I thought I would share some photographs from our recent tour. Here are a couple from Barajas-Madrid’s recently-completed Terminal 4.

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I thought I would share some photographs from our recent tour. Here are a couple from Barajas-Madrid’s recently-completed Terminal 4.

And here’s a poster that was hanging outside St. Giles-in-the-Field church in London’s West End, and the view from our Travelodge hotel window – of a new complex designed by Renzo Piano.

After London’s show we traveled by plane and van to Chalons-en-Champagne, a real picturesque French town in the heart of Champagne. This was the view from our hotel window in the center of town. After the show, the promoters generously poured fine bubbly for us.

On to Gijon, all the way north on the Atlantic coast of Spain, where they drink a different kind of bubbly – Sidra (a dry apple cider), poured in small shots from on high, the bartenders holding the bottle above their heads with one hand. It is imperative to drink the cider quickly, while it is cold and fizzy. We were lucky enough to have two days off here, and we ate well – baby squid, octopus, lamb chops, and a local stew called Fabada, made with white beans and pork shoulder and sausage. And we walked, down to the beach, past the Roman baths, up the hill to look out at the sea.

Our 13 Most Beautiful show took place at the Teatro Laboral, a beautiful new theater housed inside the Universidad Laboral, a truly enormous arts and educational building, that looks like it has been there for centuries, but was built during the 1950s, initially as an orphanage for the children of the city’s miners. Franco probably needed lots of orphanages, you can still see fascist symbols like the “shield of the eagle” and the yoke and arrows adorning the buildings.

We left Gijon at 6 a.m. the next morning, and saw a beautiful sunrise over Asturias. It was the day before thanksgiving, and we had a five-hour layover at Charles De Gaulle’s Terminal 2E (the shiny new one that collapsed in 2004). It sure is pretty though, and we explored every shop and restaurant from one end of the terminal to the other.

You see some odd juxtapositions at the Relay newsagent. When we came here in June I saw Michael Jackson with Friedrich Nietzsche. This time it was Albert Camus sitting next to French rock star Johnny Hallyday. Hallyday is currently in a medically-induced coma in a hospital in Los Angeles, this after a failed operation (in France) for a herniated disk. Apparently a couple of his fans were so angry about the initial operation that they donned black masks and attacked the doctor who performed it outside his home in Paris.

Home at last – baggage claim at JFK International Airport.