He drew a deep breath. "Well, I'm back," he said.

 “Then let’s look on the bright side: we’re having an adventure, Fezzik, and most people live and die without being as lucky as we are.”

Inigo Montoya: WIlliam Goldman, The Princess Bride

And so, as with all good things, the 2011 European Tour comes to an end.  Damn, I should have sold t-shirts...

How was it? As with any experience in life, there were pros and cons.  Three weeks is a long haul away from home, I had a period of intense discomfort due to extreme blisters caused by extensive walking in wet shoes, I was nervous about language issues for my entire stay in Paris, and it’s taken me over a week to get back in sync with west coast time.

However, as far as I'm concerned, those are minor inconveniences.  For me, the perfect vacation is more about having a memorable, interesting adventure than being comfortable.  Those three weeks of travel took me to nine cities in four countries, and let me see landscapes and locations that I'd only ever read about or seen on TV.  Getting lost in the rain in London allowed me to find a fantastic graveyard that I returned to photograph after the Doctor Who Experience.  And I wouldn't have missed the view from the Eiffel Tower even if you'd told me there was going to be a pop quiz on verbs afterward.  (Although I might have done some more studying in advance if that had been the case.)

And it's wasn't all just the standards of the Eiffel Tower, St. Paul's and the Colosseum, I was able to indulge my own unique interests as well, what with graveyards, Doctor Who, medieval armour, castles and towers, men walking through walls, alien architecture, and all the other little grace notes that surrounded my visits to the legends of European sightseeing.

When you think about it, it's not at all surprising that I'd enjoy a trip like this.  Science fiction and fantasy fans are impelled by many of the same factors that motivate people to visit foreign countries when on vacation. There’s a shared desire to see exotic, unfamiliar locations, to experience new things*, to seek out new worlds and new civilizations, TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE….

Oops, sorry about that, got a bit carried away. But, there we go, I’ve just cracked the code on Star Trek – they’re really just tourists.

- Sid

* Sorry, Laurie, this is less applicable for those of you that just want to get on the spaceship, visit the zero-g spa, and spend some time in suspended animation, without any need to take the shuttlecraft down to Mars to see the canals.

It's the little things.

Final night in England, Gatwick Airport Hotel, room service, BBC One, Doctor Who - booyah, baby!

- Sid

"Guell Park. After a fashion. Barcelona, if you like."

 As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and temperature in the first second of contact.Then it became metal again, green-​painted iron, sweeping out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she grasped now in wonder.

A few drops of rain blew into her face.

Smell of rain and wet earth.

A confusion of small details, her own memory of a drunken art school picnic warring with the perfection of Virek's illusion.

Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona, smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada Familia. She caught the railing with her other hand as well, fighting vertigo. She knew this place. She was in the Guell Park, Antonio Gaudi's tatty fairyland, on its barren rise behind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of crazy-​quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a ramp of rough stone. Its fountain-​grin watered a bed of tired flowers.

William Gibson, Count Zero

There's a long list of places that I know only as fictional settings, and Barcelona's Parc Güell is one of them, thanks to its appearance in Gibson’s Count Zero. Other than that, I didn’t really have any sort of impression as to the reality that lay behind its use as a virtual setting in the novel, but I was curious enough to add it to my list of places to go when the cruise ship docked in Spain.

I was astonished to discover that behind the ceramic dragon that has become the icon for the park, there's a fantastic array of rough-hewn promenades and viaducts threading the grounds together like the underpinnings of an alien metropolis.

Has no one ever thought of using the Parc Güell as the backdrop for a science fiction or fantasy film? It's easy to imagine some race of giant alien arthropods à la The Dark Crystal making their solemn way through the irregular semi-organic buttresses and past the peculiar colonnades spawned by Gaudi’s imagination, or faery folk duelling in front of the gingerbread curves and swells of his buildings.

A bit of research online reveals that some movies have been shot at the park, but with the best will in the world, Vicky Cristina Barcelona isn't really what I have in mind.

- Sid