Honesty

This trip is very much an exploration of foreign travel for me as the last time I went out side of the UK was over 20 years ago and my trips abroad have always been in a group or when I was married. Finding what I like about where I’m visiting is therefore a new experience and it’s taking time for me to understand that. If you had said to me this time last year that I’d be travelling around Spain/Portugal, I would have said you’d mistaken me for someone else. If I’m really honest, I was treading water, fooling myself I was ok and literally shutting out the world by keeping curtains closed as my garden was horribly overgrown. Over the last 8 months much has changed in my life and latterly very much for the better. This trip is a good way to bring this year to a close and begin 2025 in a new place with exciting possibilities. 

At first arriving somewhere without a place to sleep was rather daunting and finding a place to eat even more so, as my previously documented attempts to order dinner prove! But that changed as I got more confident. Now I’m arriving somewhere mid afternoon or later and booking a room there and then plus finding dinner in a place I don’t know, and it’s fun and I’m loving the variety and spontaneity of each place I visit. 

I didn’t think I was a museum person but then I went to Pontevedra museum! To be honest it was free and I’m ashamed to say that was what initially attracted me. It was amazing however and almost too big to take it all in. There was room after room  - 6 floors, half had 4 big rooms, half had up to 8 rooms - of paintings, sculptures, statues, furniture, relics and pottery/ceramics. Mostly it was art works and there were far too many to do justice to many here, but they were from the Middle Ages to this century, mainly Spanish artists and of all shapes and sizes (murals to miniatures). I loved the variety of styles, the way that emotion was expressed, that an artist could fill three massive mural size painting with life as he saw it. In some just the colours used spoke to me and there were modern paintings where parts were three dimensional with objects reaching out from the canvas. I left feeling lifted by the experience and grateful that notwithstanding my reason for going in I’d found something that I’ll always remember.