Download With a camera in Majorca ( Spain ) Free PDF Travel and History Guide 1907 with Illustrations by Margaret D'Este

With a camera in Majorca ( Spain ) PDF

Excerpt:In the spring of 1906, we found ourselves with three months to devote to foreign travel, and after some deliberation, we decided to spend them in exploring those " lies outlines " of the Mediterranean Majorca, Minorca, and Ibiza and in ascertaining for ourselves whether they were worth visiting and what were the possibilities of a stay there.Their names, it is true, lingered in our memories like some familiar echo from far-off schoolroom days, but with regard to all practical details we were extremely ignorant, and it was without knowing a soul in the islands or a soul who had ever been there, that we set out on the last day of January to visit the Balearics those homes of famous slingers.A railway journey of twenty-two hours takes the traveler from Paris to Barcelona by way of Toulouse. The change from France to Spain is an abrupt one. After racing through flatlands of vine, through sand dunes and salt lagoons, one crosses the frontier into a dry place of red and orange hills, where stone villages stand bare and unshrinking in the strong sunlight, and here and there a palm solitary outpost of the south waves her dusty plumes; and the night falls suddenly upon a sky crystal clear, as the sun slips in glory behind the strong outline of the purple Pyrenees.An old writer has left it on record that the thing which chiefly repented him in his life was having gone anywhere by sea when he might have gone by land. Since it is decreed, however, that islands shall be reached by water, one subject of remorse was spared us as we boarded the steamship Miramar at half-past six on the evening of February 5th. And so great is the power of comparatives to cheer, that though the worst of sailors, we derived certain happiness from the reflection that we had at any rate chosen the lesser evil in sailing from Barcelona instead of taking the twenty-four-hour crossing from Marseilles. Behold us then at dawn gliding into the Bay of Palma and gazing around us with that undefined expectancy that even in these prosaic days of travel tinges with romance the landing on an unknown shore.Author: Margaret D'EstePublication Date: 1907