American in Spain

When discussing what sort of mischief and/or tourism we could get up to last Sunday, my wife mentioned that a friend had recommended visiting “the oldest town in Cantabria”. With only this tidbit to go on, I turned to Google and discovered a Cantabrian tourism site with the sentence, “It is said that [Bárceno Mayor] is the oldest town in Cantabria, and possibly even all of Spain.” Yet nowhere on the great big internet could I find out how old the town was thought to be. It was also unclear how one would even determine how old a small town is when it’s nestled in the mountains near a cave with 15,000 year old Paleolithic cave paintings.
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On my recent return from the United States, I had the displeasure of taking Spanair flight JK 6116 from Madrid to Bilbao on an Airbus A320. I’m not a big air traveler, but I take about ten flights a year. This A320 had the least amount of legroom on any plane I’ve ever been on. Spanair should be ashamed of themselves for cramming so many seats onto this aircraft.
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To travel to the United States this June, we packed our bags and got our passports in order. We were concerned with how well our two year old, Nora, would do on our long journey (it ended up being 23 hours from door to door). In all the hubbub of travel organization and packing, we totally forgot about another two-year-old: the ridiculous Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) law enacted by the terrorist paranoid (paranoia = terrorist win?) United States that requires non-residents to fill out an application over the internet and pay a small fee of $14 to be allowed to enter the United States. It’s hard enough to find cheap holidays abroad without your destination country trying to extort money from you. Our first flight was from Bilbao to Lisbon, our second flight was from Lisbon to Philadelphia, and our third flight was from Philadelphia to Charlotte.
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The night before our 9:40 AM flight to San Francisco, which required getting up at 6:00 AM, Nora was kind enough to remind us just why we were leaving her behind on our coast-to-coast adventure; she woke up crying at 2:00 AM and kept us up until just before 4:00 AM. By 3:10, we had ascertained that her demands were that she be in her crib – not in our bed, or up playing – with her mother – not her father – uncomfortably bent over the crib holding her hand. She’d had a fever the day before, but was only suffering from a stuffy nose at this point. We broke off negotiations and let her cry for the 45 minutes until she finally understood the futility. “Remind me of this when I get all ‘I miss my poor baby!’ in San Francisco,” Marga whispered to me.
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