How to Drive In Spain Part III: Stray From the Path (Fall In Love Often)
When you’re on the road, it can be all too easy to become fixated on the destination to the detriment of the journey.
There are some landscapes – some wastelands – where this is perfectly acceptable. Places where you blast through barren fields, the speedometer dipping below 90 (we’re talking miles per hour now) only on the occasion that you pull off the highway into some dismal facsimile of a town where you steam up on bad coffee and then it’s off again, blasting toward another desert island of a town, a suffering oasis in the bleakness of a boring apocalypse.
Spain is not such a place.
Let me put it this way – no matter what country you’re in, if you find yourself driving a long distance in your car alone, there’s a good chance you are doing it because of love. You’re doing it because at the other end of your excursion is some romance (lustful or unrequited), Thanksgiving with the family, a friend unseen in ages, a job that will feed your children, a hometown fading into time, an obsession. You’re on that road and you’re almost desperate to get where you’re going – or perhaps entirely desperate – because you’re driving toward love. So you get there as fast as you can.
In Spain, every offramp leads to love. Your destination can be a fine place indeed, but it will be there when you arrive.
In this case, mine was Granada, as lovely a finish line as can be – mi corazon, as Joe Strummer described it. I couldn’t wait to arrive – to get the keys to my apartment above the Muslim markets in the Albayzin, shoulder to shoulder with the castle – but in the meantime there was Barcelona and everything it entails, coffee on the Mediterranean, pulling off the highway to lunch in miniscule towns with Medieval names, cutting out into the orange groves of Valencia, romance in Valencia, windworn beach towns where the only restaurant serves only one dish and it’s always the fish of the day, fine hotels, martinis and cheap beer everywhere, wine, paella, the teatro Romano of Cartagena, the elaborately bizarre cultural display of the Cartagenians (and the marijuana pills that accentuated its elaboration), driving toward the sunset, driving away from hangovers, the waking up and not remembering where you are.
It’s the meandering adventure of Don Quixote himself, and it leads you to triumph and folly and more than a few windmills.