My Love of Spain

In 1981, the summer between my junior and senior year at UCLA, I studied in Madrid for six weeks. I had declared my Spanish major the previous September because I could graduate in four years with AP units and because I loved the language. I saw a flyer for the summer program with Bryn Mawr’s Centro de Estudios Hispánicos. I got accepted to the program with a scholarship. I packed my bags and backpack and began my first trip to Europe. Not many of my friends studied abroad, and no one in my family had traveled to Europe. Just a few years ago my mom told me she cried all the way back from the airport.

I had never been to a nation’s capitol, even our own. Madrid’s monuments, fountains, post office that looked like a palace, wide boulevards, narrow alleys and the expansive Retiro Park inspired me. I was taken by Spain’s romantic history of kings and queens, art, culture, buildings, the independence of food, I experienced the independence of travel and the journey with other students in discovering new things and learning together. I saw bullfights, drank red wine from a porron, ate jamon y queso, tortilla española, bocadillos, and I dreamed in Spanish. I remember calling home (long distance on a land line) and having a hard time thinking of a particular word I wanted to say in English.

Most of the students lived with host families; I lived outside of Madrid in Soto del Real and drove forty five minutes into Madrid with the director and two other students in her little Fiat. We spent time in this little village with local kids who taught us the Macarena and how to make sangria. Alfred was my roommate. He was a from Ossingen, a Swiss village outside Zurich, where later in the summer I visited him. We visited Lugano, Bern, and Lucerne, where I left my small stuff sack on the train with my passport, maps, American Express card and Travellers Cheques. Good news: when I got back from Zurich to get a new passport and card, Alfred’s mother made me a late dinner with sausage, homemade carrot salad and French fries (because I’m American), washed my clothes and sewed my frayed towel. Bad news: when my mom got my stuff sack in the mail, before I arrived back from Europe, she wondered whether or not I was alive!

I took classes on modern Spanish history, the monarchy to the civil war, the fascist dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco to King Juan Carlos. For my professors, the oppression of Franco’s regime among intellectuals, artists and educators was still fresh in their memory. We read classic writers like Unamuno, and toured the Prada museum once a week with a local tapestry artist, Luis Gallardo. When we returned for sabbatical in 1997, we took the boys through the same portions of the Prado, enjoying the art in 90 minute segments.

On the weekends we toured Toledo, Segovia, Salamanca, Cuenca, Valle de los Caídos and El Escorial where Felipe II led the Spanish Inquisition. We saw castles and churches, and the room in Segovia where Columbus was welcomed back by Ferdinand and Isabella.

After the six week program, I left my bags in Madrid, packed my backpack with my bota and necessary clothes, and began my Eurail Pass adventure through Santiago de Compostela, León and Burgos (three cities we will visit on the Camino). I remember seeing the priests in the Cathedral of Santiago swing the censor attached to the tall ceiling and filling the cathedral with incense for the pilgrims. I remember the beautiful cathedral in León, and the statue of El Cid in Burgos. I traveled on to France, England, Ireland, Italy and Switzerland.

Along the way I met friends. Two architecture students from Penn State and I visited Rome and Florence together. I spent the night in a park in Paris with a college student from Nebraska because the hostels were full. I travelled to Nice with a friend from UCLA and her girlfriend. When we got to Nice, the two guys they were going to stay with said there wasn’t room for me, so I spent the night on the beach—until the police kicked everyone off and I followed some other students to a park where we could sleep the rest of the night. I slept under the stars in Interlaken and woke up to the amazing, Jungfrau. I took the ferry to Ireland and had a McClenahan coat of arms plaque made in a Dublin shop.

I returned to Madrid, picked up my other bags and flew back to LAX, not knowing if I’d ever return, but changed from the experience.

Amy and I first travelled together to Spain in 1986, our first year of marriage. The woman whose locker was next to Amy’s at the Y asked if we’d be interested in taking college students to Mallorca. We took four students we knew from Young Life and Glendale Presbyterian Church to a two week adventure in Bruce and Bonnie’s home in Sóller. It was on that trip that we all jumped off the thirty foot cliff into the Mediterranean waters. It took me a little longer to jump and the locals called me pollo.

This time around, we are spending a few days in Barcelona between leading our group in Israel and walking the Camino de Santiago. We have been in Barcelona only briefly once before. We were with our ten-year-old sons on sabbatical in 1997 where I spent most of my time working on my Doctor of Ministry final paper. We had just spent a few weeks traveling through France and Italy. We took an overnight train to Barcelona and woke up just before arriving at the station. The boys wanted to go to the café car for breakfast, but I wasn’t sure how much time we had. So, I asked them to wait until we were settled in the train station. We had to take a taxi across town from the Nord station to the Sant station and discovered our train was leaving in just 15 minutes.

We put all our bags on the train and I left to get some coffee and pastries for breakfast. When I returned, the train had left (too quiet, no “last call” or “all aboard” just “poof” and it’s gone). I stood on the platform with my box of donuts and coffee in not-to-go plastic cups. I left my passport, ticket and credit card on the train, and in the next hour convinced José, the station manager-in-training, to give me a “free” ticket to Madrid to meet up with my family. I arrived 90 minutes later than Amy, Brendan and Connor in Madrid. It was a great reunion with “I’m sorry” and “Where were you?”. That week we bought two cell phones. It was the beginning of a great adventure for all four of us… together.

We rented an apartment for two months. The boys went to school a few days with our realtor, who taught part-time. Amy and the boys had a tutor named Inigo come to our apartment to teach them Spanish. We had their tenth birthday party with kids they met in our apartment building. We walked all over Madrid. We made friends with an American missionary family living outside Madrid. We went to English language movies and ate paella.

I spent most of the days in Retiro Park reading and writing for my dissertation. A British woman sitting at a nearby table asked me what I was doing with my books and computer. I explained that I was a pastor on sabbatical working on my paper. “A vicar with a laptop?” She asked.

My childhood friend Tim and his family visited us in Madrid from Naples where he was stationed with NATO. Their kids and our kids celebrated July 4th with the best hamburgers we could make, travelled to Toledo, and rode buses all over Madrid singing This is the song that never ends…

A few weeks later we took a weekend trip to Sevilla, Nerja and Granada. As we entered the train station I saw José, now the station chief in Granada. Without missing a beat, he asked me “Where is your family?”

We took a weekend in July to drive up to the northern coast to find a place to stay for the last three weeks of our sabbatical, before returning to Paris and flying home. We arrived in San Sebastián on Friday night when Miguel Ángel was kidnapped by the Basque terrorists demanding a ransom and release of prisoners by the Spanish government. It was all over the news that this 30 something local politician was captured.

We drove into virtually every beach town looking for places listed in El País. We checked out a few casas de campo which sounded more romantic than the musty converted barns they were. Finally, we found an apartment in Comillas. By the time we returned to Madrid, Miguel Ángel had been killed and there were over a million peaceful protesters in Plaza de Colón shouting "¡Basta ya!" (Enough already). The government refused to negotiate and la ETA misjudged the Spanish people—it strengthened their resolve and weakened the terrorists’ standing. Just last week, la ETA announced they were ending their decades long fight and apologized for the violence.

The last time we were in Spain it was 2013. The church gave us a tenth anniversary gift and we took an eight day trip back to Madrid. We took only enough clothes to fit in a small daypack and walked everywhere. This time we will have a totally different adventure walking the Camino Frances, one of the many routes of the Camino De Santiago. A few facts about the Camino Frances:

• The most popular pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela
• Begins in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the French Pyrenees and ends in Santiago de Compostela
• 500 miles or 800 kilometers
• Established in Medieval times as the third pilgrimage after Jerusalem and Rome
• The relics of St James (or Santiago or San Diego) are believed to be buried at the Cathedral
• 100,000s pilgrims (the term first established with this route) from all over the world walk the route
• Every pilgrim gets their credentials stamped along the way in order to get a certificate—the minimum distance is 100 kilometers
• Made popular with the movie “The Way” with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez, and a less known documentary “Walking the Camino: Six Roads to Santiago”

We are looking forward to the adventure, giving thanks for all we see and meet, and carrying everything we’ll need on our backs. This is a spiritual pilgrimage—we will receive hospitality in the albergues, visit historic chapels and cathedrals built over the centuries for the pilgrims, and have a daily rhythm of prayer.

I’m grateful Amy and I have shared this passion for traveling and adventure in our thirty three years of marriage, and I’m grateful we can share this Camino together.