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Showing posts from December, 2017

A Weekend of Eating through Bend, Oregon

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Now that I’m living in Phoenix, Arizona, it’s so much easier to visit the almost infinite array of cities, small towns, national parks, and hiking opportunities that America’s Mountain West has to offer. I’m just a 3 1/2 hour drive from the Grand Canyon, a 4 1/2 hour trip from Las Vegas, and half a day’s drive from the wonders of southern Utah. Phoenix just so happens to have a direct flight to Redmond, Oregon—not too far from Bend, a central Oregon city tucked inside a meander (or “bend”) of the Deschutes River. My best friend and roommate from college, Jonathan, moved to Bend last year around the same time I moved out to Arizona, but since we had both taught English overseas, we hadn’t seen each other since graduating from college. I decided to fix that problem by booking flights to Oregon over Labor Day 2017, making my first foray into the Pacific Northwest. Drake Park I used Bend as a home base for making daytrips across Oregon: the Detroit Dam, Cannon Beach, Portland, and

Confession: Why I Won’t Move Back to Spain

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Teaching English in Spain, speaking Spanish, and traveling across Spain and Europe made up my day-to-day life for three years after I graduated college in 2012. June 2015 saw me go on a “farewell tour” of Spain before moving back to Texas at the end of the month, and it wasn’t until May of this year—almost two years to the day—that I would return to the country I called home for three school years. I had the opportunity to co-lead a small group of ten public radio listeners on a cooking tour of Spain, making stops in Barcelona, Sevilla, and Madrid for cooking classes, tapas-themed guided walks , and winery visits. It was a lot of work planning the trip, photographing events, translating questions, and leading these adventurous, inquisitive travelers, but it was so, so worth it to share one of my favorite places in the world with this great group of people. Streets of Reus A question I was asked quite frequently while chopping potatoes or hurrying to a Metro stop was, “Would yo