Ever since learning about their existence, I have been looking to spot some anticrepuscular rays. Every sunset and sunrise I’ve seen in the last few years, I have looked to the opposite horizon, but not until this month have I witnessed the phenomenon first hand.
Anticrepuscular rays are visible sun rays that converge on the [...]

To finally wrap up my coverage of this year’s trip to Extremadura, I’m including some photos from an evening walk we took on the last day. There’s a rural park that we walk to sometimes.
Warning: This post contains broken glass, lambs, and wood carving.

2008 was my sixth year going to Extremadura in August. One tradition that happens every year down there is picking higos chumbos (prickly pears). I used to think they were called higos chungos, which would mean “terrible figs” (chumbo doesn’t mean anything outside of American Spanish colloquialisms). According to Wikipedia, this particular [...]

Several days of my summer vacation in Extremadura were spent tackling the huge mess that was my wife’s grandfather’s attic: a lifetime of “this could be useful later!” items and the dust they have collected over the years. I learned the trick of splashing some water on the floor before sweeping to avoid being [...]

During my recent trip to Extremadura, I took walks in the evening right around the 9:30ish sunset almost every day. For most of these walks, my eyes were glued to the absolutely stunning skies. Coming from the north of Spain, visiting relatively flat, relatively treeless, relatively small housing in Extremadura reminds me [...]

Whenever we go south to Extremadura, we always bring back liters upon liters of extra virgin olive oil and wine. I don’t actually have any photos of the place where I bought the wine I brought back, but I do have a good anecdote.
We traveled to the nearby town of Esparragosa de la Serena. [...]

During the first few days of my summer vacation, I spent some sleepless nights. To take my mind off my troubles, I spent quite a bit of time outside in the corral (an open area behind the house) gazing up at the cloudless night sky.
The following photo is a one-hour exposure looking towards Polaris [...]

When we go to Extremadura, we stay mainly in my mother-in-law’s hometown of Higuera de la Serena (Fig Tree of the Serene). But we also always visit my father-in-law’s hometown of Zahínos. Higuera de la Serena is a very small town, but most of the people we see there have moved away to [...]

My father-in-law, when on vacation in Extremadura, gets up at 8:00 every morning to go on long walks around the countryside. Marga and I went with him on short walks a couple times in 2006, but we went out at night a lot that year and you don’t really feel like walking 10 km [...]

Here it is! The second part of the random photo bin from this year’s trip to the south of Spain. The first part can be seen here. The second week we were in town was the annual festival, El Ramo, that is responsible for more than doubling the town’s population. Many [...]