While in university, I took a travel literature course. I loved getting homework … I could do it while lying in bed and drifting off to foreign and exotic lands. My favourite assignment was to read Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. The author sets out on foot armed with a violin and a blanket from his home in England and embarks on a walking journey through Spain just before the onset of the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s. The imagery Lee presented of Spain became firmly planted in my brain and I vowed to one day move to Spain.

It never happened. Instead I moved to Costa Rica. I returned to the US after five years and started reading Ernest Hemmingway tales of Spain which rekindled my dreams. A good friend of mine had a family holiday home in Almeria, Spain and offered to let me stay there. I had mastered the language so moving to Spain was a natural for me. For months I had visions of living in that house and finishing a novel I had started in Costa Rica.

It never happened. Instead I ended up going to another place … another country starting with the letter ‘S’ … and that changed my destiny.

Spain has finally happened. After dreaming about it for 40 years, I have finally arrived and am not disappointed. Regrettably, I will only be afforded a glimpse of Spain. Padma and I have no timetables for the rest of our lives now and no where we really need to be. But Spain during the times of COVID just isn’t the Spanish adventure I had dreamed about so we will soon return to Germany and then on to Australia.

I downloaded an ebook of Laurie Lee’s walk through Spain. I’ll relive his travels again while Padma and I are holed up in quarantine in Perth next month and start dreaming again of a new adventure in Spain.