Ten Years After: Photo Essay of a First Encounter
Next month marks the 10th anniversary of my first visit to Rioja, a trip I have written about before. In Madrid for the wedding of my two (still) great friends Julian and Marta in July 1998, my (still) great friend Valerie and I headed north for a visit to Bilbao, by way of a small village in La Rioja’s Tierra de Cameros called El Rasillo, where we stayed the night.
I don’t have a scanner, but recently, I took digital photographs of the photo album I put together after the wedding (and preceding trip to Bilbao), which held a bunch of receipts, maps, ripped out journal entries, etc. A short selection of these follows.
I marked our trip in a yellow highlighter pen. We took the road to Alcala de Henares out of town, but came back a different way:
Here’s a detail of our map, which doesn’t list El Rasillo, but it lies along that little secondary road (LR 253) that wraps around the Embalse de González de Lacasa, a lake formed by the damming of the Río Iregua, one of the Ebro’s tributaries.
Valerie Dumova amid wildflowers, with the Embalse de González de Lacasa in the background:
Entering the Ebro Valley en route to Haro for lunch.
My receipt from lunch at Terete in Haro, specialists in traditional cordero asado, wood-roasted lamb:
A snippet from my journal, in which I describe my wine purchases:
A great picture of my lovely friend, Valerie Dumova:
Soy yo.
