Monday August 31, 2026
The Era of DIY Sewing Kits
It’s been a long while since I’ve traveled so I was scrambling when packing for our Catalunya trip and didn’t know what to put my clothes in. I was looking for a dark blue bag I thought I had, but didn’t find it, but eventually unearthed the bag shown at left. It is a little small, but we were traveling to a very warm place during summer and wouldn’t need heavy clothes, so the bag would work.
This bag was sewn by my mother around 1980 or thereabouts from a kit made by Altra Sewing Kits. The 1970s through the early 1980s were an era when several companies in the United States such as Altra and Frostline were manufacturing kits for DIYers to sew their own outdoors gear, enclosing the needed precut pieces of fabric, zippers, straps, and so on. My mother liked to sew from these kits and she made a number of pieces of gear for me included several jackets (one made with down), this piece of soft luggage, a rain poncho, and bike panniers.
Towards the end of the 1980s the economics turned against the market for these sorts of kits and these companies went out of business. I do not know of any equivalent kits being made for outdoors gear today. Here is a retrospective about Altra Sewing Kits compiled by somebody who studies the cultural resonances of Boulder, Colorado, where Altra and Frostline were based.
Sunday August 30, 2026
A Crisis With the Kit
One of the hardest things about packing for a trip is to determine how little you can get away with in the article of art supplies. Both Numenius and I like to sketch in place, with the occasional drawing done after the fact from a photo. This means being nimble — your sketching stuff should be easy to pack and retrieve, light, and as comprehensive as possible.
Although fountain pens in planes can sometimes be disastrous, I’ve found the TWSBI brand loaded with DeAtramentis Document Ink to be very reliable. I like this ink because it’s waterproof: you can sketch in ink then lay in a watercolor wash over the drawing without having it run. The TWSBI Eco has a very large reservoir for ink which lasts a long time.
Unfortunately the TWSBI Diamond isn’t as large and though the nib is delicious on the paper I chose for this trip — Stillman and Birn Zeta — I managed to run out of ink in Tarragona before the trip was over. I’d been using a brown-black (“Sepia”) ink which is new to me from DeAtramentis. I still had a TWSBI Eco loaded with what I thought was Urban Gray, but which turned out to be black, which suddenly felt very harsh. (Stressing out about this kind of thing definitely falls under the category of First World Problems, of interest to maybe three people, but still.)
My attempt to remedy my predicament had us visit “the largest stationery store in Europe,” Raima, in Barcelona. I didn’t find ink there but I picked up a permanent brown marker. This turned out to be too light. We did find a nearby pen store that stocked ink (Platinum, also permanent for fountain pens), but there wasn’t the right brown, and did I really want to buy a whole bottle of ink before I got on a plane? I decided against it. Numenius lent me a Uniball Signo brown-black pen for the rest of the trip which was definitely close in color to what I wanted but I really do prefer to sketch in fountain pen… When we got home I gave my pens a new supply of ink.
You always learn something for the next trip. My favorite place to buy stationery supplies, on this continent, is JetPens, at least where fountain pens and inks are concerned. ETA: forgot to add a link to Art Toolkit which is a fantastic source for pocket-sized travel palettes. I also forgot to add the two waterbrushes I travel with (Pentel Aquash) and a mechanical pencil, which I almost never use.
Saturday August 29, 2026
Two Barcelona Favorites
I found Barcelona overwhelming, which is probably related to the fact I haven’t lived in a place with more than 190,000 people for over 36 years, but we did visit some interesting spots. My two favorites were the Catalan bookstore and the orxateria.
We went to Ona Llibres the evening of Friday August 14th. This is probably the largest Catalan-only bookstore extant. Pica fearlessly conversed with the shopkeeper in the Catalan that she’s picked up and we came away with four publications shown at left from the store: a novel by Barcelona author Montserrat Roig, a Catalan textbook, a translation of Terry Pratchett’s Equal Rites into Catalan (there have been about a half-dozen Pratchett books translated into Catalan), and a 1:300,000 scale map of Catalunya.
The second place was the orxateria. An orxata is a sweet chilled beverage from Valencia and Catalunya that is etymologically related to the horchata from Mexico, but they are made from different bases. The latter is made from rice, cinnamon, and sugar, but the former is made from ground tiger nuts. Bottled orxatas are widely available across Catalunya but I wanted to try an orxata that was made from scratch. Prior to our trip, I had watched a video on the YouTube channel betevé that was entitled Orxateria Verdú, el secret de l’orxata artesana a Barcelona so I tracked the place down. The drink was well worth savoring..
Friday August 28, 2026
Tarragona
We took the crowded regional train from Hospitalet l’Infant to Tarragona, the capital of Roman Spain. It was hot when we arrived in this beautiful city on the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean. By luck, we hit the fiesta del Sant Magí, one of the martyrs killed in the Roman amphitheater we visited in the heat of the afternoon. We saw sardanas, the circular Catalan dances, being performed in the main square, and castells — human pyramids — precariously erecting themselves in front of one of the churches. And we took ourselves to the Cathedral for some more cloister sketching. (We encountered two separate couples getting their wedding photographs taken at the Cathedral, which was entertaining for us if not them.) The cathedral was built on the site of the Augustan temple of Tarraco and is dedicated to Santa Tecla (also martyred, though not in Tarragona). The word “tecla” in Spanish means key, as in keys on a keyboard. I’ve yet to discover whether there is any connection between them…
Thursday August 27, 2026
An Interlude On Public Transport
Apart from the excursion up to Vall de Boí via rental car, basically all of travels throughout Catalunya were via public transport. How did this go?
The train (Renfe). Train service in Spain in general and Catalunya specifically can be divided into high-speed rail (the AVE) and regional rail lines. Spain has invested a lot into building out the AVE — Spain has more mileage of high-speed rail lines than any other country besides China — but this has been at the cost of lack of investment in the regional rail network. We rode the AVE twice, once to go from Barcelona to Girona, and the other time to go from Girona to Lleida. These trips were fast as advertised but navigating the stations, particularly Barcelona-Sants, was tricky. We rode the regional rail three times: first to get from Barcelona airport to downtown, then to go from L’Hospitalet d’Infant to Tarragona, and then from Tarragona to Barcelona. The latter two trips were miserably overcrowded and I had to stand all the way both legs. The trains however were on time. There was an episode of Easy Catalan a year ago where the hosts interviewed people on the street in Vilafranca del Penedès on whether they took the train anywhere. The answer was almost without exception no, the trains in Catalunya were just too slow and unreliable.
The metro in Barcelona. We rode it extensively the last three days of our trip. It is a large system and we found that changing between lines took a lot of effort in going up and down to the different underground levels via escalator or elevator. Our base for our stay in Barcelona was a hotel on the metro line running directly to the airport so we had to do a lot of line changing. We also learned that summertime is when they do maintenance on the system; specifically on our first trip from the hotel to downtown we discovered that the L1 line which had the easiest interconnection to downtown was closed for five stations, replaced by a special bus. We then had to route around this discontinuity in the metro lines the rest of our stay. One thing that made our travels easier in Barcelona was buying a three-day Hola Barcelona pass, unlimited travel for that time period on the city buses and the metro. Another fun diversion was taking the funicular up Montjuïc that is directly connected to the metro system.
Buses. They are harder to research than trains or the metro but the buses can be quite enjoyable. Returning to our hotel in Barcelona the last day we found a bus that ran from Paral·lel straight to our hotel — it was much more efficient than the metro plus it skirted the lower slopes of Montjuïc, passing by some magnificent architecture on the way. And my favorite transit experience the entire stay in Catalunya was taking the bus from Lleida south to Mora d’Ebre. There are only two buses a day on that route but the trip passed through some really interesting countryside. Also the bus station in Lleida is right next to the train station which is quite convenient.
Taxis. We used these fairly often for short legs. In general taxis are easily found but we had a stressful twenty minutes waiting for a summoned taxi to take us from our hotel in Girona to the train station to catch the AVE.
All of which has taught me to pay more attention to bus transport while traveling. A good guide for researching buses worldwide is busmaps.com. As an example, this shows all the agencies running buses through Lleida.
Wednesday August 26, 2026
Eclipse Party
One of the main reasons to go to Spain in the height of summer was to see the total solar eclipse of August 12. We knew two years ago, when our Catalan friends still lived in Davis, that the eclipse would be total in Tivissa in the early evening, and we made plans to visit them back then.
In the couple of days leading up to the 12th we were worried there would be cloud cover in the afternoon. But neither of us had the inclination to go chasing for clear skies. In the event it was perfectly clear and we were invited over to the house of some friends of Marc and Ruth’s for dinner and an eclipse party. We could hear the merriment across the way from the main square. I have never seen a total solar eclipse before and it definitely exceeded my expectations.
It was quite the festive occasion. Numenius got interviewed by the local Tivissa YouTuber and appears on this video at 2:34. (There are some still photos later on in the video that show us on the patio watching the eclipse, see 32:30 and 35:54.)
Tuesday August 25, 2026
Ermita de Sant Blai
On Tuesday two weeks ago we went on a little hike from Tivissa up to the Ermita de Sant Blai. This is a small chapel high up in the forests overlooking the town that was built sometime in the 19th century on top of an older site. A couple hundred meters down the trail from the ermita is a spring with a basin and three faucets. At the ermita we saw beeeaters flying overhead, much to Pica’s delight — this was the bird that got her interested in birding as a child.
Sketched above is the ermita, together with a view of Tivissa looking back from the trail.
Monday August 24, 2026
Tivissa
We left Lleida on a bus to take us to Mora d’Ebre, a town on the major river of the region which was used as a principal mode of grain transport by the Romans. Our Davis Catalan friends live in Tivissa, on a hill overlooking the Ebro valley. We were privileged to get a glimpse of their day-to-day lives, which were quite hectic given that Marc is in charge of wildfire response in this part of the country and a major fire had just broken out.
I haven’t spent much time in a Spanish village since the 1970s and I’m happy to report that not a lot has changed since then. I mean you don’t have to book a phone call to the outside world and everyone has internet, but wandering around, knowing all your neighbors and their kids and their cousins, buying fruit at the market and bread at the baker — this was all very familiar. Marc and Ruth own the oldest house in the village, built in 1408 on top of a Moorish house (a front courtyard was added and walled in). The house next to theirs was hit by Napoleon’s artillery fire and burned down during the Peninsular war. Marc explained to us that brick archways in the village denote Moorish doorways, stone ones medieval Christian. A combination of the brick arch and stone columns denotes a Muslim who had converted to Christianity (with the Catholic monarchs’ edict of 1492, to convert or leave, this was something of an expedient). The straight Roman streets curved and clustered in the middle ages to aid in defense of the village, where marauding armies could be stopped before building up attacking speed. (The house had a curious raised doorway, which was used by the resident knight in armor to be able more easily to mount his horse.)
One of the most fun things about staying here was that as soon as we got our sketchbooks out, the three kids started drawing with us. We spent a lovely quarter hour or so drawing the 19th-century wash house (pictured at right) with Teresa, age six, after the boys had finished their football match.
Sunday August 23, 2026
La Vall de Boí
On Sunday two weeks ago we went on an excursion with Jennifer and Harald north into the Pyrenees, Harald having rented a car for the day trip. Our destination was the Vall de Boí, which is a steep-sided valley that is noted for its concentration of Early Romanesque churches: there are nine of these in total in the valley, and the location has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
I first heard about the Vall de Boí in a two part episode of El Foraster, a series which proves to be a good guide to finding interesting villages to visit in Catalunya. We went inside two of the churches. The first of these was the church Santa Eulàlia d’Erill la Vall, which is next to the visitors’ center for the site. I went all the way up the six stories of its bell tower. The second church, a bit farther up the valley, was Sant Climent de Taüll which is the largest and best preserved of the churches in the valley. At left is a sketch of the church viewed from the south.
Saturday August 22, 2026
Lleida
We moved from Girona to Lleida, which is in the western part of Catalunya close to the Pyrenees. We’d had a very positive review of this unassuming city from our friends in Girona, and approaching the city on the train moving through orchards, with a strong Central Valley vibe, we felt very at home.
What I really noticed almost as soon as we arrived was how real the city seemed. Very few tourists — we really stood out — and the lift to the upper levels of the city was being used for inhabitants to navigate their daily lives, rather than for tourists to get up to the cathedral. The city was besieged and bombed heavily in the civil war (1936-39) with the result that the post-war buildings spread out around the central hill and into the ag lands beyond.
We met some friends in Lleida who live in Sweden but with whom I’d grown up in Madrid. We stayed in a parador, which was a converted convent in the upper level of the town. It was a spectacular setting and for Jennifer and myself a sweetly nostalgic experience. (Jennifer and Harald were given a room with a kettle and we weren’t, with the result that she snuck upstairs in her pyjamas leaving me a thermos of tea outside the door, which was very gratefully received.)
