so eager to see the painting that as soon as the tram dropped us off, I headed to the nearest gothic church, power walked through the doors, and proceeded to do a lap around the transept. I looked in ever side chapel, but the painting wasn’t there. I panicked. Maybe the painting was on tour. Maybe I wouldn’t get to see it.

It turns our Ghent has multiple Gothic churches. We found the right church and I continued my power walk search for the painting. And there it was in a side chapel.

But not really.

It was a life size, photographic copy. You had to pay to see the real one.

But I wanted to see the painting in the context it was painted for—in a side chapel meant for personal devotion. I have to say, it took me awhile to realize it was a photograph. Even as a copy, the colors, and the level of detail are remarkable.

And it turns out we were rewarded for looking at the copy. When we walked in the chapel, a slight, old man stood at the doorway. He had a small smile on his face, and you could tell he was waiting for a crowd to gather so that he could tell the story of the painting.

And tell the story he did. He loved the painting. He loved its beauty. He loved the attention it brought to his beloved Belgium and to Ghent. And you could tell he was still personally offended by the theft of one of the paintings panels in 1934, a panel that has yet to be returned. He spoke with pure devotion and illuminated many of the paintings mysteries and symbols. He spoke of the single horsehair brushes Van Eyck used for some of the finer details. He spoke of Eve, the mother of humanity, of Christ, the mystic lamb himself, and of God, enthroned at the center of it all. And because of this man’s passion and knowledge, when we paid to see the actual painting, I had a renewed sense of fervor for the painting.

It did not disappoint.

The painting has too much symbolism, too much detail, too much history to go into here, but it is so worth seeing. It is the story of the gospel, told in image and symbol. This painting exists to create devotion in the viewer for the mystic lamb who was slain from the foundations of the world.

So Johnny America had a good day in Belgium. We saw the painting, enjoyed Belgium’s two greatest inventions waffles and fries (though strangely not waffle fries), and we even were trapped in a parade.

For pictures of Ghent and of all our adventures, see Joseph’s website.

I’ll admit it. We were pure tourists in Paris. You can’t help it, really. For one, there is such an overwhelming amount of amazing things to see and something beautiful around every corner that you walk around with your mouth open and your camera out. Another thing is the French don’t ever let you forget that you are a guest in their country.

I know the stereotype is that the French are stuck up and snobby, but I don’t see it that way. I think they are proud of their country in the same way that we Americans are proud of ours, and to us that comes across as snobbishness. Americans can’t imagine that there is any better place than America, and the French can’t imagine that people aren’t falling all over themselves to learn French.

When you are in France you actually feel bad that you don’t speak French. It isn’t a guilt thing. I never felt guilty for not knowing French. I just had a huge desire to communicate with them in their language. In other countries I usually just go straight for English and then see what happens. In France I always tried to open with some French. I don’t know why that is, but it is something that I noticed. Maybe it goes back to their pride in their country—you want to respect that.

Since we had lost one of our Paris days to the horrors of the Barcelona train system, we knew that we would have to cram a lot of Paris into a little amount of time. And that is what we did. As soon as we got off the train and put our bags into storage at the station, we headed for the Eiffel Tower, then to a boat tour, then to the D’Orsay, then to St. Chapalle, then to Notre Dame. See what I mean—pure tourist.

Of these sites St. Chapalle is my favorite. It is a church in the gothic style, but it is not overwhelming in size. I love that the space is small because sometimes it is easy to get over stimulated by the size of cathedrals, so much so that you can’t take everything in. Not so at St. Chapalle, though it does overwhelm in other ways. The walls are almost purely stained glass, and the vibrancy of the colored glass makes all other stained glass seem anemic. As you turn your hands in the colored light, the color of your skin changes, at once deep blue, then vibrant red. The small space allows you to be swallowed up in colored light. Truly an unbelievable place.

I’m glad in one sense that we lost a day in Paris because it is an expensive city. I don’t think it costs more really than London, but you just want to spend money in Paris. You want the big meal. You want the desert. You want the coffee every couple of hours. You want Parisian clothes. You want everything you can get your hands on. There is something about Paris that makes you manic to experience everything.

I think this is because the French enjoy life in a way that is paradoxical to Americans. We want to figure them out. There are so many books in America about how French women eat incredible rich and decadent food and stay skinny. Which is true on both counts—the food is decadent and the women are skinny. I think the key to all of this is pace. They do enjoy life but they enjoy it at a more leisurely pace than us.

Take their café culture for instance. All the seats that are outside face the street so that the café goers can leisurely enjoy their coffee and people watch. This would never happen in America. When we are in a coffee shop it is for a specific reason. It may be to work. It may be to get a caffeine fix. It may be to read. It may be to study. Even meeting a friend for a chat is a stated purpose. I think the French take life more as it comes, and I think in that non-pragmatic, non- ends driven approach is at the heart of how the French do things. There doesn’t always have to be an agenda. Which is a hard pill for us Americans to shallow. We always have to have reasons for things.

The very premise of this travel blog shows that my American brethren and I are driven by pragmatics. With these posts I’m attempting to show why travel matters, which is a presupposition inherently about value and pragmatics. It is an attempt to show that the cost/benefit analysis of travel actual comes out in my favor in the end. And that may or may not be possible to quantify. Some things are just worth it, even if you can’t explain it.

Look what the French have done. They simply turned their chairs ninety degrees toward the street, and I’m questioning my pragmatic presuppositions. C’est la vie.

For more pictures, check out Joseph’s website.

I was no longer the navigator. After two days of utter defeat at the hands of Barcelona’s public transport system, I relinquished my role as map keeper. It felt good to no longer bear the burden of getting us places. From then on I would be in charge of trains and activities, of front end logistics, and this was a relief.

So a new day. That night we planned to get a sleeper car to Paris, so we headed to the train station to get the tickets. Except they only had two spaces left on that sleeper train. And we had to sit in the train station another hour waiting in line to buy tickets for the following evening. This meant that we basically had two more days in Barcelona. This was good and bad. At worst we had lost a couple days on our schedule. At best we gained a chance to actually enjoy Barcelona. Joey booked a hotel in the city center, we checked in our bags, and headed out to enjoy the city.

Our first stop was the Sagrada Familia Temple, an architectural masterpiece that is still under construction after more than one hundred years. I considered seeing a cathedral while it was under construction a great gift. I’ve always been overwhelmed with the beauty of cathedrals, and I could never understand how they were built. I couldn’t believe that medieval man could persevere in the construction of something so cohesively beautiful, so harmonious in construction, so massive, so overwhelming in scope and purpose. To me the best cathedrals are seamless. They feel like light filled caverns carved out of hulking pieces of marble. To see in the present moment workers piecing together columns of marble, to watch them climb scaffolding to carve out the ceiling, to see the construction of something that seems timeless, helped me see the collaboration, the shared vision necessary to achieve the desired end.

Much of the cathedral is complete, and for me the most affecting part of the cathedral is the Passion Portal. Featuring sculptures by Sabiruchs, the portal depicts the final hours of the life of Christ. The sculptures themselves are blocky and weighty; it is almost as if you can see gravity pulling them down. The weight of the sculptures communicates the pathos of the scene itself—here the innocent Christ suffers willingly at the hands of vindictive man.

Each scene is powerful, but it is the centerpiece that pulls the entire portal together for me. At the center of the portal is Christ himself, bound to a column, weary and bloody from Roman lashes, and on the door behind him in gold letters Pilate’s infamous question to Christ, “What is truth?” glitters in the afternoon sun.

What is truth? These sculptures, all art really, attempts to answer that question.
Keats famously wrote that truth is beauty and beauty is truth, which at least means that we experience truth by experiencing beauty and that we experience beauty by experiencing truth. In many ways I agree with Keats. There is most certainly a relationship between truth and beauty, because our voracious appetite for beauty indicates that there is something more than aesthetic appreciation going on when we experience something beautiful. But I can’t go all the way with Keats. As N. T. Wright argues in Simply Christian, I think beauty is an echo of truth; beauty is not truth itself—it is something that indicates there is truth. In the same way that an echo is not a voice, beauty is not truth. But when I see something like the Passion Portal, that echo resonates more strongly, and I know that truth is afoot.

I love travel because I think travel teaches us how to keen our ears to that echo, and it is important to find that echo. It reminds us that there is someone speaking.

There is a Voice.

I’ve been meditating on Psalm 29 for the last few weeks. In it King David enumerates the many ways in which God’s voice is powerful. One of my favorites is, “The voice of the Lord is over the waters.” For me this image hearkens back to creation, when God’s spirit was over the waters of the earth, waiting to burst forth in creative power. When that voice speaks, it does echo throughout the cosmos. “The heavens declare the glory of God” mostly because they still vibrate with the power of His voice. So what about art? The feeble work of our hands—our paintings, our sculptures, our buildings, and our words—are echoes of an echo, and even the echo of an echo points back to the Voice.

For more pictures, visit Joseph’s website.

I’ve always wanted to drive in Europe, so when we couldn’t get a train from Pamplona to Barcelona, renting a car seemed like a great option. And it was. The car was pretty cheap, the place was easy to find, Barcelona was a mere 4-hours away, and we even got a GPS. Everything went great. Except I didn’t get to drive the car. All the cars on the entire continent, it seems, are stick shift, and to my shame, I can’t drive a manual. So I had to ride shotgun all the way to Barcelona.

At least I got to sleep a bit.

The drive was fun, and I’d found a great deal on a hotel, but it wasn’t until we got about 45 minutes outside the city that I realized that our hotel was actually in the Barcelona suburbs. Now I don’t have anything against the Barcelona suburbs, especially since the hotel room was the nicest and most spacious one we’d had yet, but it did mean that it would take a long time to get back from the city every night. This proved to be an almost fatal error.

After checking in we drove the car into town to drop it off at the train station. This was a major hassle. Following the GPS directions lead us into a distribution center of sorts with fences all around. I don’t know how we got in and I don’t know how we got out. We rechecked the GPS coordinates and for the 300th time the slightly smug British woman warned us that the train station was in a restricted area. I don’t speak GPS so I didn’t know what that meant, and even though Tyler is an engineer, he didn’t either.

When we made it to the city center and pulled into the train station, we couldn’t find the car return area. So I rechecked the GPS again and she told me that the Europcar return center was actually a half-mile away. Winding through the downtown Barcelona streets proved stressful (we had more than a couple close calls), and when we pulled up to a stoplight, a Spanish man started gesturing wildly at us. I thought we might have found ourselves in the middle of a Barcelona turf war, but it turns out our tire was flat. Since the car was on my credit card, I imagined that this would cost me a lot of money and that I would have to fly home early because I would be completely wiped out.

Out of options and on a dangerously low tire, we decided to try the train station again. When we circled the station this time, we saw the smallest Europcar sign imaginably, and we drove toward as if it were an oasis. The language barrier was our friend this time since no one I talked to seemed to understand what a flat tire was. I got off scot-free. We walked out of that train station and believed our Barcelona troubles were behind us.

They weren’t. It turns out there are multiple overlapping transportation systems in Barcelona, and we had a map for one. So when our well-meaning hotel receptionist explained that we needed to take train 4 to get back to the hotel, we assumed she meant one of the metro trains. She didn’t. And we ended up lost in Barcelona for 3 hours that night, boarding train after train, talking to agent after agent, finally ending up in a neighborhood somewhere without any chance of finding the correct. Miraculously we found a cab. Unfortunately that angel of mercy cost us $60 to get home.

At least we were home.

We woke up the next morning convinced our transportation problems were over. We started out well, finding a cab to the correct train station, and boarding the correct train into the city center. We even decided to buy our train tickets for Paris early so that we wouldn’t have any more train hiccups. I found what I thought was the central train station in Barcelona and we headed for it. And we found it. Except it wasn’t the central train in Barcelona. I had assumed it was the train station, since it was the only one I could find on the map. Wrong. I don’t even know why they called it a train station-it had one track. So we had to wait to get our tickets.

At least we could still go to the beach, and we enjoyed a few hours of fun at the beach and then had an amazing meal of tapas at an excellent restaurant and we were confident that we could retrace our steps back to the hotel.

We couldn’t and we ended up more lost than the night before. Somehow we ended up in a warehouse district down by the marina, and because we are gringos from the Texas panhandle, we were convinced we were in Spanish gang territory. I’m serious. At any given moment we thought we were a block away from a Spanish knife fight. There was no public transport around, so we walked. And walked. And walked. For two hours we walked.

We saw a cab and started waving our arms as if we were island castaways flailing at a passing ship. He stopped. We made it home. It was another night of missed connections, missed trains, misunderstandings. We wasted so many hours and so much mental energy trying to get around Barcelona that we hadn’t really seen anything in Barcelona. It felt like a waste.

In all of this I have to admit that we were lost mostly because of me. I would say some train or street or station was the right move and then it ended up being the wrong move. I’m supposed to be the seasoned traveler, the one who’s done the grand tour before, the one who’s lived overseas before, and yet I kept getting us lost. That’s why I was the navigator. But I don’t know who I was kidding. I’ve never been great with directions. I mean, I get lost in Amarillo sometimes. So I don’t know why I even embraced the role as navigator. But after that night, I was no longer the navigator, and we haven’t been lost since.

That’s the thing about travel. It most definitely keeps you humble. It has a way of showing you what you can and cannot do. Me. I’m good at the planning stage. Where we should go, what we should do, what we should eat. But once we get in the field, keep the map away from me. I will get you lost. And if that lesson isn’t something I can take into my everyday life after this fantasy trip has ended, then I don’t know what is.

For more pictures check out Joseph’s website.

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.