I’m back from a delightful 3 week jaunt around Spain. Ilana and I started in Madrid and took short trips out to Toledo and Salamanca before heading south to Seville. There, we met up with our flatmate Alina, and hired a car to drive around Andalucia, staying in Granada, Cordoba, Ronda, and Ubeda. We then headed over to the east coast and wrapped up our trip with Valencia and Barcelona.

I’m not going to chronicle the journey step my step, but I’ll blog up some of my favourite (and least favourite) impressions from the journey. The first impression was, of course, the weather. Eliza Doolittle’s old line about the rain in Spain staying mainly in the plain is utter bullocks. There was plenty of rain everywhere. We would get a temporary reprieve every now and then, but we also got good and wet a few times. The picture above is one of those times, as Ilana and Alina hide from the rain under a small overhang.

In terms of chronicling the trip, I may not have blogged while on the road, but I think I took more high quality pictures on this trip than I have on any other in the past. If you are keen, you can take a gander through the entire collection of them on Flickr. I hope you enjoy them, I sure had fun taking them.

I was buying some tea with my flatmates, and we ended up buying the flavours “wanderlust” and “adventure”. It’s like a bad habit, wherever I go I just can’t help but take the option that sounds like roaming around and having fun. Even if it is just a bunch of dried leaves given a silly name.

I love fudge, but for some reason it’s a food that I only eat while I’m travelling. On roadtrips as a kid, the family would always stop for a chunk of fudge in Clines Corners. The couple of times that I’ve been in Philadelphia’s Penn Station, the Ben and Jerry’s fudge stand satisfied my need for travel fudge. And this last weekend in Scotland, wandering down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, we couldn’t resist ducking into a fudge shop and grabbing a slice.

I’m fairly convinced, that like beef jerky, fudge relies on tourists and travellers for it’s continued existence. Does anyone eat these these foods in their regular life? Are there others you can think of that fall into this category?

I just discoved that next week is going to be awesome. It’s Chocolate Week here in London.

I’ve heard of restaurant week, a pretty common week in cities around the world. All the good restaurants in town have a fixed menu for deal of a price. Chocolate week is a similar deal except there are it’s also loaded up tastings and samplings. Excellent.

When you’re scoping out a big city, make see if there are any weeks like chocolate weeks or restaurant week so that you can get in on the action. I’m sure that you can be somewhere and not know that something was going on, I suppose I even missed Chocolate Week last year. But it’s well worth a little research, as these quiet special events really make a trip that much more special.

How good is the Shake Shack (a famous New York fast food joint in Madison Square Park)? I don’t know. Not a clue. But, I can tell you that it is massively popular. In fact, I think it’s too popular. The picture above is a bit of the line (I couldn’t fit the whole line in the frame) at 1:30 PM on Saturday. In the time I watched, the line was moving at a rate of about one person getting served every minute. At that rate people near the back of the line would be waiting for the better part of an hour. For a burger.

Unless you are on the burger pilgrimage, this sort of dedication to a simple food product is baffling. Sometimes when you’re traveling, your need to realise that even though something is a tourist destination, that doesn’t mean it should be the be all end all of your trip. If you go to the Louvre, you don’t have to spend hours queuing to see the Mona Lisa. Trust me, it’s smaller than you think and there is plenty of other great art to see without crowds of people jostling for a better position. Same goes for the Shake Shack. I’m sure it’s good, but I bet you can find a burger that’s just as good, if not better, without the wait. Just because something is famous and a tourist destination, doesn’t mean that you have to see it. Reach out and find the next big thing. Odds are you’ll spend less time in line and more time enjoying where you are.