Eurasia Mega Tour 2026 - Days Thirty Eight - Forty - The Home Coming, El Campello

On Thursday the 1st we returned home...not to ElderFleet Command in Albuquerque, New Mexico...but to ElderBase One in El Campello, Spain. This has been our 'happy place for four years now. It has been the one place we have found in all our travels where we are happy to come back to and just 'live'. That becomes more and more important to us as age puts limits on how much we can do when we travel. 

The drive from Madrid to El Campello is almost exactly four hours. It is always wearying. I am not that fond of driving and the road has almost no straight stretches (literally). It is worst the final hour before we arrive when you are at your most tired.

But then we arrive and the apartment is as you remember it. We quickly rearrange the furniture to our desires. We go to our respective rooms and lay things out. We do a quick immediate shopping for dinner and breakfast the next day. We know where everything is in the supermarket and the products we like. The next day we do our big shopping and it is much the same. We know where things are. We know what we like. We don't have to wander around and figure out what things are. 

It is important to note that the 'view' aspects of the apartment are significant to our enjoyment of place. It is very difficult in our experience to get the breath of view, with the closeness to water, in a place that has so much happening in the water to watch. If we were in different accommodations, I'm not sure we would love this locale as much. 

Return to our Happy Place 

 Are the forces of the universe speaking to you when Wife can find her favorite soft drink, heretofore never seen on our travels, in our big supermarket here!

 

 Local Laundry Shots

 The day we arrived it was stormy

 

 Birds torment me. They fly by the windows almost every night. By the time, I whip out my camera, they are far away. 

Eurasia Mega Trip 2026 - Day Thirty Seven - No End To The Photography

Our few days in Madrid opened Wife and my eyes to the possibilities of staying in a larger city, something we, heretofore, had been avoiding. I should qualify that it needs to be a city that has a lot of interesting neighborhoods and architecture. That disqualifies a lot of places in Europe because they were destroyed in WWII and are now mostly rebuilt. A city like Madrid (or Rome and Paris), for example, avoided that and thus have many more interesting older places that are not on the tourist mainstream to explore. 

For example, the apartment we were staying in was on the Western outskirts of the central district (Centro) of Madrid close to the Plaza de San Francisco and the Plaza de los Carros, just South of the Catedral de Santa Maria. As such we could walk through out the Centro district. And we found in our quarter, plenty to observe, imbibe, and photograph.

Even though we were quite tired from the night before with our brush with civil disobedience, we wanted to take advantage of being in this area. So we decided to go out for another shoot.  

As the photographic blood has been running hot ever since our workshop in Alanya, I decided I would only shoot with the fisheye lens again. So no narrative here. Just the pictures.

Eurasia Mega Trip 2026 - Day Thirty Six - Madrid Night Photography

We are half-way through the Mega Trip! Hard to believe. Tomorrow we head to El Campello where we will be spending the month of October. 

I specifically wanted to spend a few days in Madrid to do photography. I was inspired by our experience last year when we took an Uber back to our apartment from visiting Granddaughter 2.2 and was blown away by the incredible lit up architecture. Last night we did it. We took an Uber to one part of the Centro area and then walked our way across the entire Centro area until we got to where we were staying. We did all the photography we wanted, and by chance, found ourselves in the middle of a major political demonstration that had both of us a bit freaked out. But we kept our cool and managed our way back into the calm districts of town.  

I did a bit of online research and found recommendations on the type of lens and settings that would best work in the nighttime environment. This led to my selecting our Fish-eye lens  and a 17mm fixed lens as well. The first half of the photos were with the Fish-eye, the last half with the 17mm.

Notice the Beautiful Fountain in the center. The one that looks like a 'box' 

 

 "I'm telling you. That's a famous fountain!"

 

 Hmmm...looks like the infamous 'repair work on a de-I top of list item' if you ask me.

 Mingling with others at the top 'photo site'

 

 

 

 

 

 This was our furthest point out. Now we worked our way back into Centro

 

 

 

 

 Espouses Fotograficus is nocturnal in Madrid

 

 We walk on

 

 

 Man in a Bus

 

 High level street musicians

 

 We head down a street, not thinking much.

 

 But CLEARLY, something IS happening

There are tents set up. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people

 We are totally engulfed in people and can barely move

 

 Finally, after a rather nerve wracking time, we are able to exit to a side street and back to normality. Turns out this is a major protest for housing affordability.

 Calm

 

 

 

This may look like an Amsterdam brothel. It is a fast food place

 

 Moving toward the Plaza Major

The Plaza itself is quite calm

 

 

 

 We make our way back to our apartment, pretty wiped out from the stress of the demonstration and the length of the walk but feeling good we did it.

A last monument close to home