Dan Q

Tag: holiday

Three(ish) Weeks In Spain

Ruth, JTA, the kids and I are all back in the UK1 after a three week period during which some or all of us were consistently in Spain. The whole adventure was the kind of masterpiece of epic planning that only Ruth could have pulled off, and it worked spectacularly2.

A fawn-coloured French Bulldog lies comfortably on a blanket on a sofa, with her tongue sticking out in a large sideways blep.
I wasn’t around for the first week of the trip, but continued working from home (with the dog, pictured) as per the usual.

San Sebastián

Through clever permutations of remote-working from overseas (mostly by Ruth) and overlapping/intersecting stretches of annual leave (mostly by JTA and I), we were able to avoid having to send the dog to the dogsitter for a block of more than a single week3, didn’t need to break the bank on our collective leave budgets, and managed to give the kids the longest possible block of continuous immersion in the language and culture of Spain.

A group of children in wetsuits surf on low waves.
The one time I tried surfing, I wasn’t good at it, but I was reassured that was normal for a first day. The kids disproved that theory, becoming pretty reasonable boarders very quickly.

In the first week (when I wasn’t there), the kids got to take a mixture of surfing classes and Spanish language lessons in San Sebastián, among other activities. The Bordeaux wildfires caused some travel chaos for the others getting there, but they made it work in the end.

Tarragona

Later, I flew out to meet up with them and we switched to the opposite coast of Spain, staying in a delightful little villa North of Tarragona. The summer heatwaves that are affecting the continent made the middle of the day especially oppressive, so we did as the locals do and sensibly sheltered indoors during the hottest part of the day… but the kids in particular were glad to be able to take a dip in the pool to cool off.

Under nearly-cloudless skies and surrounded by trees and olive and grape-laden slopes, a stone villa and its outbuildings sit prominently under the bright sun.
The villa was a lovely building in a fabulous spot, nestled among hillside olive groves and vineyards, but the lack of wired Internet access/WiFi plus the signal-blocking stone walls made it more “disconnected” than we’d anticipated4!

As has become my tradition when travelling and on family holidays – because I’m an earlier riser than most, but also because I wanted to make the most of the coolest part of the day – I got out early most days for a whole bunch of geocaching expeditions5. But once others were awake we found plenty of other opportunities to explore the area.

Wide/panoramic view from a pagoda-like tower, where a woman and two children lean over a railing to look at a network of bridge-linked islands in a lake below, dotted with palm and other trees.
Parc Samà‘s breezy towers and water features took some of the heat out of the day, when we visited its attractive botanic gardens.

Having come from, remarkably, a similar level of temperature and humidity in the UK, I was interested to see how much greener everything was here on the Mediterranean coast. The plants here, better-adapted to hot and dry summers than those that we plant on our little island, were clearly more-suited to these kinds of conditions. Is it perhaps time that Britain started ditching her lawns and other year-round thirsty vegetation… instead planting more tropical-adjacent plants to provide shade (and carbon capture!) as the climate continues to shift?

A freshwater turtle pokes its head out of blue-green water near a rocky shore, with small black fish visible swimming in the depths.
This little fella had the right idea about keeping cool.

I enjoyed that we were able to split out time between a diversity of activities. A week-long jaunt can be dominated by a single activity – a skiing holiday, for example – but by the time you’re spending most of a month exploring a country, you want to be able to mix things up a bit, right?

A Roman aquaduct spans a forested valley.
Per local legend (and in common with many similar spans around the world6, which usually share a myth about the devil aiding in its otherwise-impossible construction in exchange for the first soul to cross it and then being tricked when an animal is sent across first), the Ferreres Aquaduct  is also known as Devil’s Bridge, which lead me to observe that of all the architecture I’ve seen with which Hell’s ruler is credited, this might be the best (nice work, Satan!).

Sometimes we kept it slow-paced and relaxing, like reading by the pool while the children invent splashing-based games or playing board games in the shade. Other times we explored history and culture, like our visit to the Ferreres Aqueduct, the Catedral de Tarragona, or the old Roman amphitheatre.

Two children wearing VR headsets and holding parasols, in the ruins of a restored Roman amphitheatre.
An augmented reality tour of the amphitheatre was both engaging and educational for the kids, bringing to life its long and complex history: did you know it started as an amphitheatre, but later was the ground of a church (commemorating Saint Fructuosus, who was executed there), then became a prison, and now… it’s an amphitheatre again: in addition to being a historical monument it’s used to stage concerts and things!

And other times still we even did the typical “British tourist in Spain” things, like a trip to the beach or an expedition out on a catamaran to swim in the sea while the sun set.

Dan, a white man, drips from a swim in the sea as he stands, holding a plastic cup of white wine, on the deck of a catamaran.
I expected the catamaran trip to be a bit tacky, but it was actually lush. (I may have availed myself of the open bar, a bit!)

Obviously the biggest reason for our trip was to catch sight of the total solar eclipse as it passed over the region, and our villa’s garden/vineyard was without a doubt a superlative spot for this. We’d initially been concerned that visibility of the low-in-the-sky/close to sunset eclipse might be obstructed by the hills and that, therefore, we’d need to find another spot from which to spectate, but an early-in-the-week experiment of watching the sunset (with an eye on the clock) reassured us that this wasn’t the case. So – as long as we were lucky with the cloud cover – we should be set.

Dan sits on a sun lounger on a driveway, alongside a covered brick barbeque building. He's alongside two children doing the same, and all are wearing disposable eclipse glasses.
A particular highlight of the entire trip was hanging out as a family in our private vineyard, watching the solar eclipse.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had great visibility of a total solar eclipse once before, in 1999, but honestly: this one beat it. The perfect location, the reds of the setting sun, the “moon illusion” exaggerating the perceived size of the moon as it approached the sun, the joy of vicariously sharing in the childrens’ wonder… all of these made the whole experience pretty mind-blowing.

The sun completely occluded by the moon.
You’ve seen pictures of eclipses before, but this one is mine. I maintain that even the good/professional photographs are poor substitutes for the real experience, though!

We watched, we awed, and then we saw the still half-obscured sun gradually disappear over the horizon. And then, a round of hugs and cheers and conversation later, we sat up late to enjoy the Perseids begin their nocturnal display.

Over the silhouette of hills, a total solar eclipse is just coming to an end, with a 'diamond ring' effect resulting from the sun's reappearance visible.
Mostly I was looking at the sky (through the safety of my eclipse glasses, of course). But I managed to snap a handful of photographs that, despite the limitations of my phone’s camera, came out pretty well.

PortAventura

After our week in the villa we delivered JTA to the airport to return home. Then Ruth, the kids and I drove on to PortAventura, perhaps our favourite theme park anywhere in the world. Since our last visit, the younger kid has reached a milestone of height that permits him to ride all of the largest rides, and he was excited to take advantage of this newfound privilege.

A man (Dan), a woman (Ruth), and two children sit in a circular boat on a 'river rapids' style ride.
A particularly useful thing about PortAventura compared to some other theme parks is that it’s designed with heatwaves in mind: it’s got lots of natural shade, cooling-off areas, and the right ratio of water rides for when you positively, absolutely need a good soaking.

Both the elder child and I were particularly excited to share with him my favourite non-looping rollercoaster, Shambhala. Shambhala is simply excellent: it’s a highly-vertical smooth ride with a free and open-feeling restraint that, collectively, give amazing “air” and a sensation of “flying” that’s hard to compare to almost any other coaster ride I’ve been on. I could sing its praises aplenty.

A man with a screwdriver repairs the restraint system on a rollercoaster car.
The second we reached the front of the line for our first ride on Dragon Khan… it broke down. But we got to watch it being repaired right in front of us, so that’s cute!

Going to Disneyland Paris and PortAventura in the same summer gives me the confidence to say: PortAventura is the better theme park. The rides, the theming, the food, the queue management, the accommodation, the value-for-money… it’s all better. So if  you’re considering a European theme park trip and you don’t care about getting your photo taken with Goofy or whatever… PortAventura would be my suggestion.

PortAventura’s water park is good too, although it was pretty busy on the day we went. Their 30-metre tall near-vertical waterslide King Khajuna is a little intimidating7, but nothing our thrillseeking little man wasn’t up for.

Barcelona

Finally, we made our way to Barcelona for a “wind-down” couple of days at a hotel we’ve always enjoyed there. Aside for being mistaken for staff while I was using my laptop by the rooftop pool, there’s little of note to say about it: we took it easy, did as little as we could get away with, and generally “unplugged” before our journey back to the UK and a return to normal life (boo!).

Altogether a fabulous trip… and a really interesting experiment in a model that we could replicate if we ever opted for a three week (but drop-in/drop-out/telework) holiday in future. Though… I’d again want (our scheduling queen) Ruth to wrangle the logistics, because it gets complicated when there are so many moving parts!

Footnotes

1 Although not in our house, of course, which is still being repaired following the flood in February; it’s now F-Day plus 191 days… more on that in a future blog post, I’ve no doubt.

2 For a while, she was talking about trying to engineer it into a five-week expedition spanning both this and our trip to France earlier in the summer (to which JTA, the kids and I drove/LeShuttle’d, and to which Ruth flew following a work-related event in Austria: my, what a cosmopolitan life we’re leading this year!). But that’d have been an enormously more-complicated affair and I’m glad we settled on this “simpler” trip in the end!

3 Not that she cares: the dog loves hanging out with her little doggy friends, and is always excited to be taken to our dogsitter‘s, where she also “commutes” for a workday or two most weeks.

4 During out post-holiday ‘retro’ (because of course that’s what we do), the lack of connectivity appeared as both a negative and a positive on some of our lists! Obviously we’re all aware that a little digital disconnection is healthy and valuable, but sometimes it takes being in the middle of nowhere to impose the requisite self-discipline to keep off your devices!

5 Geocaching logs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (my 1000th successful find) – not that Geocaching.com can count that correctly! – 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37.

6 Obviously, the Devil’s Bridge nearest where I used to live and at which Ruth and I spent our first anniversary – back when we had no idea that we’d be able to make our relationship last… what…? 19 years this month!) – will always have a special place in my heart.

7 Reaching the top of King Khajuna’s tower, you can feel it swap in the breeze, and when you get to the slide itself its ‘horizon’ disappears precipitously until you shuffle completely up to it, at which point there’s little choice about your destination! While we queued for our first goes, we witnessed several people reach the top, change their minds, and turn back!

× × × × × × × × × × × × ×

Article posted at UTC on .

No comments

Casa Ventola

This week, I’m living in a villa on a vineyard about 9km North of Tarragona, on the East coast of Spain.

Under nearly-cloudless skies and surrounded by trees and olive and grape-laden slopes, a stone villa and its outbuildings sit prominently under the bright sun.
Gotta say, it’s a pretty place to walk the grounds of.

A large part of our choice of location for this trip was, of course, the total solar eclipse that’s expected this evening, whose path of totality just barely passes over this spot before disappearing somewhere over the Mediterranean.

A red and orange sunset with beams reaching up over the hilly horizon of climatically- Mediterranean farmlands.
We tested by watching a couple of sunsets that, at the time of day the eclipse will occur, the sun will still be visible over the horizon.1

26 years ago, almost to the day, I blogged about witnessing the 1999 solar eclipse from Paris, where we were fortunate enough that Europe’s cloudy conditions on that day broke just in time for a midday totality and a proper “diamond ring” occlusion. I’m not confident I’ll ever see an eclipse quite so spectacular again in my lifetime, but I’m hopeful!

Obviously the eclipse is a primary deciding factor in our location this summer, but this family holiday’s about more than just seeing the sun vanish and hoping that it comes back out again.

A freshwater turtle swims close to the rocky shore of a blue-green lake, peeping its head above the water.
For example, we’ve also braved the August heat for a variety of outings around the area, such as to the beautiful botanic gardens of Parc Samà where we met this curious little turtle.

I’ve been out geocaching a lot on the mornings, for example, as is my way when visiting any foreign country! I’ve enjoyed taking advantage of being a naturally earlier-riser than most of my family, coupled with the cooler morning temperatures, to explore the hills and forests of this region. And look: I found my thousandth ever geocache!2

The one downside3 of our accommodation is the lack of connectivity. There’s no wired Internet here, and the hilly location and stone walls make acquiring a reasonable cellular signal… challenging.

Dan, a white man with a short 'goatee' beard and a blue ponytail, sits in the drivers' seat of a left-hand drive car with a laptop perched between his belly and the steering wheel, giving a sarcastic grin to the camera.
To look into a Three Rings issue this morning, I first needed to drive down the hill and around the valley a short way to get line-of-sight to a cellular tower, in order to get more than one bar of 5G signal and tether myself a reasonable Internet connection!

Anyway: it’s beautiful and bright (and scorchingly hot!) out here, and I’ve got my fingers crossed for clear skies in eight hours’ time. Here’s hoping!

Footnotes

1 Without clouds in the way, the prettiest pictures of sunsets occurs just after this point, of course. I’ve spared you seeing a photo of an unoccluded sun, which – depending on the brightness fidelity of your screen – you’d possibly need to wear special shades to look at anyway?

2 I know, I know: I’ve been geocaching for sixteen years – I “should” have found more than that by now. Well, I’m pretty laid-back about the sport, and often only target caches with a reasonable number of positive reviews or that are otherwise interesting to me. I’m not so-interested in making the “number go up” as I am in exploring interesting places and seeing cool things.

3 Or is it an upside? It’s certainly keeping my focus on the world around me and away from screens!

× × × ×

Article posted at UTC on .

1 mention

Hollandaise Sauce

If I’m on holiday and a hotel offers me eggs benedict for breakfast, I’ll almost always order it. But I’d never make it at home.

I tell myself that this is because hollandaise sauce is notoriously easy to mess up. That I don’t want to go through the learning process only to make something inferior to what I eat as a holiday treat.

But maybe it’s just that my brain wants to keep eggs benedict as a signifier that I’m on holiday. That I can unplug from the world, stop thinking about work, and enjoy a leisurely breakfast with some creamy eggs and a long black coffee.

Maybe eggs benedict just has to remain “holiday food”, for me.

Invisible Dog

Our dog has decided that the perfect place to lie down at our holiday accommodation is… on a staircase whose carpet is the same colour as her!

I’m grateful for her very-visible blep… or I’d have tripped over this camouflaged pupper several times already!

A champagne-coloured French Bulldog lies on a step of a staircase carpeted in the same colour as herself, u her tongue in medium-blep.

×

Note posted at UTC on .

No comments

Note #26625

Off to Pembrokeshire on holiday I’ve had to stop near Cardiff to put some more charge into the car… which provides the perfect opportunity for the doggo and I to explore a nearby sports field and take in All. The. Smells. 🐶

Standing in a green park space, Dan gestures to his dog, a Frenchie, who's sniffing a nearby tree.

×

PortAventura

Made it through a day and a half of theme park fun with the kids. Time for a much-needed beer, then as long a sleep as circumstance will allow.

Three glasses of beer held by adult hands clink together against a glass of water and a bottle of Fanta held 6 by cold hands.

×

Dos Huevos

For some reason, the breakfast chef assumed that when I asked for two eggs benedict that I might want them on two separate plates. As if I WEREN’T totally planning to scoff them both myself! 😂

Two portions of eggs benedict, in front of a window showing a 25th-storey view of Barcelona.

×

Note posted at UTC on .

No comments

Hackaday

Me, hacking challenging Javascript at work: “Damn, I need a holiday.”

Dan sits at a laptop in a hotel bar, a view of Barcelona out of the window behind him, a beer bottle alongside him.

Me, hacking challenging Javascript on sabbatical: “Ah, so relaxing.”

×

Freedom of the Mountain

During a family holiday last week to the Three Valleys region of the French Alps for some skiing1, I came to see that I enjoy a privilege I call the freedom of the mountain.

In black skiwear, Dan looks into the camera from a bench in the snow, his skis upright behind him.
“Mornin’. Let’s go skiing.”

The Freedom

The freedom of the mountain is a privilege that comes from having the level of experience necessary to take on virtually any run a resort has to offer. It provides a handful of benefits denied to less-confident skiers:

  • I usually don’t feed to look at a map to plan my next route; whichever way I go will be fine!
  • When I reach one or more lifts, I can choose which to take based on the length of their queue, rather than considering their destinations.
  • When faced with a choice of pistes (or an off-piste route), my choice can be based on my mood, how crowded they are, etc., rather than their rated difficulty.
A snow-covered Alpine glacier sandwiched into a gully of exposed rocks.
Let’s tear this up, yo.

The downside is that I’m less well-equipped to consider the needs of others! Out skiing with Ruth one morning I suggested a route back into town that “felt easy” based on my previous runs, only to have her tell me that – according to the map – it probably wasn’t!

Approaching the Peak

The kids spent the week in lessons. It’s paying off: they’re both improving fast, and the eldest has got all the essentials down and it’s working on improving her parallel turns and on “reading the mountain”. It’s absolutely possible that the eldest, and perhaps both of them, will be a better skier than me someday2.

I’m not perfect, mind. While skiing backwards and filming, I misjudged the height of an arch and hit the back of the head with it… despite the child shouting to warn me! 😅

Maybe, as part of my effort to do what I’m bad at, I should have another go at learning to snowboard. I always found snowboarding frustrating because everything I needed to re-learn was something that I could already do much better and easier on skis. But perhaps if I can reframe that frustration through the lens of learning itself as the destination, I might be in a better place. One to consider for next time I hit the piste.

Footnotes

1 Also a little geocaching and some mountainside Where’s Wally?

2 Assuming snow is still a thing in ten years time.

× ×

Article posted at UTC on .

1 comment

Short-Term Blogging

There’s a perception that a blog is a long-lived, ongoing thing. That it lives with and alongside its author.1

But that doesn’t have to be true, and I think a lot of people could benefit from “short-term” blogging. Consider:

  • Photoblogging your holiday, rather than posting snaps to social media
    You gain the ability to add context, crosslinking, and have permanent addresses (rather than losing eveything to the depths of a feed). You can crosspost/syndicate to your favourite socials if that’s your poison..
Photo showing a mobile phone, held in a hand, being used to take a photograph of a rugged coastline landscape.
Photoblog your holiday and I might follow it, and I’ll do so at my convenience. Put your snaps on Facebook and I almost certainly won’t bother. Photo courtesy ArtHouse Studio.
  • Blogging your studies, rather than keeping your notes to yourself
    Writing what you learn helps you remember it; writing what you learn in a public space helps others learn too and makes it easy to search for your discoveries later.2
  • Recording your roleplaying, rather than just summarising each session to your fellow players
    My D&D group does this at levellers.blog! That site won’t continue to be updated forever – the party will someday retire or, more-likely, come to a glorious but horrific end – but it’ll always live on as a reminder of what we achieved.

One of my favourite examples of such a blog was 52 Reflect3 (now integrated into its successor The Improbable Blog). For 52 consecutive weeks my partner‘s brother Robin blogged about adventures that took him out of his home in London and it was amazing. The project’s finished, but a blog was absolutely the right medium for it because now it’s got a “forever home” on the Web (imagine if he’d posted instead to Twitter, only for that platform to turn into a flaming turd).

I don’t often shill for my employer, but I genuinely believe that the free tier on WordPress.com is an excellent way to give a forever home to your short-term blog4. Did you know that you can type new.blog (or blog.new; both work!) into your browser to start one?

What are you going to write about?

Footnotes

1 This blog is, of course, an example of a long-term blog. It’s been going in some form or another for over half my life, and I don’t see that changing. But it’s not the only kind of blog.

2 Personally, I really love the serendipity of asking a web search engine for the solution to a problem and finding a result that turns out to be something that I myself wrote, long ago!

3 My previous posts about 52 Reflect: Challenge Robin, Twatt, Brixton to Brighton by Boris Bike, Ending on a High (and associated photo/note)

4 One of my favourite features of WordPress.com is the fact that it’s built atop the world’s most-popular blogging software and you can export all your data at any time, so there’s absolutely no lock-in: if you want to migrate to a competitor or even host your own blog, it’s really easy to do so!

×

Article posted at UTC on .

1 comment

Holidays in the Age of COVID

We’ve missed out on or delayed a number of trips and holidays over the last year and a half for, you know, pandemic-related reasons. So this summer, in addition to our trip to Lichfield, we arranged a series of back-to-back expeditions.

1. Alton Towers

The first leg of our holiday saw us spend a long weekend at Alton Towers, staying over at one of their themed hotels in between days at the water park and theme park:

2. Darwin Forest

The second leg of our holiday took us to a log cabin in the Darwin Forest Country Park for a week:

3. Preston

Kicking off the second week of our holiday, we crossed the Pennines to Preston to hang out with my family (with the exception of JTA, who had work to do back in Oxfordshire that he needed to return to):

4. Forest of Bowland

Ruth and I then left the kids with my mother and sisters for a few days to take an “anniversary mini-break” of glamping in the gorgeous Forest of Bowland:

(If you’re interested in Steve Taylor’s bathtub-carrying virtual-Everest expedition, here’s his Facebook page and JustGiving profile.)

5. Meanwhile, in Preston

The children, back in Preston, were apparently having a whale of a time:

6. Suddenly, A Ping

The plan from this point was simple: Ruth and I would return to Preston for a few days, hang out with my family some more, and eventually make a leisurely return to Oxfordshire. But it wasn’t to be…

Screenshot from the NHS Covid App: "You need to self-isolate."
Well that’s not the kind of message you want to get from your phone.

I got a “ping”. What that means is that my phone was in close proximity to somebody else’s phone on 29 August and that other person subsequently tested positive for COVID-19.

My risk from this contact is exceptionally low. There’s only one place that my phone was in close proximity to the phone of anybody else outside of my immediate family, that day, and it’s when I left it in a locker at the swimming pool near our cabin in the Darwin Forest. Also, of course, I’d been double-jabbed for a month and a half and I’m more-cautious than most about contact, distance, mask usage etc. But my family are, for their own (good) reasons, more-cautious still, so self-isolating at Preston didn’t look like a possibility for us.

Ruth and Dan in a car, in a car park.
Ruth and I went directly to a drive-through PCR testing facility.

As soon as I got the notification we redirected to the nearest testing facility and both got swabs done. 8 days after possible exposure we ought to have a detectable viral load, if we’ve been infected. But, of course, the tests take a day or so to process, so we still needed to do a socially-distanced pickup of the kids and all their stuff from Preston and turn tail for Oxfordshire immediately, cutting our trip short.

The results would turn up negative, and subsequent tests would confirm that the “ping” was a false positive. And in an ironic twist, heading straight home actually put us closer to an actual COVID case as Ruth’s brother Owen turned out to have contracted the bug at almost exactly the same time and had, while we’d been travelling down the motorway, been working on isolating himself in an annex of the “North wing” of our house for the duration of his quarantine.

Barricade with signs reading "Quarantine: Zombie Outbreak"
I set up a “yellow zone” between Owen’s quarantine area and the rest of the house into which we could throw supplies. And I figured I’d have fun with the signage.

7. Ruth & JTA go to Berwick

Thanks to negative tests and quick action in quarantining Owen, Ruth and JTA were still able to undertake the next part of this three-week holiday period and take their anniversary break (which technically should be later in the year, but who knows what the situation will be by then?) to Berwick-upon-Tweed. That’s their story to tell, if they want to, but the kids and I had fun in their absence:

8. Reunited again

Finally, Ruth and JTA returned from their mini-break and we got to do a few things together as a family again before our extended holiday drew to a close:

9. Back to work?

Tomorrow I’m back at work, and after 23 days “off” I’m honestly not sure I remember what I do for a living any more. Something to do with the Internet, right? Maybe ecommerce?

I’m sure it’ll all come right back to me, at least by the time I’ve read through all the messages and notifications that doubtless await me (I’ve been especially good at the discipline, this break, of not looking at work notifications while I’ve been on holiday; I’m pretty proud of myself.)

But looking back, it’s been a hell of a three weeks. After a year and a half of being pretty-well confined to one place, doing a “grand tour” of so many destinations as a family and getting to do so many new and exciting things has made the break feel even longer than it was. It seems like it must have been months since I last had a Zoom meeting with a work colleague!

For now, though, it’s time to try to get the old brain back into work mode and get back to making the Web a better place!

× × ×

Article posted at UTC on .

No comments