We’ve done it! We’ve surprised ourselves actually – we’re really doing this big thing. We’ve left behind bushfires and droughts and are on our way to the lush valleys of the Rio Duero in Spain. I’ve dreamed about Spain so very often since leaving her behind four decades ago, a dream akin to a longing to finally be reunited with a lost lover. Always, when I wake up, I promise myself I will live there again – one day. Today is that ‘one day’.
I wake up in Madrid, slightly groggy after a deep jetlag-induced sleep, the first day of our new lives on Iberian soil. I turn over to find Alex still fast asleep. My love for Spain never diminished after living here in my teens and early twenties, and neither has my love for this man, sleeping beside me. For many years I did not think I could have both, but I’m starting to wonder: maybe I can?
Lying as still as I can so that Alex can sleep some more, I close my eyes again and relive my very first glimpses of Spain on a sunny spring day in the 1970s. An eighteen-year-old on her first holiday without parents. It was also my first time on a plane and my first trip to Europe’s south, as opposed to the usual family outings to the Alps or the Black Forest. I recall my excitement as the plane banked steeply, heading for the runway: the panorama below coming into focus, the sky the bluest of blue and the water below shimmering and sparkling. The view from that plane window was a world away from the cold and grey Dutch village where I grew up. On leaving Amsterdam earlier that morning the world looked small, cloud covered and dark. On landing I saw a curtain of cream-coloured mountains running parallel with the blue of the sea, clumps of green pine trees starkly outlined against white rocks and pink almond blossom lining the valley in orderly rows.
This exotic country promised palm-fringed beaches, endless sun, music and fun, everything I’d fantasised about. My love affair with Spain
began the moment that charter flight landed at the small airport of Alicante on the Costa Blanca. I stayed for seven years until an Aussie backpacker swept me off my feet and I followed him to the other end of the world. Love will do that.
Alex, the Aussie backpacker, and my ‘other’ love, stirs and wakes up, which brings me back to the here and now. Soon we’ll be on our way to start our new life in Castilla y Leon…
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