Our Spanish Holiday (Part 1)

“To Dream the Impossible Dream…” – Don Quixote

As many of you know, we spent the past two weeks in Don Quixote country. Ever since reading The Man of La Mancha and studying Spanish my freshman year at Mount Holyoke I’ve wanted to journey to this country.  I’m not sure if you all know this but Luke, my husband, comes from a very large family in Cornwall, England.  We see the family every few years, the last time being two years ago in England.  If you’d like to see highlights of that trip you can see them here, here, here, here and here.  As you can imagine we miss them tremendously and often we wish we were bit closer.  So not only was the location of our trip heaven but so was the company.  Our two boys leaped and climbed and dove off their cousins’ shoulders into a lovely and refreshing pool.  We stayed up into the wee hours of the night talking over brandy and cokes.  On our last trip, I blogged while we traveled but this time I decided to completely switch off and enjoy our family and Spain.  A trip we will savor always.

So now I’m so excited to share with you all of what we saw.  I took so many photos and saw so many amazing parts of the country, I decided to break our trip up into two parts.

We spent our first night in Sevilla!  This is a sizzling city known for tapas, flamenco and it’s beautiful buildings.

I became obsessed with taking photos of doors.  John always the poser!

We enjoyed a tapas dinner here and Conor flirted with two Italian girls at the table next to us.  So sweet.  He’s going to be trouble as he gets older….

It was 109 degrees Fahrenheit just to give you an idea of temperature with blazing sunshine. We were all very HOT.  Luckily, most of the cafes have canopies with misters in them. Our hotel, the Novotel, also had a roof top pool which we took full advantage of.

We swam as soon as we got to the hotel and also right after breakfast the next day…

Then it was time to get in the car and drive a bit to the country just outside of Campillos.

This was our home for the two weeks we were in Spain.  Click here if you’d like to read more on the villa we rented.

A gorgeous home with three different buildings (the Arab house dating back to the 15th century), our room was the one right above the front door and the boys were next to us.

It was set in the middle of the country with olive groves and open spaces.

We spent much of the time catching up with our family, here you can see everyone:

It was precious to see the younger generation enjoying each other.

The boys also loved piling on top of their big cousins and uncles in the pool. My husband has a photo of he and his brothers like this in a pool and they spent the whole holiday trying to recreate the photo.  Ha! Ha! So much fun to watch.

We prepared many dinners at home with each other, the men huddled over the grill.  I used my bartending skills from the restaurant to make margaritas and sangria.  On two occasions we had dinner prepared for us at the villa.  One night we had an authentic paella and I loved watching Juan prepare it for us. The pictures don’t do this justice.  It was delicious.

The following week he returned with a true Andalusian  meal of: tomato salad, a tuna starter, fresh bread, rice and meatballs in an almond and saffron sauce.

Our first family excursion (all of us) was to a town not too far from Campillos called Antequera.  

Sun hats and sun cream on we were ready to climb many, many stairs to reach this view!

We spent a good amount of time at the castle followed by a lovely stop at the cafe.  How amazing is the ceiling in this church?

I’ll leave you here enjoying the view. Thursday I’ll share my absolute favorite places from Spain. What do you think of the highlights so far?