Spain, 2004

Mary, John, Tom, and I spent March 18 to 28 in Mijas, an ancient hill town on the Mediterranean near Gibralter, and visiting Bill, who was spending Penn State's spring semester studying in Seville.  Here's a selection of photos.

-- Terry

On the plane from JFK to Madrid, we ran into Uncle Don -- or, rather, a Spanish businessman who looked remarkably like him.  ("Handsome dude, huh?" Don remarked when I showed him this photo.)

Tom just couldn't get enough of the local lemons.

Night life in old Seville

Tom's car

Bill's friend Sofia was also in town.

And here's the whole gang on the front lawn of the villa we rented in Mijas.

A view from the patio. The town in the distance is Fuengirola, and behind it is the Mediterranean Sea.

One of Tom's favorite pictures, taken outside a restaurant in Mijas.

John was the first to notice that Spaniards really like ham.

Bill on the patio at the villa in Mijas.

One of many strange moments during the daily hike up to town.

We also visited the Alhambra, an ancient Moorish citadel in Granada.

A courtyard in the Alhambra.

In another courtyard, John attempted to straighten a tree...

...and discovered an ancient Moorish doorstop.

A rainy day, a lonely church on the road to Rondo.

Everywhere you look, olive groves.

The Sierra Nevadas dwarf a farming town near Rondo.

The same picture in stereo. Stare at the space between the pictures and let your eyes relax as if you're looking through the screen at something far away. When the two pictures merge, forming a third picture in the middle, you should see it in 3D.

Mary, Tom, and John in the park at Rondo.  If you walk over to the fence and look down...

...it's 1000 feet straight down.  I believe Rondo is the setting of Hemingway's story about the Spanish civil war, in which insurgents were forced to run a gauntlet of townspeople wielding whips and rakes, and then thrown over the wall.

Back in Seville, John spots the remains of a ham in someone's trash.

Outside the cathedral in Seville, Bill turns down an offer from an umbrella seller.  Bill is a business student.  We surmise that he learned this technique in a negotiation course.

Bill and two college friends took a trip to Morocco and came back looking like this.

Bill and Sofia at a beach in Portugal.

Tom with Mary, homeward bound.