The country of Spain will always be a set of parentheses in my mind. I suppose the left parentheses would be Arcos de la Frontera in Andalucía and the right parentheses. Tarragona in Catalonia.
In May of 1977 we departed New Zealand for the last time. As the southern winter approached our project was complete and Georgianna flew to Texas and I to Singapore. I joined the ocean going tug Ruby which soon departed for the Persian Gulf and after about 10 days we arrived in Manama, Bahrain. For the next two months we tended a construction barge off the coast of Saudi Arabia. In August it was time for my vacation and Georgianna and I decided that we would meet in Spain for a month.
We enjoyed southern Spain for about three weeks as we traveled from one parador to the next, occasionally having to beg for a room at the crowded, but wonderful historic inns. Our favorite was the parador in the quaint town of Arcos de la Frontera of which the guide book says:
“One of Andalucia’s most dramatically positioned pueblos blancos (white villages), Arcos balances atop a rocky limestone ridge, its whitewashed houses and stone castle walls stopping abruptly as a sheer cliff face plunges down to the fertile valley of the river Guadalete below.”
Parador de Arcos de la Frontera
The idea of Spanish parentheses came to my mind recently when we were planning to go back to Spain. In early October we departed for two lovely weeks in Tarragona, Catalonia of which the guide book says:
“The eternally sunny port city of Tarragona is a fascinating mix of Mediterranean beach life, Roman history and medieval alleyways. Spain‘s second-most important Roman site, Tarragona has a wealth of ruins, including a seaside amphitheatre. The town’s medieval heart is one of the most beautifully designed in Spain, its maze of narrow cobbled streets encircled by steep walls and crowned with a splendid cathedral.”
During this trip, I was working and Georgianna was enjoying the language, the people, and the incredible Roman ruins of this ancient 2200 year old capital of the Roman province of Hispania. As I pondered the timing of our trips I was amazed that the trips occurred almost exactly one year before our first child arrived and one year after our last child left the nest for college. We had gone to Spain in August 1977, a year before Kristin was born. Then came Bethanie, Stephen, Susanna, Kathleen, Michael, and Abigail. At the end of August 2013 Abby moved out to attend college and one year later we went to Spain again. When our flight arrived Sunday afternoon three weeks ago I was somewhat disappointed as the airline had lost my bag. Georgianna, as always cheering me up, said: “It’s the parenthesis you have been speaking of, remember when you arrived in Spain 37 years ago your bag was lost that time as well.”
I am reminded by the scripture just how short our life is, James chapter 4 says:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
I praise God our “mist” has been good. God has surprised me many times in recent years with travel. While I was a young man I traveled extensively, and was a young believer growing up in Christ in foreign lands and non-traditional churches. We were greatly blessed to have many exciting experiences and to meet other Christians of varied cultures and denominational backgrounds. But in recent years I was resigned that there were many places that I had dreamed about visiting that I would probably not get to visit. I am not sure whether this thought was one of disappointment or relief.
However, since 2011 I have traveled to several places of interest to me, all with rich maritime history including: Maine, New Brunswick, Greenwich, England, and Port Lawrence on Bioko Island, West Africa. These were very enjoyable, however the over two thousand years of maritime history recorded and displayed in the Port Museum of Tarragona and the Barcelona Maritime Museum were extra icing on the cake.
Ericofrockport's Weblog 