Spain Part 1 – Familia

Why slow down right? We picked the twins up from their respective colleges after their freshman year and before they could settle down or scatter to friends houses & cabins we were off to Spain. We had always wanted and planned to do a big family trip after our kids graduated from High School, but like many things, Covid changed our plans. In this case, I think waiting made it even better. I don’t like to speak for others, but I will say that the 12 days we had together traveling through Spain were incredible and Jen and I cherished every, single moment. While today’s post is gonna be very heavy on family pics, don’t fret. I will be doing the Spain coverage in three posts; familia, food & drink and places.

12 days in a foreign country is a long time. Honestly, it is Jen’s and my longest actual vacation since New Zealand way back before we even had children. Yeah, that’s a long time ago! It’s sad really. As working Americans, we historically have only taken a week of vacation at one time and occasionally got a bonus day or two if planned alongside a paid holiday. Taking longer than a week really allows the mind to disconnect and allows you to truly engage the culture that you are in. I sure hope we can do this again as it was magical.

I wanted to start my series off with family pics. This trip was about our family. In a way, I’ll admit to almost capturing our kids a bit by taking them away to a an international location! It was a needed trip to reconnect and experience the growth of these two amazing young people. I fear without this trip, each of us would have kept our heads down and just settled in. Without this trip, Jen and I would have missed out at really getting to fully experience how each of the kids grew and developed this past year while away at college. Steeling the twins away for 12 days let us have real, quality time with them. It was a true gift. Many of you know I love photography but please note that not all of these images are perfect portraits and what not. My focus was not on capturing perfect pictures, but on capturing moments for our family. I carried two small, Fuji cameras, one with a fixed lens 35mm equivalent autofocus lens and one with a manual focus 50mm equivalent lens. I snuck in a few iPhone photos here and there as well.

The following gallery shows a lot of family moments in a lot of different locations throughout Spain. I’ll be writing a bit more about some of the locations and experiences in the next few posts, but I will give you a level idea of where we went and where these pictures came from. Our trip involved time in the following places; Madrid, Barcelona, the Costa Brava region, Grenada, Sevilla, Toledo and then back to Madrid. It involved planes, trains, automobiles, buses and boats.

And with that, here are quite a few family pics. I often do not share these, but again, this trip was about our time together and I tried much harder to capture images together. Click on any image to go to slideshow mode.