A lot has been happening in our lives lately and we haven't had as much time to train for Kilimanjaro as we would like, but this is a video diary I put together of one of our longer recent ones:
Other things happening in our lives this summer:
1) We are now proud river tube owners. We saw that you could BUY a two pack of tubes at Costco for the same price as RENTING one tube for a day. So now we own four. We tested them out by tubing the Provo River. Some strangers borrowed our pump and gave us root beer as a thank you. Turns out our tubes have cup holders and headrests so we were floating and sipping in style.
2) Bryan continues to both work on school and go on trucking runs a lot. In the time that's left, he has continued with the spoon carving mentioned in our firework video. He has now carved something like a dozen rustic spoons out of everything from Black Walnut to Mountain Mahogany.
3) I have now shot 2/3 of a short film which I am both directing and starring in. It is wicked stressful and the experience is kicking my trash. There will probably be an entire entry on that later.
4) I'm continuing to work on selling my first novel and now gearing up to start on the second. I've written the first chapter and am now in the exploring/outlining phase. This second one is vastly different from the first and I'm excited to get going on it.
That's it for now. This blog is somewhat neglected, but it's because we're busy living life so I'm ok with that.
Still on the schedule for the rest of the summer before we leave are Lone Peak, Timp, and King's Peak. If anyone has any insider tips for them, let us know!
I was going to write a whole post about this all-encompassing experience that was running a firework stand for the two weeks leading up to the 4th of July. As I was in the thick of it, I couldn't remember my life being any other way than this nomadic, car-sleeping, overheated, underselling existence, but now that it's a few days in the past it almost feels like it never happened. Such a gift in life that time passes at the same rate for bad things as for good things and just like that, the worst is over.
Thankfully, I made a video to immortalize the ridiculous times of our explosive-selling homelessness which you can enjoy below. We did this partially to save for our upcoming trek to Kilimanjaro. You don't have to be rich to travel, just determined.
I've always known about (and been vaguely scared of) the iconic Angel's Landing hike in Zion National Park, Utah. I actually didn't know that much about it except that it involved a section of clamoring up a veritable tightrope of rock with only a chain to hold onto and that people had died doing it.
So, what did I decide to do the morning before we were to drive south to take on the cliffs ourselves? Googled "Angel's Landing + death" obviously. And so it was, fueled with the anxiety of names and numbers and queasy google image views down to the valley below that I huddled that night in our queen size sleeping bag in a tent among the sage brush and the sand, wondering whether I would survive the following day's adventure. I seriously could not get to sleep and I'm not usually an anxiety-prone person. I wasn't so much worried for myself as I was horrified at the prospective experience of seeing my husband fall.
I'm learning recently that I deal incredibly well with the actual difficulty of things, but do a terrible job with the potential difficulty of things. When I partially severed my tendon on Groundhog's Day of this year, the thought of my gaping wound and the needles and the stitches were freaking me out to the max, but I was incredibly well-behaved and patient as the doc actually did the stitching. Maybe my imagination is just too active. I should have perhaps listened to the sentiment expressed by both Newt Scamander and Og Mandino (note: one of those is a real person and one is fictional, but both names sound equally made up) when they said essentially, "[she] who worries, suffers twice."
And indeed, when I got to Angel's Landing (4.8 miles round trip, not too bad), I got up the canyons to the part with the chains and thought "THIS is it?" "This isn't scary AT ALL". Unfortunately, I mistook the start of the chain part as the end of the hike, so it only got worse and worse and I later ate my words because it IS scary at all.
Fear is a funny thing. Bryan always tells me that fear and excitement are physiologically the same in your body (pounding heart, rapid breath etc.), it's just your mindset you have to work on. I guess to a degree I believe that's true, but it's so much easier said than done to flip a mental switch and suddenly be thrilled about looking out over a 1200 ft drop-off-of-doom that moments ago made you nauseous with terror. I couldn't just flip the switch, but surprisingly what helped me the most was facing a second fear to cancel out the power of the first.
At the start of the hike I said out loud to Bryan and his sister Sarah, who went with us, "If I meet any German speakers on this hike, I have to speak in German with them. I'm saying it out loud so you can hold me accountable." Now, German was my second major in college. I literally have a Bachelor's degree in it, but speaking with natives just scares the pants off of me.
Last summer, I was seeing Don Giovanni at an opera house in Prague and saw that some better seats than mine opened up when some students decided to move to a different row. Those remaining were a German school group and I could hear them speaking to each other. I thought, "You know, I should ask them if those other people are coming back or if it would be ok if I scooted over." It wasn't difficult German, I knew exactly how to say it. I thought in my head, 'just be confident'. I geared up and lifted my arm up and across to get their attention and then chickened out mid-gesture. The result was that it looked like I'd suddenly done half of a ridiculous dance move/that my muscles had spasmed wildly and then stopped. It was way more embarrassing than just finishing the interaction, but I panicked.
Back to being perched on the red sandstone cliffs of Zion. I should've known when I made my declaration that seeing Germans was 100% guaranteed. People think it's random that I speak that language, but the one language besides English that I have encountered literally every single place I have ever been--from remote mountain orphanages in Thailand to safari lodges in Kenya to Aztec ruins in Mexico--is German. German speakers travel. They just do.
So, suddenly we found ourselves on a section of the hike where we were sort of huddled along a three foot ledge, red cliffs behind and drop-off below. We stopped to let people come down a narrow section ahead (this place is wicked crowded, so there are lots of places you get stopped waiting for people to come down or go up ahead of you). We could hear that the man on Bryan's right, who had stopped for a breather, had a heavy accent. So, of course Bryan (who is not afraid of strangers in the least) says, "Where are you from?" "Germany" came the reply.
I felt the eyes of my companions immediately on me. Accountability is no joke. I literally looked down the 1200 ft canyon in front of me and it's like all my fear cells had to rush to the German department instead. The ledge didn't even seem scary, but speaking up did. "Ich spreche auch Deutsch", I finally managed, "I speak German too". I told them that it was my college major and they asked me where I went to college. They were amazed that you could even study German as a major in Utah. We chatted a little more and then it was time to keep hiking. I had done it! I had conquered my fear!---except then we ran into them like fifteen other times on the hike.
Bryan and his sister being much braver than I.
They would stop for a break and we'd run into them, then we would stop for a break and they'd run into us. Each time they'd make comments or observations to me in German and each time after I responded, I'd spend the next section of mildly treacherous rock climbing just kicking myself for saying the wrong form of this word or not remembering what that word meant. My fear cells continued to just congregate in the German-speaking department of my brain. Even as my hand grabbed for a sagging chain that was ill-placed to save my life if it needed to, or my foot slipped around in a sandy spot and everything was precarious, my fear was totally focused on how I'd said "vielen" instead of "viel" back there. Like an idiot.
This phenomenon of my one fear canceling out the other out taught me something interesting. When you're clamoring across the rock formations at Angel's Landing and you ask yourself, "what's the worst that could happen?" The answer is, "you could, pretty easily, fall 1200 feet to your death". When you're talking to a native speaker of a language you are still trying to learn and ask, "What's the worst that could happen?" the answer is...not really anything. Maybe you'll say something silly and embarrass yourself or maybe someday someone will be rude to you, but I have never listened to someone struggle to speak English with me and thought even a tiny bit less of them for stumbling through it. Having the juxtaposition of the two fears side by side made me think, "In reality, what am I so afraid of?"
Dora Montague, suspended over Zion like a boss.
I believe 7 people have died at Angel's Landing since 2004. On the drive back from Zion, we saw a sign that said there had been 22 deaths on Utah roads in the month of May alone. In reality, in terms of potentially life-threatening activities, we should've probably been more scared of the drive down to the park than the hike itself. But fear isn't logical. It doesn't use good sense, but we all too often hand over the reigns to it anyway.
I've been working on my German in one form or another since I was 14 years old and struggled with speaking with natives that entire time. Why did it take thirteen years and an enormous cliff to make me finally think to say, "Wait a minute, what am I actually afraid of? What's the worst that could happen?" We shouldn't allow our fears to run rampant and go along unquestioned. I think most of them, if we held them up to the light would turn out to be nothing at all, a mouse in a bear suit.
And in case you were wondering, I ended up loving the hike. We sat on the top of the world and ate oranges under a shade tree strong enough to grow right out of the rock. My sister-in-law said an orange has never tasted so good and my husband said his smile muscles were starting to hurt from so much use. Even I felt the triumph of it and the awe and grandeur of the looming red canyons all around us and the greenish, curling Virgin River below.
This is living.
It made me quietly wonder what other unforgettable, life-affirming, joyous experiences lie just on the other side of my fear. I guess it's time to find out.
P.S. That black and white photo is of one of the original visitors to Zion when it first became a National Park. She's just hanging out there sketching like it ain't no thing. She might be my new spirit animal. Which is a step up since my previous spirit animal was the daddy long-leg. P.P.S. This is our FIRST OFFICIAL VIDEO DIARY for our Kilimanjaro Training. Subscribe to the channel if you want to make sure you don't miss the next one.
Well kids, I bought my official Kilimanjaro shoes. The picture (left) was from our first "break-them-in" hike. We went up Dry Creek Canyon near where we live in Alpine, UT to a place we call Elk Camp. To be honest, I'm not sure if that's what it's called or if that's just what Bryan calls it. Either way it's about 2.5 miles up the canyon. The shoes (with my feet in them) are perched on Pride Rock just above Elk Camp. Pride Rock, I am sure, is just what we call it and not really what it's called. It's a pretty fine spot for watching the sun sink and go golden on the horizon. We went up there just for part of an evening to roast some bratwurst over a fire. Lucy (little dog, enamored with Bryan) came along and was great at scouting firewood with us and exploring. She also walked straight up the steep part of pride rock like a mountain goat. It's possible we underestimate her abilities because she's so tiny and enthusiastic.
We're learning the art of being opportunistic as we prepare for this trek. Bryan, for those of you who don't already know, drives semi-trucks. He doesn't have a regular schedule and that's by design, otherwise how could we keep dropping everything and disappearing to foreign places? However, that also means it's pretty hard to make plans more than a few days ahead of time. As such, we have to be ready to drop everything and hike somewhere at a moment's notice. Say he gets home from a trucking run a couple of hours earlier than expected and the weather is nice? We're probably going to find a mountain somewhere to have dinner in. We have to take our chances wherever we can get them. I have a feeling that that will be the key to maintaining an adventurous lifestyle even once we have kids and a little less freedom than we have now. Being ready to jump at any opportunity.
It's a good mental exercise for me. I have one side of my personality that is adventurous and active and ready to go and can't get enough of new experiences, but the other side of me is happy to just sit and binge Netflix and take long, leisurely naps in the afternoon and call it productivity. I'm grateful to have married someone that encourages the one side of me more than the other. It's often hard to get excited about a daunting hike when I'm not in the mood, but I never regret that we did it when we get back to the car. I'm finding it's starting to require less and less inner pep talking to get myself to do physically demanding things these days. Maybe the more active me is finally dominating. Or maybe I'm just in better shape and it's physically not as hard as it used to be, who knows?
By way of explanation about what Kilimanjaro trekking looks like (i.e. what were are preparing for). I'm starting to get the sense that a lot of people envision very technical, ice-climbing-the-north-face-of-the-Matterhorn type of trekking. Kilimanjaro is the highest peak in Africa, but ascending its summit is, in many ways, just a very long walk. You can summit in as little as 4 days, but we're doing it in 8. We're giving ourselves plenty of time to acclimatize, because the hardest and most dangerous part of the mountain is the altitude. Except for the day we summit, most days on the mountain won't be more than about 5 miles of hiking in a day. The rest of the time will be spent relaxing, chatting, reading and avoiding the monkeys.
There are a few high-ish altitude peaks in Utah, but for now Bryan and I are just staying in good day-to-day hiking shape. Monday we hiked a loop from Grove Creek to Battle Creek (two adjacent canyons in Pleasant Grove, UT--see All Trails summary above). It was so beautiful. You're getting incredible valley views within the first 15 minutes of hiking and there are creeks and waterfalls everywhere.
Ms. Lucy came along. It turned out to be kind of scorcher so I'm glad she had tons of opportunities to lap up a cooling drink. You hike through rock canyons, pine forest, aspen forest and big, sprawling meadows. Something I love about Utah Valley is that if you get high enough on practically any mountain, you find yourself in places that look just like the alps. There's Switzerland in them thar hills! It makes it feel like going on a trip without leaving your own community.
The heat of almost-summer was initially a little overwhelming, but it also meant that, in addition to all the greenery coming out, there were suddenly butterflies everywhere. They were so bright and cheerful, I loved having them fluttering around while we walked and talked. Actually, one of the first moments when I started to fall for Bryan (and we weren't even dating yet) was when he called me when he got home from trekking the Annapurna circuit in Nepal and told me he'd seen a butterfly fluttering around the barren, high tundra there and thought, "hey little buddy, what are you going to eat?" It was such surprising, gentle concern for something so small from someone so big. I loved it. And I loved seeing these Grove Creek butterflies. It seems I'm not the only one. Lucy seemed pretty interested in the one that kept landing on our stuff:
All in all, the summer's getting off to a grand start and it's only May. (Oh no, is that was someone says just before disaster strikes??) Having Kilimanjaro to work towards is giving me a great excuse to get in shape without my motivation being something tied up in my personal vanity. I want to be healthy and fit, but I don't want to spend all my time thinking about being skinny or eating less. That's such a buzzkill to me.
Instead, I just keep going on a long, beautiful walks with Bryan (and Lucy). I keep putting one foot in front of the other and enjoying his company and enjoying the day and next thing you know, four hours have passed and I've burned 1700 calories without meaning to. It's kind of ideal.
Still ahead for us are trips to Angel's Landing, hiking over the mountain from our place to Tibble Fork Reservoir, a redo on Lone Peak, a trip up Timp and a backpacking trek to King's Peak (Utah's highest mountain).
Stay tuned (and someday in the future, there will be video...)
Also, if anyone is local and wants to either recommend or join us on a hike, please let me know. You could spend a morning (or even a whole day) enjoying these faces:
[The following is a small excerpt from a writing project I did about the women in my family who have made me what I am. I figure this is an appropriate Mother's Day share].
My mother says her soul
was largely furnished by her mother. We’d
tease Mom for always saying things like “oh, just look at these trees, have you
ever seen anything so green?” or “can you believe how gorgeous that sunset is?”
She’s filled to the brim with gladness for the simple things. When we give her
a hard time for it, she always just says, “I got it from my mother.”
Something else that her
mother taught her was that she could do anything that she put her mind to. And
the reason her mother knew that? Because her
father told her that shecould do anything. He literally stopped
the wagon they were traveling in and made sure she knew that she was capable
and that she could do or be anything that she wanted.
For the early part of
her life, my mother interpreted that to mean joining every club, being the
president of every organization, getting straight As in all her years of
schooling (except one B+ in 8th grade health class under the
mysterious subcategory of ‘citizenship’).
This mentality took her
through a series of competitions all the way to the National College Queen
pageant held in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1969 during her sophomore year of
college. The look of shock on her face (as pictured in the newspaper) when a
girl who considered herself a little too tall and a little too smart first got
named the Homecoming Queen of the University of Utah, must have carried over as
she was later named Miss Utah College Queen. The next step was flying eastward
to Florida and even to Washington, D.C. for a day to meet “Mrs. Richard Nixon.”
I know what you’re
picturing now, my mother the beauty queen. She is gorgeous, but she is also grounded and intelligent and
insightful and one of the least superficial women I’ve ever known.
The winner of the
National Pageant would get a car, an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe, and a
college scholarship. The first runner-up would get three typewriters. Guess
which prize my Mom took home?
The typewriters were a
poetic award actually, in light of the way she’s spent her life since then. In
raising her children, my mother had great desires that we would each (or at
least a few of us) develop musical prowess that she wished she had developed in
herself. She took us to years of piano lessons trying to make us what she
wasn’t, and instead we each became what she was---a writer.
When I sat in my
apartment in New York City in the fall of 2014, I couldn’t help thinking of her
in the early years of her marriage living in Chicago; a girl from
Midvale, Utah tackling the big city. She graduated from Harvard with a Master’s
in English Education and taught one year of high school before deciding that it
was not for her. She felt constrained by bells that rang and things she had to
do.
She wanted to be a
writer. She felt like a child posing as an adult too by just boldly saying, “I
am a writer, this is what I do for a living,” but she was determined. She
started making calls and knocking doors. Lots of big companies were based in
Chicago then, Encyclopedia Britannica, McGraw Hill, not to mention all the
newspapers. But she was an unknown, and to add to that challenge, she wasn’t in
a position to accept a full-time job. She was already expecting a baby. So, she
was in the market for freelance work and had no idea where to find it.
It found her.
After months of looking,
she was in the hallway of her Mormon church building one day, cleaning up after
an event, when the public phone on the wall started ringing. She picked it up
and it was none other than the Chicago
Sun Times looking to do an article on Mormon women. Without hesitation, she
said, “I’m a writer. I’ll do that article.”
I can’t imagine the
gumption it took to live the life she did in Chicago and since then. She said
that when each of her babies turned two, she’d just want another one. And she
continued to write. She’d write with a newborn in her lap, then a toddler. She
says, “I got great rhythm in my writing because I was always bouncing someone
on my knee.”
It was an unpopular path
to take. This was the mid-1970s when women in America were taking great pride
in striking out into the work force, and she felt their stares as she would
come into the newspaper offices with a toddler in tow to pick up her next
assignment.
Their eyes said having a
baby meant she had sold out. Having two babies nineteen months apart? She must
be stupid.
I’m glad she didn’t heed
their judgments. And that she kept having babies because it would take quite a
few more before she got to me. I’m number ten.
It’s only been since
leaving home that I’ve developed any anxieties about how having children ends
your life or ends your career. And it’s only now that I’m seeing why it had
previously never seemed like an issue to me. I was raised by a mother who
refused to let her life end, because she was
raised by a mother who refused to let her life end. Within three months of the
loss of her beloved husband, my Nana put in to run for the school board and was
elected president. She served on that board (and a few others) for 20 years.
My mother didn’t let
having babies slow her down because she was investing in a lifelong pursuit,
both with us and with her writing. She wasn’t expecting immediate acclaim and
assuming that if she didn’t find it, she should probably just quit. She knew
she was talented, she knew she had more to learn, and she’s spent her whole
life continuing to learn it whenever and however she could.
She made me believe that I can do that. I don't know if I will become a New York
Times Bestselling author by 30, but I can write. And find time between
times and set aside time, and keep writing.
[It's a glimpse more than a proper tribute, but I sure love my best friend/mother. I put together an article for Meridian about mother-related videos and the one below was by far my favorite. It got me all teary and though I'm no Olympian, my mother has certainly been one of the major reasons for any success I've found in life so far]
I already wrote a post below about a recent trip my
husband and I took to Barcelona. (Check it out if you want). The trip was an
ongoing exercise in finding activities to enjoy together since we’re quite
different in our travel tastes and we arrived in Spain with essentially no
plans.
We may not have identical preferences, but one
thing we are both very passionate about in life is FOOD.
No matter where we went in Barcelona and the
surrounding coastal towns, there was delicious food to be had and after lots
and lots of eating—here are six foods I would highly recommend for anyone’s
Spanish vacation.
1. TAPAS
Tapas have sort of made their way to the United States, so
you may have already tried them. More likely, you’ve started hearing them
mentioned in movies and TV a bunch and not actually tried them yourself. That
was me. Tapas are essentially a delicious array of hot and cold appetizers and
snacks. They can be anything from cured meats to olives to croquettes to fish
to meatballs to seriously anything. Fried cheeses make the list—I find that if
you nibble on the edge of something bite-sized, warm and breaded and a river of
cheese pours out, all seems basically right with the world.
FYI, this is the one stock photo in this post. I was too busy eating the Tapas to photograph them...
Also, if you're not an olive fan, try a few of the different kinds anyway. I'm not the world's biggest green olive person, but we had some tiny, salted green olives that were "Please sir, can I have some more?" good.
Tapas are available essentially everywhere hot food is sold.
There are tapas bars, tapas buffets, tapas to go and tapas with a Flamenco
show. The trouble won’t be finding them, it will be deciding which ones to try
once you do.
2. PAELLA
Here’s what I have to say about paella. It’s on the list,
not because I loved it, but because it’s everywhere and it’s an essential part
of the Spanish cuisine experience. You cannot visit Spain and not try it. It’s
also on the list though because part of the reason I didn’t like the paella
that I had was because I picked what I perceived to be the most authentic kind
rather than the kind that appealed the most to me. Trying the real-deal foods
of any place you visit is important and a big part of the fun, but it’s ok to
choose the variety that sound delicious to you rather than just choosing what
seems the most authentic.
Mr. B and I shared a giant pot of the most cultural-looking
paella on the menu, which was (almost literally) crawling with sea creatures.
We’re both a little obsessed with chorizo and kind of so-so on things that
still have their legs, but we skipped the chorizo in favor of what seemed more
“authentic” to us. We should’ve chosen what sounded good. Always be ready to
branch out and try new things, but you also know what you like—choose the
paella that gets you excited.
3. PATATAS BRAVAS
So, I’m cheating a little here. Patatas Bravas are
technically also tapas, but they need their own category because they’re just
too good. We actually only had them once and it was sort of accidentally, a
restaurateur gave them to us for free while we waited for the food we ordered
to be ready. We wouldn’t have known to order them, but now I’m telling you so
that you will know. Order them. Patatas Bravas are essentially potatoes
(sometimes cut like fries and sometimes cut like wedges) that are boiled in
salt and then deep-fried. They are then served with a spicy red pepper or
tomato sauce and a garlic aioli drizzled overtop. As I describe them, they kind
of just sound like fries. They are so much more. Must to try for yourself.
4. "WORLD'S FINEST STRAWBERRIES"
On our biking tour of the countryside (three days long), we
stayed for a night in a seaside town called Sant Pol de Mar. We were in an
AirBnB with a gravel-voiced smiling lady who spoke no English, and her hyper
French bulldog named ‘Happy.’ We asked her advice about dinner spots in town in
our broken Spanish and she answered with her phone’s Google translate that we
could check online. We were there in the off season so nearly nothing was open. We figured instead of choosing a place online and then finding it closed once
we got there in person, we would just walk out the front door and follow our
hearts.
Now Bryan’s heart map is usually astonishingly accurate.
Mine is a little less trustworthy. In this case, we both followed our hearts
along the railroad tracks through the purple and pink light of the setting sun,
enjoying the peaceful walk and the pleasant sea breeze and then finally
found…nothing. We got to the end of town and did not see a single restaurant.
We stopped to decide where to go next and happened to spot a sign that said
that this town was the “home of the world’s finest strawberries.”
Bold claim, but we ended up buying local strawberries every chance
we got the rest of the trip and each batch really was very fine. They’re much
sweeter and softer than in the U.S. and certainly worth tasting. While you’re
at it, taste the kiwis. They have surprisingly delicious kiwis, also grown right
there in the coastal region.
5. PASTRY
We finally did find someplace to eat in Sant Pol de Mar.
Moments after we saw that sign, we ran into our host out on an evening walk
with Happy. She still didn’t have a recommendation, but she had us follow her
to the part of town where our heart maps—if they were accurate—would’ve led us
for food options. She left us then to take Happy home and we continued to
search street after street of mostly closed restaurants for a place to eat
dinner. We passed a tiny bakery and, afraid that we might not find anything
else, stopped in to buy some “just in case” pastries.
Now, it’s possible that Spain hasn’t much been known for its
pastry because it gets overshadowed by its famous pastry neighbors: France,
Italy and even Austria (where croissants are actually from—Google it). But whether by borrowed techniques or
originality, Spain certainly holds its own in terms of baked goods. That night we bought a giant “just
in case” pastry in the shape of, and nearly the size of, a Christmas wreath. It
was flaky and crème-filled and topped with roasted almonds. It was so delicious
that we went back and bought another before the night was out. We also tried
coconut tarts, meringues (which in Spain is pronounced like the latin dance),
croissants and a rolled sponge sort of thing we affectionately called a “
Spanish street twinkie" (see lower shelf in the picture).
The point is, don’t let the flood of olives and meats and
the paella make you think Spain doesn’t have desserts worth tasting.
6. EMPANADAS
That said, if you can choose only one bready thing to
partake of on your Spanish vacation, let it be an empanada. Let it be three
empanadas, or ten. We fell so in love with empanadas that we came home and took
a cooking class on how to make them. It’s amazing that a little dough pocket
could be the canvas for such masterpieces, masterpieces that at one restaurant
literally brought me to the edge of tears.
Muns is an Argentinean-style empanada restaurant with three locations in
Barcelona. They have rows and rows of them and once you know which flavors you
want, they heat them up for you and brand them with a number—so you know which
empanada is which flavor.They
come out the absolute perfect temperature, I don’t know how they do it. I tried
three flavors: 1) Goat cheese, caramelized onions and walnuts, 2) Spinach and
emmental cheese, and 3) Tomato and mozzarella. They have three sauces for your
empanadas and somehow the stars aligned and I chose the perfect sauce for each
flavor, even though I was basically going off smell/my heart map. My heart map was redeemed! The textures
and combinations of flavors combined with that perfect heat made me a customer
for life (if I ever go back to Barcelona). The place is more expensive than the
empanadas at regular bakeries (which are also good), but they have happy hour
discounts in the mid afternoon so have a late lunch, or three.
Anyone reading this who has been to Spain, do we have the
same favorites? Did I miss one of yours?
I wrote an article for Meridian Magazine on reconciling vastly different interests and tastes in marriage and in travel. You can click here to read it or click on the picture below. Bryan and I are pretty different, but something we really share in travel is a deep and abiding love of FOOD. I was going to try and incorporate that somewhere in the article, but there was literally too much to say about all the things we ate and loved in Spain.
As such, there will be a forthcoming post exclusively about our experience with Spanish cuisine from our hunt for the what are allegedly the "world's finest strawberries" to empanadas that were so delicious, I nearly wept.
