Finding your feet on a wonderful road...

From Alicante, we traveled to Barcelona, where we were able to spend almost a week exploring this amazing city. Out of the Spanish cities that I knew we would be visiting this trip, Barcelona was the one I was most excited about. Barcelona is a beautiful city on the coast with fascinating buildings and unique architecture. Its blue skies and sunshine are almost constant as it only rains about 20 days per year. The culture and food are amazing as well. It certainly lived up to all of its hype, and I think I would say that it is one of my favorite cities in the world. Neither Perry nor I have really spent any time in Barcelona before. We briefly flew in and out of the city on our honeymoon where we took a Mediterranean Sea cruise that travelled in and out of its port, but sadly our only experience in the city was in the airport and on a bus to and from the port. We both remember thinking as we sailed away from the city five years ago that we definitely wanted to return one day and s

In May and June of 2010, Perry spent several weeks in Alicante, Spain on a University of Tennessee study abroad trip. While there, he took a Spanish class and lived with a Spanish host. He absolutely loved his time in Alicante where he was able to learn and practice his Spanish, spend his afternoons on the beach, and explore different parts of Spain and Europe with his classmates. Sounds like a pretty nice way to study abroad, right? When planning this trip, we knew that we wanted to come to Spain and struggled with where we wanted to go. Spain is an amazing country with SO many places to see and explore. They have big cities, small villages, mountains, beaches, castles, cold weather, warm weather and everything in between. Figuring out where to go in a short period of time can be quite the conundrum. One place that we knew we wanted to visit though was Alicante. Perry has such fond memories of his time there, and to be able to return and show me around was something he has wanted

After our wonderful week in Australia, we boarded a plane and began the 30+ hour journey to Spain. To say it was long is a bit of an understatement. We flew Cairns to Sydney (3 hours), Sydney to Abu Dhabi (14 hours) and Abu Dhabi to Madrid (7 hours). We were both pretty happy to be off a plane once we touched down in Madrid. I love to fly and don’t mind long flights, but the jet-lag and short layovers made even me ready to be on the ground. The only issue was that we arrived in Madrid and couldn’t check into our AirBnB for 8 hours so if you ever want to know anything about the Madrid Arrivals area in Terminal 1, specifically the seats located close to the rental car area, we are your people ;)  Needless to say, we were still excited to be back in Europe in the land of Espana. We both love Spain. The culture, the people, the language, the food…all of it are wonderful. Spain was also the first European country for both of us to ever visit- Perry in 2010 on a UT summer study abroad t