Once again, we’re off on a trip prompted by someone else’s travels. Last year we were in New Zealand visiting our niece Casey who was attending school in Christchurch. Before that was Paris, once again stalking Casey as she attended school.

This time we’re stalking our friends Judith and Mark. Judith garnered an artist residency in Spain, so we’ve built this trip around visiting them.

The hard part was deciding whether to approach our friends via Barcelona or via Andalucia. I had been to both areas while in college, but Jim hasn’t been to Spain yet. We opted for Andalucia given it has everything that people think of when they think of Spain – flamenco, bullfighting, tapas. We also thought it would be a nice bookend to our visit to Turkey – in Spain mosques have been transformed into cathedrals, while in Istanbul cathedrals were transformed into mosques. We’ll be visiting several of both on this trip.

As usual, we’ll be blogging and invite our friends and family to follow us. Or not. As I repeat with every trip, we started doing this to keep my mom informed about our travels. We’ve since found it a great resource to remind us where we stayed and what we did on trips as things fade from memory.

Off we go!