Here I am ...

Rock me like a hurricane...

I'm back ... and as anyone reading this knows, I have been for a while. No excuse for not writing -- except that my muse suffered greater jet lag than I did.

'Twas lovely, Spain -- as was Cambridge, which I was emphatically told last night is NOT PART OF LONDON. The teller of this fact went on to say that equating Cambridge to London is akin to equating Burlington, Vermont to Manhattan.

When I was in Burlington four years(ish) ago, I did something very out of character: I rode in a hot air balloon. I have always been afraid of heights -- incredibly so. The leader of this hot air balloon excursion confirmed this, saying that, while many people claim to have this fear, I was the first person in his six(ish) years running these excursions who actually is afraid of heights ... not ledges or edges or that they might have the urge to jump. I know this fear made the trip up a lot of fun for those around me. Once up, it was an exhilerating and beautiful experience, though I did get viscerally nervous a few more times. And as soon as we landed I wanted to do it again.

I digress ... though my fear of heights did come into play during our visit to the Alhambra when I once again discovered that scaling great heights and peering down at the views is not my favorite activity. So I let Neil take my camera to the tops of things while I sat below and wrote in my travel journal and did my best to not look like a girl whose boyfriend had scaled great heights with her camera because she was too afraid to join him.

We spent the first part of our trip in a lovely apartment on the beach in a town called Aligate, outside of Marbella, with our dear friend George Breakfast. Senor Desayuno. We took day trips, in George's rented Fiat, to Marbella, Puerto Banus (from which we could see Africa) and Ronda ... and then spent a few days on the beach. Most nights the boys cooked dinner and we watched movies and they played music -- a real vacation -- no work obligations hanging over my head, no gigs for Neil, nothing to fix or work on around the house. And then we parted ways for a few days -- Neil and I traveled to Granada and spent two nights in a little hotel with a balcony that looked out over a monastery and its orange grove. We began each morning with a walk through the tiny, fragrant orange grove, and spent our days exploring, drinking sangria and vino tinto, eating free tapas (one of the few places in Andalusia where this lovely tradition is still practiced), visiting the indescribably beautiful Alhambra ... it was blissful, occasional extreme heights notwithstanding. On our last day in Spain we took a three hour ride to the Malaga airport, through mountains covered in olive trees and cypress. Oh, the olives -- never have I appreciated this odd little fruit as much as I did in Spain. We flew back to Stansted, the airport nearest Cambridge (which, my friends, is NOT IN LONDON), and spent the next day exploring the town. I explored -- Neil knows it well. And on our last night there, we had a curry with George and his kids and then George and Neil played a show at one of George's favorite pubs, The Flying Pig. The show ended at 11, we went back to George's and rested, then took a 3AM bus to Gatwick to fly home the next day.

So, so many photos, which is, in part, why there's been such a long delay in my posting. I will post them separately.

Hasta very soon.