The main feast day for Saint Thomas in the Catholic church falls suspiciously close to the winter solstice, and is celebrated on December 21 with a huge fair in San Sebastian, Spain. In Mondragón, my wife’s home town, Santo Tomás is also an important day. But since San Sebastian is so close and [...]

This is a “viewer generated content” post. I didn’t take one single photo during my wedding.

For years now, I’ve been told what a shame it was that I’ve been missing Maritxu (mar-EE-choo). Maritxu is a huge party in Mondragon held on the first Friday of October. Since moving to Spain 2.5 years ago, I’ve been out of the country for Maritxu in both 2005 (golfing in Scotland) [...]

Mondragon, the town where Marga grew up, is a rather difficult place to get to. It’s situated in a mountain valley in the Basque Country. Until this year, getting to it by car required driving through some winding mountain passes. A couple years ago, they began a major highway project in the [...]

For various reasons, we visited Mondragon again this weekend. On Sunday, I got to see the sill from my recent post, Sill Traffic. I was surprised to see that it had been cleaned up, a new road surface put down, the skier properly removed, and that traffic was flowing normally.

None of the photos in this post were posed by me. I found the scene just as shown. These toys were part of the attic cleaning I mentioned earlier.

A couple weeks ago, when visiting Juan’s (my future father-in-law’s) chickens in Mondragon, I chose, as I often do, to wait outside the little stinky structure where Juan goes to feed the animals. Instead, I waited in the other building there, where some of Juan’s friends have meals and store wine and stuff. [...]

On Saturday, we got up, packed our bags, and drove to Mondragón to celebrate Grandpa Ramón’s 87th birthday.

Last time I was in Mondragon, I was struck by a particular logo that was spray painted onto many walls. It combines two really cool symbols. Unfortunately, the two symbols carry just a tiny bit of historical significance.
Both symbols can be made by drawing three lines on a sheet of paper, rotating the [...]

We had a very busy weekend, with most of the agenda being wedding-oriented.