Spain, Portugal and Morocco, November, 2017

One day in 2017 I was talking to Chuck Mattox on the phone and asked him if he and Elouise were interested in going to Spain. We had talked about this before. Chuck replied that a realtor they knew in Bend, Linda Gardner, had been getting together a group to tour Portugal, Spain and Morocco for November of that year, they had joined it, and there were still openings.

I jumped at the chance. Once when I was nine years old, I had seen a picture of the Alhambra in a book my mother had bought me, and from that moment I had been enthralled by Moorish architecture. The same book captivated me with stories about Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the medieval Spanish warrior known as El Cid. As an adult the Iberian peninsula had become one of a few places at the top of my bucket list. With Morocco thrown in, it was a no-brainer. I had to go.

The group turned out to be good-sized, twenty-five people or so, enough to fill a bus. That was fine, since we would be traveling mostly by bus. The members of the group were mainly, but not entirely, drawn from Bend and other places in the Pacific Northwest; there were people from various other parts of the USA as well. The tour would be conducted under the aegis of Education First, a Swiss company, dba Go-Ahead Tours.

I’m obliged to say that the arrangements made by EF/Go-Ahead were superb. Hotels were first-class, food was always top-notch, adherence to schedules was punctual, and the attractions visited were invariably well-chosen. And the guides. Above all, the tour leader, Manuel Sueiras, who stayed with us the entire trip, was the best I’ve encountered in all of my travels. In each place we visited we also had local guides, and in Morocco we had a second tour leader, Karim, who shared the duties of chef de voyage with Manuel and did a fantastic job of it. They were all top-notch people and I have great memories of them. I’ve remained in touch with Manuel since the trip and count him among my most treasured friends.

The tour began in Lisbon, Portugal on November 4 and ended in Barcelona, Spain on November 20. We arrived home on the 22nd, in time for the Thanksgiving holiday.