I suppose it’s not cool to say that you conceived the idea of doing something because of a fantasy or science fiction book you read, but a book of Guy Gavriel Kay set in a fictionalized medieval Spain, where the tensions and interactions among Muslims, Christians, and Jews drove the plot, was what started Mark and me thinking that we ought to get to Southern Spain.

       All of our previous ambitious trips have been done with a walking tour by Country Walkers as centerpiece, so we saw no reason to do this one any differently: we’ve been very satisfied with the two previous such tours we’ve taken. This tour was to start in Granada on Monday morning, October 23, and run till Monday morning October 30, in Sevilla.

       Mark’s plan for the trip was that we would get to Granada a few days early so we could see the Alhambra on our own, even though we knew that the tour would involve a guided trip through parts of that complex; and afterwards spend a little more time in Sevilla before going out on our own to Córdoba and Toledo. A final fraction of a day in Madrid should allow us to get a taste of the Prado, even though we knew that a full meal at that banquet would take much more time than we’d be allowing ourselves.

Most of these pictures were taken in my camera’s “small size”, 1536 by 1024 pixels, plenty big enough to overflow most people’s computer screens. I have put them up in this size (except when I cropped out extraneous detail), but also in half-size, 768 by 512 pixels. I have used various degrees of compression, but in all cases, the pictures are not of as high quality as what came out of the camera: that would make your loading of them take far too long. If anyone wants an original, comparatively uncompressed, file, I’ll be happy to send by e-mail: the file-size runs between one and two megabytes each.

You view the half-size picture by clicking on the thumbnail, and in the text there are links for the half-size (“small image”) and the full-size (“large image”) — in all cases, you return to the page you had been in by hitting your “back” button.

Each of my pages is keyed to Mark’s page of the same date, and you can go to his page by clicking on the icon to the right. These icons always appear at the bottom right of your browser window — except perhaps if you’re using Internet Exploder for Windows.