In late October 2023 I traveled to Malaga Spain for my annual Division Meetup at work. It was the last thing I’d had planned when Jordan passed, and the last thing he knew for sure I was doing.

When I booked my tickets I decided to return a week after the end of the meetup, giving myself an extra week in Spain to do whatever I wanted. I’d loosely planned to rent a motorcycle over there and cruise around for the week.

By the time the trip rolled around, I had made no plans to do anything or go anywhere, but I did reserve a BMW GS750 in Malaga with a planned return a week later in Madrid – the day before my flight home.

The Meetup

After a quick Uber-plane-plane-bus-train-train-Uber in a mere 26 hours, I was safely ensconced in a luxurious suite at the meetup hotel in Malaga Spain.

When I finally arrived at the hotel, I was so exhausted I couldn’t find my room (or work the door). Fortunately my colleague Ian found me wandering around the hotel restaurant on the verge of tears and helped me find and gain access to my room (“It’s a push door, love.”). A warm bath and a deep sleep later, and I was ready to meet my wider team and do meetup things.

Meetups can be very intense. It’s full days of workshops and co-working, and all your meals are communal with colleagues. They happen at this larger scale (~250 people) once a year, and this was my first time being able to participate in one. Jordan had a brain surgery a week after the 2022 meetup in Denver, so I didn’t attend.

Around day three, I was badly hit by an impossible homesickness. I’d grown used to Jordan’s absence at home. I’d stopped texting him so much when he was ill and couldn’t read or respond to them. And he hadn’t been in my daily life for a few months. But traveling was a different story. I wanted to text him everything. To show him all the scenery. To marvel at the similarities between Southern California and Southern Spain (they look basically the same!). To gush about the abundance of salami (paper cups full of it!). I wanted to call him and hear his voice, the painful reality hitting me repeatedly throughout the day.

I partially recovered by taking myself out to dinner (skipping a social meal at the meetup) and returning to the hotel just in time to take part in an evening plunge in the Mediterranean with some team mates. It was cold!

On our last day at the meetup, we headed to downtown Malaga and enjoyed a visit to the Picasso Museum. We’d all thought (hoped) we’d get some unstructured time to explore together, but unfortunately there was a very long and very structured tour to tolerate instead. At my insistence, couple of us peeled off to enjoy dinner in the city before returning to the meetup hotel for the goodbye reception.

The Ride

The next morning, I hit the road. I packed all my things onto the rental bike and headed west with a loose plan to see Gibraltar and spend the night in Cadiz. From there – I still had no idea where I would go.

Spanish motorcycling is chaos. I am assured there are rules that apply to scooters and bikes, but from what I could tell, they are lax and seldom-enforced. Two wheeled vehicles swarm to the front of queues at lights, park on sidewalks, ride up pedestrian paths, and pass slower vehicles with terrific speed and impossibly small gaps in oncoming traffic. Harrowing. Intoxicating. I came back with bad habits.

Gibraltar was a big rock. I passed through passport control into the British territory and went around the imposing cliff to a mediocre restaurant at the point. You can see the mountains of Morocco from there, poking up across the strait.

The ride from there to Cadiz was largely uneventful. I saw a few big raptors circling over the highway as I rode through national forest, and I saw a spectacular, miles-long road rage meltdown from a bold (foolhardy?) scooter rider when he was cut off by a car.

Cadiz itself was beautiful. Easily the most gorgeous city I’ve ever been to. It’s one of the most ancient cities in Europe and has been continuously occupied since before the 9th century BCE. I wandered the old town and took in the harbor (where Columbus sailed from on a few of his voyages), the exterior of the cathedral, the remains of a Roman theater, and the tiny streets and plazas of the barrios.

The next morning I decided to head back to the mountains and I took the long way to Ronda. On my way I detoured through a treacherously steep village surrounding an ancient Moorish fortress and it’s accompanying cathedral (Arcos de la Frontera ). I would have liked to stop, but the GS was a little big for me to park comfortably on the slippery, inclined cobblestones so I only have this video of my ride through town. I later learned that this fortress is privately owned and not open to the public, so it’s probably for the best that I was unable to park my behemoth motorcycle.

From there the ride to Ronda was much the same as the rest of the riding would prove to be – filled with olive tree groves and a very familiar looking landscape. Spain really does look a lot like the American Southwest and northern Mexico.

Ronda is a small town in the mountains near Malaga with a big, beautiful Roman bridge (the Punte Nuevo). The bridge was full of tourists taking selfies (myself included) for much of the day – and for obvious reason. From it you can see down into a spectacular gorge on one side, and over an idyllic agricultural pursuit from the other. By this point in the trip, I was realizing that restaurants don’t really cater to solo travelers in Spain. Tapas for one solo woman often meant I was (somewhat forcibly) limited to one or two selections. My physique doesn’t really showcase my robust American appetite, so I was usually still hungry at the end of my meal and the waiters then insisted I get cheesecake instead of more tapas. This is only cute the first time it happens.

The next morning I was feeling very lonely, and very tired. I decided to head to Sevilla and spend two nights there, thinking a larger city would keep me busy without needing to make too many decisions. The ride from Ronda was fine – another day of chaparral and olive groves.

I stayed in the historic center of Sevilla, walkable to the big sights. In my first afternoon I walked to and around all of them, waiting for the restaurants to reopen (at 8:30pm). I took a spin by the Cathedral, the Torre del Oro, and other places that didn’t really grab my interest. I was entering a low point on my days in Sevilla, and I admit that I wasn’t engaged with much of anything I experienced here.

I slept in the next day and eventually emerged with a plan to walk to the public gardens. They were closed (the signs said for weather, but it was a beautiful day and the grounds seemed full of maintenance workers). I wandered down the riverfront walk with my headphones in and spent the day in bitter contemplation until I was near a contemporary art museum. It was also closed, so I went back to the bitter contemplation and wandered back to my hotel after a stop for lunch at an excellent and well reviewed restaurant that only let me order one tapa (and cheesecake).

The next morning I couldn’t wait to get out of Sevilla and make my way to Granada to see Steven and Cindy – Jordan’s first cousin once removed and his wife. I rode through miles and miles and miles of olive groves, and saw a few more Moorish fortress towns off in the distance. (Once you’ve seen one fortress town, you’ve seen most of them, even when you’re not battling a depressive episode.)

My time in Granada was some of my favorite in Spain. It was deeply fulfilling to spend time with Jordan’s family and enjoy the company of people who think and live in ways that are so similar to the ways he thought and lived. Steven told several stories about his time in Spain (and his youth) that had me saying “this sounds like a Jordan story!”

I didn’t plan ahead well enough to get tickets to tour the famous Alhambra fortress in Grenada, but I did walk the grounds with Cindy and enjoy Steve’s tour of the palace museum. After Steve’s shift at the museum, we walked up to a stunning viewpoint in town and had one of the best meals I ate in Spain.

I stayed with Steve and Cindy for two nights, and I’m so grateful for their hospitality and that warm and welcoming touch of the Marks family vibe.

My last day riding was kind of brutal. I had my longest mileage day (somewhere around 260 miles), and it coincided with a storm. (I later learned this was the tail end of a bomb cyclone hitting Western Europe.) My rainsuit held on for a few hours before leaking through, but the wind was intense. More than once I thought to myself “is this dangerous? Should I be pulling over somewhere?” ( I didn’t.)

I had originally planned to take a cab into Madrid from the hotel near the airport I’d booked for dinner, but after that harrowing day, I decided to order room service and go to bed early. No regrets.

After two uneventful plane rides, I was back home after a mere 18 hours of travel and a positive COVID test (which I suspect I’d had for about a week by this point).

My verdict on Spain? Fun, but I’ve had better food and admired similar architecture in its former colonies. Especially Mexico, which is only 20 minutes from home.