Eurasia Mega Trip - Days Forty Two - Four - Daily Life In El Campello

The reason for long search that led us to finding our place in El Campello and the reason we keep coming back is our long steady decline in physical capabilities. It is true that we still have the ability to show bursts of energy and capability when it comes to our travel adventures. But, as I described following our multi-day burst in Madrid, we need periods to recuperate. And prior to Wife having bounced back from the issues that assaulted her the last couple of years, we had serious doubts as to our ability to travel as we had done earlier. 

What our place here provides us with is a situation where we can 'live' as opposed to go 'do'. The everyday tableau on the water, the ability to shop and cook, the markets, the places to go walking, the places to hang out in, all create an environment where we can enjoy living in. And we still have things that motivate us to pull out the cameras for shooting.

Thought we were done with cats when we left Türkiye?

  Cat-o-pia El Campello

 

 There is a never ending parade of sailing vessels...especially on weekends

 

 This year the sunrises and sunsets have not been quite as spectacular as other years, it is still a wonderful place for them.

 

 We start having family visiting tomorrow, so the pace of things will definitely be picking up

Eurasia Mega Trip 2026 -Day Forty One - The Morning Rhythm Method

One of our daily joys in El Campello is going out for long walks in the early morning. The physical location of Spain in its time zone means that the sun doesn't come up until around 8am at this time of year. There will be just a hint of light coming up from the horizon in the East across the water at 7am. As returning readers know, that leads to great sunrises which in turn leads to the photo mad Eldership crew taking pictures like crazy. As we are now fully acclimated and settled in, let the madness begin.

 Avramar Acqua Farming ship moving out of the harbor

They still haven't hired me to do their promotional work 

 

 Our only 'Tower'

 

 

 

Along the beach

 

 Mostly shooting in the harbor today

 

 

 

Predators of El Campello

(Inspired by recent photos taken by follower 'The Count' of Grizzly Bears catching and eating salmon in the wild)

 

 Stalking

 

 

Attacking and capturing the prey

 

Devouring same

The Return Home

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.