It’s a relief to be traveling again — really traveling again — and Andalucia has proved to be a nearly perfect place to start with. The second half of 2021 and the first half of 2022 had COVID hanging over them, and since then I’ve been consumed with running two larps.¹ That pinned me down way more than I thought it would: six weeks in Croatia and nearly twelve weeks in the United Kingdom.²

It’s not like COVID has gone away, obviously, but the world’s going to keep on pretending it hasn’t.³ Spain is still mandating masks on public transit and in taxis⁴ but has also forbidden any businesses from inquiring about your vaccination or test status so it’s a mixed bag, but one that doesn’t contain any travel restrictions. And now that both of the larps I ran are done, I’m left back in the position I was when I first started traveling. I have a few places I need to be⁵ and otherwise I can go and do anything I want.

So I started in Seville, catching the train after a brief overnight in Madrid. And Seville was about the best place I could have picked. It’s drowning in riches, much of it stolen from the Americas,⁶ and the city bears some of the most astounding architecture, heavily leaning on its Moorish influences. It’s a joy simply to walk around, particularly at twilight, when it seems everybody hits the streets for the evening paseo.

I could have spent a week. Seville is the sort of place where there’s plenty to see and plenty to do, but the pace of the city is slow enough that you don’t feel forced to do anything. Personally, I needed some time to recharge, so I let a lot of things slide. I did get to the Cathedral of Seville⁷ and Real Alcázar.⁸ But the rest I just took it easy, walking down along the river, stopping for drinks here and there at cafés or bars, or grabbing some tapas before taking in a flamenco show.⁹

I’d go so far as to say, if you’ve only got about three days in Spain, Seville is the place to go. It feels Spanish in that way that certain regions tend to stand in for the whole of their country, the way Bavaria feels German to Americans while North Rhine-Westphalia doesn’t quite.¹⁰ Andalucia has the bullfighting and the flamenco and the jamón ibérico.

And if you can spend more than three days, you have a whole countryside filled with scenic hill towns to venture out into. That’s what I did, before heading to the southern coast. I visited three of the towns: Jerez de la Frontera, Arcos de la Frontera, and Ronda. Of the three Ronda is the most scenic, perched across a gorge with a truly stunning drop, and worth a day or two on its own.¹¹ Jerez de la Frontera is skippable, except that it’s the home of one of the top equestrian schools in the world and you can book a ticket to one of the shows.¹² Arcos de la Frontera is tiny but very pretty; I could have spent another day but I wasn’t too disappointed to leave when I did.

I do wish I had rented a car, which would have let me see some of the other towns and also to set my own pace; none of these places had great bus terminals¹³ and the rail connections are inconvenient.¹⁴ And as usual, the food gets excessively meat-heavy as you get more and more into rural areas. But I usually managed to find something on the menu I could eat just about everywhere, and it was a small trade off for a week’s worth of those stunning views.

After winding my way through Andalucia I ended up on the coast at Gibraltar. Gibraltar is a very deeply weird place. It’s one of those places that’s an artifact of history; Spain lost it to the United Kingdom during the War of the Spanish Succession in 1704, and despite a few subsequent attempts never managed to get it back.¹⁵ It’s still a thorn in the side of the Spanish who occasionally get snippy and slow border crossings or restrict port access, although that seems to have calmed down in recent years.¹⁶ One of the ironies of the place was when Spain instituted rules (since repealed) which effectively made it impossible for Spanish locals to work there. The British turned to Moroccan labor — and since the Moroccans couldn’t just walk across the border, a significant number of them settled in Gibraltar, restoring a Muslim presence which had largely disappeared in the late 1400s.

Gibraltar is no longer the military prize it once was; the local industry’s mostly turned over to tourism. I can’t really recommend it on that basis. It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d imagine being built for Brits who loved the Mediterranean sun but weren’t keen on all those locals speaking funny languages. The currency is pound sterling,¹⁷ there’s plenty of chip shops and pubs, and there’s a steady stream of vacationers coming off cruise ships for a brief taste of Old Blighty.¹⁸

I made a point of visiting because, well, it’s a deeply weird place. It’s certainly geographically interesting. The locals are called Llanitos which means “flatlanders,” an odd appellation for a place known for the gigantic rock sitting in the middle of it. But you get there and realize there really is just that rock. Everything else is the flattest ground I’ve seen since leaving Ohio, which is wild since it’s surrounded by all that famously hilly Andalucian terrain.

It’s also got probably the single most stunning view over the Mediterranean,¹⁹ and the famed Barbary macaques who will jump on your back and unzip your backpack to rummage around in there if you’re not careful.²⁰ And for me there’s a statue of Molly Bloom from Ulysses in the garden — Molly comes from Gibraltar — and in a world full of curiosities you might as well make of point of seeing the ones which spark something in you. But I mostly came because I had the time, and I was nearby, and when you put it that way, why wouldn’t you?

I’m really starting to dial in on how to plan travel. The real secret is to not to count the days you have someplace — count nights. Here’s my rule-of-thumb:

1 night

You’re still in transit. You’re not seeing anything. Maybe you’re getting in early enough or leaving late enough that you can squeeze something in, but you’re going to need to think all that out ahead of time and you’re at the mercy of travel delays.

I’ve really started to appreciate booking a nice place to stay before or after flights, or in the middle of long train connections. After two weeks of rushing around a country, arriving at the airport a day early and checking in to a hotel early afternoon can be amazing, especially if there’s a nice bar and a pool and a comfortable bed. This is particularly nice if you’ve got a flight leaving early or arriving late, or if you’re someplace with a lot of budget options. Why crash exhausted into your hotel in town at 11pm when you can crash exhausted into your hotel at 9:30pm, wake up in the morning, have a nice breakfast, and arrive in town feeling human? Maybe even knocking 50€ off your tab while doing so?

2 nights

You’re committing yourself to one very packed day of sightseeing. It’s fine if you’ve been there a lot — you can always turn up a museum in London to visit or revisit — or if you’re someplace you reasonably can see in a day. But you’re also locking yourself into doing that. If you’re feeling unwell or tired you either push yourself through it or miss out. And pushing through usually ends up making you more unwell or more tired.

The Andalucian hill towns I visited on this trip are almost perfect for 2 night stays. You’re there for the views, to maybe stop in the church or hike around the scenery for a couple hours, to stroll through town in the evening and have some wine and tapas. There’s not much more you need to do, and I always tend to err on the side of doing more, not less.

On the other hand, moving every couple days is a very aggressive pace. Be forewarned.²¹

3 nights

This is finally starting to be a reasonable pace. For me, places I’d spend a full day sightseeing I can instead spend two half-days, taking it easy. Or I can spend one day wandering around and spend the other one lazing around the hotel recovering. Or if I’m someplace grand I can cram two full days of running around. The important thing is you’re starting to have options. You can cancel your afternoon plans and turn in early knowing you can catch up the next day. You can have a fancy dinner and go to the theater, on separate nights.²² You get to kind of plan your time, rather than having to fit everything in.

4 nights

My idea of the classic week-long vacation is four nights in one place then four nights in another one before heading home.²³ This nearly perfect for most places, if you’re on vacation. I usually run out of things I really wanted to see after two days, and having that extra day means I can spread things out and have some chill time to myself, or fit in touristy stuff like cooking classes which always seem like fun but burn a lot of time.

5-6 nights

These start to get awkward. You really don’t need this much time for anywhere except places like New York or London, and even there I feel like I want to break up the trip and see something else. For me, for most places, I can come back later. I find two visits of two days each is almost always superior to one visit of four days. But if you’ve got a particular hankering for a deep dive somewhere — hiking around Yellowstone, I don’t know — maybe this will work out for you.

I book these when I’m worried I’m getting a little burnt out, or I’m staying someplace where I want to soak up the culture more than the sights. But even then I’m likely to break it up by scheduling a short travel day in the middle, even if it’s simply an hour’s cab ride to the next village over. And they’re great if you want a base to do day trips from.

7+ nights

This is no longer traveling, it’s living somewhere. Sure, maybe that’s only a week or two, but it’s long enough to start to think about grocery shopping or laundry²⁴ and you’re far better off looking for short-term leases rather than hotels.

Looking back over my travel, I can sort these kind of stays, for me, into a few rough categories. There’s the times I was visiting with friends or family, often over holidays; the times I was trying to cool off my Schengen visa without going too far abroad; the times I was attending (or running) a larp or a convention and wanted a little time before or after; and the pandemic. Some of these were great, and some of them were necessary, but there’s not a single one of them I wasn’t grateful to be moving on from. I’m not really made to be sitting still for all that long, and I don’t really like the person I become when I do.

I know a lot of people whose idea of the perfect vacation is plopping themselves down someplace warm for days if not weeks and just soaking up the sun, maybe with a fancy drink and an array of waiters to keep it refilled.²⁵ I’m not claiming I can’t see the appeal of that. But I never found a paradise I wasn’t ready to gnaw my leg off to escape after about three days. I keep reminding myself it’s good for the soul to stop traveling from time to time. But I know what side of the line my heart lives on.

I’m currently in Tarifa on the Spanish coast, and in a few hours I’m going to catch a ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangier. Morocco is incredibly close; the English Channel is roughly 2½ times as wide at its narrowest point. I could have traveled from Algeciras — that’s where most of the ferries leave from — but Algeciras is an industrial shipping port and the ferries end up an hour’s drive down the coast from Tangier. Tarifa is a tidy little coastal town with a ferry which runs to the port in downtown Tangier.

It’s strange to look at the coastline across the Strait. There’s something eerie about water borders which isn’t true of land borders. Land borders are, mostly, arbitrary. There’s nothing preventing you from dropping the passport control booth another mile down the road except politics and history. But water is different. It really feels to me, sitting on the beach and looking at the opposite shore, that that’s supposed to be a foreign country, like it’s etched into the face of the earth. And Africa carries with it a whole lot of historical baggage, for both Europeans and Americans.

But I’ve been hopping borders like they’re nothing. I’m apprehensive and excited to be returning to Africa after so long away. Since late March I’ve spent less than three weeks outside the EU or the UK. It’s time to get a little further afield.

Next: Casablanca (CMN) to Dakar (DKR)
Prev: Zagreb (ZAG) to Madrid (MAD)

Footnotes

¹ Again, I really thought we’d have gotten Triumph wrapped by late 2021 when I made plans to run And Then There Were None.

² I’m honestly shocked I spent almost three months in England. Some of that’s just travel; it’s easy to rack up a week or two here and there if you’re flying through London and staying over a weekend during transit. And I did do some traveling around the UK; there’s still a lot there I haven’t seen. But I mostly wanted to be close by in the event something needed to be taken care of, and I wasn’t really in a mood to do the tourism thing when I was trying to sort out all the moving pieces of running a larp, so I stayed put.

³ Much to the detriment, as I will keep pointing out, of a number of vulnerable populations.

⁴ Although the first train I caught had absolutely no one wearing them, even through the announcement reminding everyone to put them on, until the conductor came through and chided the whole car. So compliance varies.

⁵ Namely the UK, yet again, for a larp in early February

⁶ Seville was the gateway to the New World for the Spanish Empire, despite not being on the coast. It had a monopoly on trade with the Spanish colonies in America for about a century.

⁷ The third-largest in the world, largest by area, and one of about a half-dozen churches worth touring in the city. It’s where Columbus is, aloft in a coffin borne by four statues of pallbearers, and if it seems a little obvious of a metaphor that Columbus is dead but we still can’t manage to stuff them in the ground to rot, look, I didn’t design the mausoleum.

⁸ The once and future palace of the Spanish royal family, still in use today and featuring some incredible Mudéjar architecture, mixing Moorish styles with Gothic, Romanesque, and Renaissance.

⁹ I did make an attempt to watch the United States play England in the World Cup but what few bars were around were jammed hours before the game started. I ended up back in my hotel where I discovered Spanish television was only broadcasting the Spanish matches. Minutes before kickoff I managed to somehow convince a British broadcaster I was in the UK and thus watch an online stream of the game.

¹⁰ This is to say nothing about the accuracy of those stereotypes, or even their relative merits; I greatly prefer Köln to München.

¹¹ Ronda was the penultimate settlement to fall during the Reconquista, just before Grenada did, and it had everything to do with being build on the top of a ridiculously defensible hill.

¹² Be sure you’re traveling through one of the days the show is being performed. And Jerez is also known for sherry, and you can book a sherry tasting after. Or before. Or before and after, if someone else is driving.

I did it all in a single day: bus arrived at 10am, equestrian show at noon, sherry tasting at 2pm, and back on a bus by 5pm. That’s all you need, unless you’re really into horses or really into sherry.

¹³ Does such a thing even exist?

¹⁴ I had a train to Ronda from Seville and got off at the wrong station. The announcements weren’t repeated in English like on the major lines so I got off when my ticket said we would be arriving. Turns out the train’s regularly delayed by 30 minutes, so I disembarked one station too soon, at a stop in the middle of nowhere with no further trains due, an incredibly iffy data connection on my cell phone, and no taxi stand to speak of.

If this happens to you, I’ve got a great suggestion. Call your hotel. They’ll speak better English than any random cab driver, they’re used to dealing with idiot tourists, and if the connection keeps dropping you can just call back and pick up where you left off. They handled ordering a cab and, like clockwork, it showed up 20 minutes later.

¹⁵ I mean, Spain got it from the Emirate of Granada in 1462 and before that it had been passed around, mostly between different Moorish kingdoms, since it had been taken by the Visigoths, so it’s not like this is uncommon, historically speaking.

¹⁶ In fact Gibraltar and the EU have a tentative agreement for Gibraltar to join the Schengen area, which would make it significantly easier for the Spanish workers to commute to work.

¹⁷ Although many shops will happily take euros, at an informal exchange rate of 2×1, and hand you back change in pounds.

¹⁸ I’m going to take it on faith that most of those people aren’t from the UK, and a little spot of England on the southern shore of Europe actually is a fun novelty rather than a replication of the same place you live when you aren’t on vacation. But I have my doubts.

¹⁹ Marred somewhat by the blocky cement ruins of the fort the British put up there

²⁰ They’re the only wild monkey population on the European subcontinent. And to be clear, they’re monkeys, not apes, despite not having tails.

²¹ Honestly, if you are visiting a bunch of places like that in a row, you’re almost better off booking a extra day somewhere and skipping someplace or — if you must — catching an early bus in then a late bus out, like I did for Jerez de la Frontier; since the big draws are the dancing horse show and the sherry tasting, you can do both in a short afternoon.

²² It’s true you could do this if you’re only spending two nights somewhere — I certainly have — but then the first night seems you’re always rushing to get to the hotel and check in and change and shower before running off again for your evening plans, on a day you’re already tired from travel. I usually reserve my first night in a place to grabbing something cheap near the hotel and turning in early to recover. I certainly don’t want to have to deal with any plans.

²³ Florence and Rome, or Madrid and Seville, or Berlin and Munich. Or Ho Chi Mihn City and Hanoi, or Mexico City and Oaxaca, or Marrakesh and Fes, or Vienna and Prague, or Tokyo and Seoul, etc, etc.

I’m counting eight nights, here, which means you can fly out Saturday and fly back a week from Sunday; for me this usually meant sticking a larp at one end or the other.

²⁴ If there’s one thing long stopovers have going for them, it’s how much time they give you to get your clothing washed. I don’t mind spending a day in the laundromat doing them myself, but it’s a waste if you’re only somewhere for a handful of days already. And there’s nothing like having a dropoff service explain your clothes will be ready tomorrow after 1pm when your train leaves tomorrow at 10am.

²⁵ cf The White Lotus