Tag: #VermazenVagabonds

Our Next Adventure

Duke’s birthday was last weekend. We are almost always traveling on his birthday so it was fun to be home, and to be able to bake him a cake and have a family party.

Duke and his monster birthday cake.

We leave Monday on our next big adventure. We will start with a five and a half week road trip through Spain and Portugal, then spend the rest of the trip in Italy and France. If you would like to see a more detailed itinerary, you’ll find a link to the day by day plan in the menu above.

While we are traveling I blog every day. It is fun when friends, family and others follow along on our travels. Please join us.

I started blogging back in 2004 when I was working at Sun Microsystems. It has been a wonderful way to chronicle my life. It is so nice to be able to look back and see what I did when, and where I was. Since I’m trying to use Facebook as little as possible, the blog and BlueSky, @marion-v.bsky.social, will be where I post updates and share my thoughts. My blog post are also cross posted on BlueSky.

We will also be putting videos of our travels up on our YouTube channel @BoomersWithoutBorders. We now have 968 subscribers and 199 videos! That means that in all likelihood on this trip we will reach and pass our goal of 1000 subscribers. I’m very excited. If you haven’t aleady subscribed we would really appreciated it if you subscribed to BoomersWithoutBorders now.

Our latest YouTube video

Traveling, blogging and creating a YouTube channel have been wonderful opportunities to be challenged, to learn and to stay young at heart. But I think it’s traveling most of all that is the biggest adventure. So starting Monday the adventure continues. We will be on the road again. I’m so excited!!

Our bags are packed and we are ready to go!

We are On The Road again.

We made it to Rome! It was an smooth trip. Saturday we drove from Reno to the Bay Area where we had a wonderful few hours with family and friends.

Barbecue at Allie and Doug’s

Sunday evening Allison drove us to San Francisco airport. We were checked in, through security and at our gate in thirty minutes. That’s fantastic compared to our last trip when it took two hours!

Swiss Air was quite comfortable. The food was good, especially the chocolate. On the flight to Zurich I slept as much as one can expect on an airplane.

Judging by the Playa dust on her pack, the lady next to Duke had been at Burning Man and was on her way home from Black Rock City.

Dinner

We had a two hour layover in Zurich and then flew on to Rome where we caught the Leonardo Express Train straight to central Rome. From the train station our hotel was just a short walk.

Buying train tickets
Walking to the hotel.

Although We were exhausted, we went out for some dinner before sleep.

Waiting for dinner in Rome
Pizza!

Trujillo to Guadalupe

Today we had a fairly short drive further northeast towards the Parador of Guadalupe, another new Parador for us. We drove through the mountains.

The view on our drive to Guadalupe

Guadalupe is the site of the Royal Monastery of Guadalupe. It has been a pilgrimage destination since the fourteenth century. At the location where pilgrims first crested a hill and looked down on Guadalupe there is a Hermitage.

Hermitage of the Humilladero
Guadalupe

The Parador of Guadalupe is right next to the cathedral.

Parador de Guadalupe

The view of the Parador and the Cathedral from the balcony of our room blew me away when we walked in.

We have to leave here fairly early tomorrow to meet Roger and Gail at the airport in Madrid. So this afternoon we drove back up to the Hermitage and recoded Duke’s second car review of this trip.

Duke’s Review of our rental car.

When we got back to Guadalupe we went exploring.

Cathedral of Guadalupe
One of the old gates of Guadalupe
Guadalupe

We had a picnic in our room for dinner.

Dinner
Dinner

The view from our room is pretty at night too.

Guadalupe

Madrid to Reno

We made it home. We left for the Airport in Madrid about 6:20 am Madrid time on Monday and finally arrived home 36 hours later. There was a long line to check in at the airport in Madrid but it moved fairly quickly.

The check in line in Madrid

Our flight from Madrid to Miami was quite good. It was only about half full. Getting through health screening, customs and immigration and rechecking our bags in Miami took less than an hour. In Madrid airport they were making regular announcements to keep a one meter distance between people. In Miami that didn’t seem to be a concern.

Our flight from Miami to San Francisco was almost full. My middle seat made for a long flight.

My daughter and her family left our truck for us at the airport in San Francisco. About 1am Tuesday morning we were on the road home to Reno.

Loading our truck in San Francisco

There was very little traffic. We stopped to nap a couple of times. Interstate 80 was closed through the mountains so we sat in a parking lot in the town of Colfax for several hours.

Interstate 80 through the Sierras

It feels surreal to have been in the middle of a two month trip one day and be home the next. Duke is busy working on trying to get refunds. We are doing laundry and going through the mail. I will update our itinerary and the final videos of the trip on my YouTube channel in the next couple of days.

Córdoba to Madrid

We woke up this morning to the news that all hotels in Spain will close tomorrow. We were able to get a plane ticket home for Monday. In Córdoba we went to the bus station. Almost everything was closed up but luckily the rental car office was open and we were able to rent a car.

Archaeological ruins in the bus station parking garage where we picked up
our rental car.

We drove the four hours to a hotel next to the airport in Madrid where we are now.

Sign on the freeway. “It is prohibited to travel without justification “.

Our flight leaves early Monday morning. We have a connection in Miami and if the U.S. entry process isn’t too slow we will be in San Francisco by midnight. We have our fingers crossed.