Since August 2017, I have been obsessed with seeing total solar eclipses. Witnessing them is the closest I’ve ever been to a religious experience. They cannot be overhyped. If you haven’t seen one, go see one. No, not an annular eclipse. And no, none of this, “I saw 94% once and it was pretty cool.” No, it wasn’t cool. 94% is garbage. Hell, 99% is about 1% as cool as a totality…maybe even more like 0.01%.
Now, with that belligerence out of the way, let’s introduce the trip. Bae and I had decided to plan an eclipse trip for those…more distinguished (old) members of our families who hadn’t yet seen a total eclipse. The 2026 edition was to pass over Iceland, and then all of Spain. It was to be low on the horizon at the location we would view it, which was cool for us because we have yet to see a total eclipse low on the horizon, but maybe not as cool as an overhead total eclipse, when you can really feel the temperature differences.
For about 0.01 seconds we considered going to Iceland, but the two times we’ve been there it has been cloudy and rainy AF. Not exactly good weather if you want to see the Sun.
So having selected Spain as our destination, we used Airbnb to rent a nice vacation house for 10 people. I don’t want to harp on this, because it will make me mad, but Airbnb cancelled our reservation two months before we were set to be in Spain. Not only did they not help us secure a new place, they were only going to give us pennies of credit. Kind of an insane thing to do when they had an interest free loan from us for over a year. We ended up finding a place on VRBO, and as you’ll read, all was (mostly) fine, but man, fuck Airbnb. Never again. Good reminder I need to go review bomb them.
ANYWAY, I also will skip my rant on driving in the DC area, as our trip from our house to Dulles took twice as long as it should have. BUT, we made it! The flight itself was mostly OK, despite airplanes being more uncomfortable each time I get on one. Pretty soon you’ll need to pay for the premium tickets just to fit in your seat. I promise the blog gets more positive. I also promise that I’m trying REALLY hard not to go on rant after rant.
I did get a pretty cool image of Barcelona as we flew in:
And then of course, couldn’t resist taking a video of our landing:
After we landed we needed to go grab our rental car and drive to our VRBO. Fortunately, driving in this part of Spain is EXTREMELY easy. Yeah, there are roundabouts, but those are mostly easy to navigate (although some have like 6-7 exits). Most importantly, they drive on the correct side of the road, and the roads/lanes are fairly wide.
We went ahead and stopped at a nice secluded beach on the way down. Here are some photos from that:
Yes, those were indeed flamingos:
If you want to see exactly where that was, here’s the Garmin for that:
https://connect.garmin.com/app/activity/23911656796
After hanging out at the beach for a bit, we got back on the road and continued our drive, eventually arriving at the VRBO. It had a pool (CLUTCH), and a beautiful view of the Mediterranean:
Finally it was time to eat some ravioli and GO TO SLEEP. Flying East is never easy.