The Boy and I got the confirmation of our hotel reservations (the ones we made anyway) for Spain. We found this great deal at these even greater hotels called paradors. The deal is that you get to spend five nights in any of Spain's paradors, provided they take part in the 5-night deal. For buying the 5-night card, the hotels average out to being 69 euros a night. Most of them are actually castles that had been abandoned, and then the state took over and made them into magnificent, beautiful hotels. Normally, they would be too pricey for us (running at 150-250 euros a night!), but after finding this deal, we decided to spoil ourselves and pretty much organized our entire trip around the hotels. Really, 69 euros at a four-star hotel is a price that just can't be beat. And I mean, Christ, we'll be sleeping in castles!
We only know about the deal because a friend of mine in my Spanish class suggested it. Sergio had decided to be a gentleman (for once) when we first went to Spain two years ago, and we spent two nights in this gorgeous castle on him. I mentioned how lovely it had been to my classmate, and she told me about the deal, because she also happened to have fallen in love with the paradors. I was so excited at the possibility I looked into it straight away.
What's so wonderful about these hotelcastlethingies is that they are always a bit off the beaten track. The first one we stayed at was sort of in the middle of nowhere, but we got to see a bit of small-town Catalunian (is that what we say in English? I really have no idea) life.
We're hoping for more of the same, although now it will be Andalucian.
As for the other 21 nights of our vacation, we're thinking we'll just sleep in the car.
Actually, here's the itinerary to date (roughly). The only things that can't be modified are marked with a star, because we have reservations somewhere on those nights.
Pick up car in Barcelona and head to...
Valencia, Alicante (2 nights), *Jaen, Grenada, Sevilla (2 nights), *Cadiz (3 nuits), Malaga (2 nights), *Ronda
Cross over into Portugal...
Evora, Lisbon (2-3 nights), Porto (2-3 nights), Viano do Castelo
Cross back into Spain
Salamanca (2 nights), Madrid (2 nights), *Guadalajara, and Zaragoza
before returning to Barcelona to catch the train back on the very last day.
I'm happy with the way we've set things up. This way, we have a semi-schedule to keep, but we have a fair amount of flexibility, too. There were a few places we each insisted on going to (him - Alicante, me - Grenada), and so we've fit them in where they worked out along our map.
I'm getting so excited. I just can't wait.
So excited, in fact, that I might, just might, have made an entire folder dedicated to the trip. I also might have written down everything on a lovely piece of paper, with reservation numbers and hotel phone numbers and practical information, that might now be sitting in a protective sleeve in the trip's folder. I also might have printed out a colored map of Spain, looked up the driving distances and times between each major city, and color-coded the map accordingly. Maybe.
Yum. Must go to Spain. Must go to castle.
When you go to Portugal, you should really really really go to Sintra--it's about a 45 minute train ride outside of Lisbon, and you can go there for a day or overnight or whatever, but it's a beeyooooootiful little town on a hillside. Okay, there's a ton of those, but I fell in love with Sintra. It's got ruins of a moorish castle way high on a hilltop that are gorgeous to go climb up to--it's wildly gothic and romantic (can a moorish castle be gothic? am I nerdy for even thinking that juxtaposition is kind of funny?).
Oh, and I think Americans say Catalonian.
Where did your titles go?