I didn't come to Spain for the art. Pablo Picasso's cubism always caused me to have unpleasant circle and box dreams. Salvador Dali's melting clocks left me feeling all liquidy, and the grotesque works of Antoni Gaudi, whose church, the Sagrada Familia, always looked as though it was a candle that had been left outside on a hot sunny day. Photos of Gaudi's so called masterwork induced in me mild forms of anxiety. I'd often wondered why...

Below are pics of our departure from Fort Lauderdale, the Solstice, Ponta Delgada, in the Azores, Lisbon, Cadiz and Malaga. We had almost no Internet access during the boat trip.That is why the sortation of the photos may look at bit like a cat's breakfast. There are a great number of photos and therefore Ellen won't be horribly upset if they all aren't studied as they normally might be. Pick and choose. Even I don't like them all.

 You have to get used to it if you want to be a cruiser. Lisbon annoyed the devil out of me, but I've had a change of heart. Short stopovers can be okay if don't try and do too much.The Solstice folks provide tiny bits of information about ports of call, in hope that you'll choose them for everything from loading you into a bus and taking you to a far off city, to selling you bottles of water to quench your thirst on the way there.The port city of Ca...

It was a mad rush from Malaga along southern Spain's Costa de Sol. Ellen and I wanted to make the last boat of the day from Algeciras, Spain to Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on Morocco's Mediterranean coast. A football field-sized hydrofoil jetted us across the Strait of Gibraltar in about an hour. Enclave is exactly what Ceuta is; a police guarded oasis, filled with wonderful little restaurants and cafes on the edge of a precipice that is Morocco. After a mea...