This is the story of my sixteenth total solar eclipse, a travel-adventure to Spain. I came home with lots of pictures and lots of adventure stories. This is my twelfth trip with Brian McGee's companies, Explorers and then Astro Trails, and the twelfth time I have been deliriously happy with their performance.

My sixteen total solar eclipses   1998 February 26, Aruba, Carribean   1999 August 11, Szeged, Hungary   2001 June 21, Lusaka, Zambia, Africa   2002 December 4, Woomera, Australia   *     2006 March 29, Libya, Africa   *   2008 August 1, Jiuguan, China   *   2009 July 22, Agra, China   2012 November 14, Cains, Australia   +   2013 November 3, Uganda, Africa   +   2016 March 9, Indonesia   2017 August 21, Wyoming, USA   2019 July 2, Argentina   +   2020 December 14, Argentina   +   2023 April 20, Argentina   +   2024 April 8, Mexico   +   2026 August 12, Spain   + X * Explorers         + Astro Trails         X Clouds

     I have stories of previous eclipse trips to (1) Aruba, (2) Hungary, (3) Zambia, (4) Australia, (5) Libya, (6) China, (8) back to Australia, (9) Uganda, (11) Wyoming, (12) Argentina, and (13) Argentina again. The third was on my own with a side trip to Victoria Falls, the fifth combined Africa with the middle east with plenty of stories to tell, the seventh was a second trip to China without its own web page (but with pictures), the tenth was a trip to south Asia also without its own web page (but also with pictures), the fourteenth was a trip to western Australia also without its own web page (but also with pictures), and the fifteenth was a trip to Mexico also without its own web page (but also with pictures). This is my first trip to Spain.

2019 June 23

     First, this is my first total-solar-eclipse failure. We were, as they say, "clouded out" so all we saw were the clouds getting darker and lighter again. They got a lot darker and the effect was striking all by itself, even without the spectacle of the sun going dark with the corona showing. While I'm no longer 100%, I'm still fifteen out of sixteen, about 94%, not too bad as eclipse chasing goes.

     I have a collection of other people's posted pictures.

     The other issue was my knee and back were more of a factor than on previous trips, eclipse or otherwise. My usual long hike a few weeks earlier left my left knee unusually sensitive, even with the cane, and I have a new back pain, neither sciatica nor stenosis (says my doctor), growing rapidly after standing for a while and entirely mitigated by sitting down. I have a three-legged cane that lets me sit down, a bit low and awkward, but enough to relieve my pain. For me this trip so-called "walking tours" were continuing searches for a place to rest my bottom, especially when a guide was explaing something or other.

     Spain is a country rich in history and beauty. (¡Gosh, I sound like a travel brochure!) Barcelona became its own place around 100 BCE, Bilbao was officially its own city in 1300 March. Fascist dictators Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco were important factors in mid-twentieth-century Spanish history. One of the lingering effects of this history is Spain is on Central European Time (CET) instead of Western European Time (WEST) like England and parts of Portugal. Franco made Spain on the same time zone as Germany to appease Hitler, or so my tour guide explained it to us.

     2026 August 4, Tuesday.

     My airline trip from Phoenix (PHX) through Philadelphia (PHL) to Barcelona (BCN) was pleasant enough. The only glitch was the PHL-BCN flight was three hours late and, in a moment of faith in American Airlines, I booked my tour less than three hours after my scheduled arrival. My tour guide was totally pleasant about it, through WhatsApp we texted each other to agree that the tour would start when I arrived at the Seventy Hotel and would have as much as she could fit in the time we had before her next appointment.

     2026 August 5, Wednesday.

     With some search help from friends I ended up booking three tours in three days from Laura Tours Barcelona and I'm totally happy with my experiences. Besides the illuminating and entertaining time with my tour guides, Laura herself was my first tour guide and she handled my flight delay wonderfully. We communicated through WhatsApp and we met in my hotel lobby later than planned and she agreed to cover as much of the tour as we could in the time she had before her next appointment. It turned out I got the full itinerary withough being rushed.

     When I was in college I took two Art-History courses. One was Baroque and Rococo including Rembrant, whom I admired, and Rubens, whom I did not. The other was Twentieth-Century art which mostly enabled me to dislike and to dismiss most of it from a more-educated viewpoint. I recall my professor mentioning she stayed a night in Barcelona in a wavy house with no parallel walls and that, somehow, she slept better in that room than anywhere else she could recall. This is a fading memory from quite a few decades ago and I seem to remember the picture looking a lot like Antoni Gaudi's La Padrera house, which I finally got to see up close in person.

     Most of the energy of my Barcelona-Highlights tour was the Basillica de la Segrada Familia begun 1882 March 19 under architect Francisco de Paula del Villar, before Gaudi took over in 1883. His theme of art following nature went from his small structures to this beautiful, gigantic edifice still under construction. I learned that, no matter how magnificant it is, this isn't a cathedral as that building title is, if I have my recalled facts right, reserved for the seat of a cardinal and this church doesn't have its own cardinal.

     What I saw in this tour was magnificent and my tours by Laura Tours were wonderful and the joy and splender of Barcelona came through crystal clear.

     One of the amusing things I noticed in Barcelona is, just as every house in Minnesota seems to require having an outside deck, every window in Barcelona seems to require a terrace. Some of the terraces are tiny, but they're everywhere. Even my hotel room windows were presented as tiny terraces a half meter square with wood-louvered doors between the room and the windows.

     I spent the evening listening to a flamenco-guitar concert at La Perala del Born, a wonderful hole-in-the-wall music venue in the older Born district with museums, shops, and lots of food shops selling pastries and chocolate. That this was a tourist-trap area was given away by more English than Spanish in the shop signs, but it's one of those tourist traps where I'm happy to be trapped. The music and food were delightful and I got back later on to see a couple of museums.

     2026 August 6, Thursday.

     I chose to spend an extra three days on my Spain trip in Barcelona to meet Antoni Gaudi through his works. In college circa 1976 I took a course "Structures in the Urban Environment" from David Billington with slide shows accompanying the spoken lectures. One of the lectures I recall started with Disneyland and smiling, happy people having fun on rides. More and more the pictures were people waiting in lines and the rides were machines shuffing passive people around. There were views of Gaudi's spaces in Barcelona with people walking amid the sculpture and children having fun in the spaces designed by Gaudi and other architects. In particular, there was Park Güell where children were playing amid the strange and beautiful pillers and mosiac-tile patterns.

     The reality of the park fifty years later was more crowded with tourists than open with children playing, but it was still a truly-lovely space for us to enjoy. This was my second tour, Essential Gaudi, from Laura Tours with my tour guide Katarina.

     A Barcelona-Gaudi tour has to include the Basillica de la Segrada Familia and the wavy-house La Pedrera outside and inside.

     Leticia, an eclipse friend from 2020 in Argentina, works for Ericsson, the telephone company that gave Bell Telephone serious competition in our early cellular-telephone days. The company is Swedish, Leticia is Texan, but there are offices in Barcelona so she could take a extended-working holiday with time in the Barcelona office and time off on holiday. We had lunch and caught up on life in general and eclipses in particular. Leticia invited me to join her husband and friends for a musical event the next day.

     The Barcelona subway is labeled about as clearly as New York City, so there were some less-intuitive walking detours to the next train but the route numbering and lettering is clearly marked in red circles.

     There were stories on line of an airport strike in Barcelona that, fortunately for me, didn't affect my Saturday flight to Bilbao. Spain is one of the four "PIGS" countries in the European Union that is having economic trouble, or so I heard a decade or two ago, so an airport strike isn't a big surprise.

     There is another reputation Spain has that came to mind. Christian friends of mine tell stories in December of Sinterklaas, short for Saint Nicholas, and further shortened to Santa Claus in English-speaking countries like mine. Saint Nicholas rewards the good boys and girls with gifts and snacks and candy. The other part of the story is Black Peter who comes for the bad boys and girls. He puts them in a big sack and takes them to the worst place in the world, or so they told the story in the Netherlands, and that worst place for Black Peter's victims was Spain.

     2026 August 7, Friday.

     My third tour with Miguel was about Barcelona's older history. Founded about a century before the Common Era (or the Christian Era, CE, or AD, whatever you like) Barcelona has survived several empires and countries. Rome was one of the earliest and much of the original city still stands with buildings, old churches, and underground ruins.

     The Jews were expelled from Spain with the Inquisition in 1492, but Barcelona was ahead of the rest with their Jewish purge in 1391, one hundred and one years earlier. Some of the Hebrew gravestones and similar artifacts appear in walls I saw in my tour.

     Within the old-city walls were the expected old buildings and old history and old churches with gargoyles, all wonderful to see. Miguel had information and stories to offer about Barcelona's long history going back twenty-one centuries. That's a long history, especially seen by an American whose history clock just reached two hundred and fifty years. In contrast, the city of Bilbao was founded in 1300 March, fourteen centuries later than Barcelona.

     The old city included the Born district which is a busy attraction with music and art and shops and, of course, chocolate and ice cream shops. There was new art alongside the historic buildings and narrow streets. I would describe it as a tourist trap where I don't mind being trapped. It was a lot of fun.

     The old, underground ruins are presented as a museum with well-presented exhibits and signs and displays.

     My tour ended around lunchtime and, rather than take me back to my hotel, Miguel left me in the Born district where I stopped in the Figurative Art Museum on my way to the Picasso Museum.

     After a short nap and shower in my hotel room I met Leticia, her husband Dan, and their friend Darryl for an evening of guitar music atop La Pedrera with some food and light drink.

     2026 August 8, Saturday.

     My flight from Barcelona (BCN) to Bilbao (BIO) was uneventful and I met up with Astro Trails at their hotel-lobby event desk.

     The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is similar to the same-name museum in New York City in that it's architecturally interesting, more so than the art inside it. My web search says there's a third Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy, and a new location is planned in Abu Dhabi.

     I saw a cool, metal, Calder-style, mobile-on-a-stand piece in the museum gift shop, cool enough that I bought one of them and have it at my house.

     2026 August 9, Sunday.

     There were two optional Astro-Trails tours in Bilbao. First was a walking tour of the city. My left knee has been tender lately, so it may have been a bit reckless to sign up for any kind of walking tour, but I figured most people on a trip like this aren't terribly-athletic walkers and I have a cane that unfoldes into a chair when I need to sit down.

     I don't remember our tour guide's name, but she was articulate and easily able to communicate with a busload of English tourists. Bilbao doesn't have Barcelona's infactuation with terraces, but it has its own character, especially the older parts. Writing this several weeks later dulls my memory of details about Bilbao, but I do remember there were history and beauty.

     Seconds was a boat tour along the river. The Guggenheim Museum was in prominant view at the beginning and end while there were many, varied sections of architecture and industry.

     2026 August 10, Monday.

     The second day's optional tour was a wine-tasting trip. Along the way we stopped at Atlantic-Ocean viewpoints and a small town with a monument commemorating several people from there who joined Magellen in his trip around the world.

     While the winery itself was pretty the two wines we tasted were stronger than my preference. They had a tour of the machinery they used to make the wines and a parking lot full of cats that amused me.

     After the wine-tasting part of the wine-tasting tour we stopped in Gernika-Lumo, site of destructive bombings from a conspiracy between Franco and Hitler, if I understood our tour guide. There were commemorative pictures in black and white, not the town's finest hour. Our tour guide impressed me seriously by explaining what happened there without coloring it with her own passions and opinions. I think she lived there, so it was all the more impressive that she could keep her history straight and factual. We saw Picasso's mural "Guernica" while we were there.

     2026 August 11, Tuesday.

     Our third day's outings took us to the Altamira Museum about a cave and its inhabitants. As I recall the museum wasn't the actual cave but a recreation so visitors could appreciate and understand the archeology without contaminating the fragile environment of the original ruins. My phrase was "authentic rather than genuine" as the mock-ups allowed us to see what we would have seen in the actual places while keeping those actual places pristine.

     One of my similar constrasts was between the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix where the music and the sound are the exhibits and a musical-instruments display I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The former often had the same type of instrument a famous musician played without being authentic while the latter had actual ancient instruments befitting a premier art museum. The Museo de Altamira seemed there to show us how these people lived way back then rather than always to impress us with actual ancient artifacts.

     One of the joys of this eclipse trip was spending time with my eclipse-friends Gwyneth and Simon. I think I met them twenty years ago in Libya, maybe an eclipse or two later. I enjoyed her company then and enjoyed it even more now.

     2026 August 12, Wednesday.

     Eclipse Day was anticlamactic as our viewing site was cloudy all afternoon and evening. We stopped for lunch in Puerta de Vega where I stopped in the Museo Historias del Mar, a museum about the history of the sea, or, more accurately, the history of sailors on the sea.

     My eclipse history was fifteen corona views out of fifteen eclipses, but this was a truly overcast afternoon. It was still dramatic watching the grey sky getting night-dark for a few minutes. I'm grateful this wasn't my first eclipse attempt.

     2026 August 13, Thursday.

     We traveled by coach ("bus" in American) to Santiago de Compostela where we stayed in a hotel that reminded me of the San Francisco Hyatt Regency Hotel with its full-height, open atrium. We got a tour of the city with its old churches and spaces. Our tour guide was energetic and sincere, but her English wasn't really good enough for an all-English tour group.

     By the end of the day my walk back from city center to the hotel was painful for my knee, even with my cane, but the day was still pleasant and wonderful. I had the company of Rachel and David on the way back.

     2026 August 14, Friday.

     The last Astro-Trails-tour day was a tour of Spain's north shore. (My pictures are a bit confusing here since my day-to-day breaks are based on U.S.A.-Arizona time which is not the same as Spain.) It was a day of beautiful street art, some waterfalls, lovely ocean views, and a stop at the End of the World. The town of Fisterra considers itself the westernmost point in Europe. Technically, I think Lisbon is slightly further west and there are a few islands in Ireland also further west, but it's the beginning of pilgrimage east along the Atlantic coast from there to Santiago de Compostela, about 100 kilometers. It's similar to Americans hiking the Appalachian Trail on a smaller scale.

     The contrast of historical times and distances reminds me of a popular cultural observation where Americans think 100 years is a long time while Europeans think 100 miles is a long way. My country is celebrating 250 years like it's forever while I spent ten days in towns founded centuries earlier. These trekkers cover 100 kilometers with passion while hikers cover 2200 miles on the Appalachian Trail.

     2026 August 15, Saturday.

     Well, Saturday was a boring day, well mostly. I took a cab from our gorgeous hotel to the airport in Santiago de Compostela (SCQ) for my double-connect flight home. My connection in Madrid (MAD) was seventy-minutes, very tight with a long, long inter-terminal walk and lines at passport control for my international flight, and they let me through as I was waving at the gate agents. Chicago (ORD) was waiting a long time for my luggage so I could get waved through customs to recheck it to Phoenix (PHX).

     My three-legged cane that turns into a seat bent and collapsed under me at O'Hare (ORD) in Chicago, not a crisis as I was almost home anyway, so it didn't spoil my trip.

     So now I'm home, back in Scottsdale, Arizona. It's warmer and drier than Spain. I'm not as disappointed as I expected not seeing the eclipse. Most eclipse chasers have a lower success rate than fifteen out of sixteen, so I have nothing to complain about. There were other places in Spain that had good views of the sky, it's just luck that this one didn't. I can speculate what somebody might have done with hindsight. Were some of those good-view places within an hour drive? Could they have rounded everybody up and rushed us there? I figure sometimes it's enough to watch the clouds get dark.

     The band Three Dog Night was famous for a song "Never Been to Spain" that goes, "Well, I've never been to Spain, but I kinda like the music, say the ladies are insane there, and they sure know how to use it." It says here on Google AI the song was originally written and recorded by Hoyt Axton in 1971 along with "Joy to the World."

     Well, now I've been to Spain and I still like the music.