Took a Plane to Spain
December 1 - December 7, 2019
Another work trip here, where we were sent to do some high pressure testing at an oil refinery in A Coruña, Spain. A Coruña is in the Northwest Corner of Spain, north of Portugal along the coast. We flew to Madrid and immediately got into a rental car and drove to A Coruña. I was pretty jet lagged and spent most of the trip so I didn’t get many photos on the drive. We spent most of our spare time exploring the city in the evenings and struggling to order food when we went out to eat. Luckily, a sandwich shop called Cien Montaditos (in English “100 Little Sandwiches”) was easy enough to order from and had some good food. Even after taking 7 years of Spanish between high school and college, I still struggled to speak it and they were very stubborn about not speaking English, which I definitely respect. There are some photos from the Tower of Hercules on the coast as well. On the way back down to Madrid to fly out, we swung down into the northern tip of Portugal to explore an old medieval fort, the Castelo de Chavez. There won’t be nearly as many photos as the South Africa trip, as we were only there for about a week.
The first set of photos are from exploring the city of A Coruña. We stayed right on the small bay at the Meliá Maria Pita hotel. We walked up and down the coast to check out the view of the bay. We typically moved away from the coast into the city more to find a place to eat. Obviously, since its a coastal town, seafood was abundant which is not my favorite, but they had some bomb paella (see the last photo where they served full on octopus). The building with the strange architecture is the Domus which is an “interactive museum of the human body” but we did not have the time to go in and explore.
Just north of the hotel was the Tower of Hercules which had a little park and hiking trails around it.
On the way back to Madrid before leaving, we swung down into Portugal for a quick little adventure. We stopped in the town of Chavez and explored the Castelo de Chavez, a medieval fort. It had a bunch of old weapon displays inside, including artifacts from WW1 and WW2. Unfortunately, it was a very foggy morning when we were there, so I could not get many good photos of the view from the top of the tower. There are a few photos of the mountains on our drive back down to Madrid at the end.
