Rota, Spain

Mariscos is Spanish for shellfish. When I taught in Rota, Spain, in the summer of 1982, I used to go once a week or so to Puerto de la Santa Maria (a little fishing village nearby) for dinner, often with a group of friends. We'd go into the simple seafood market, where we'd each order a kilo of something that looked good. The staff would steam our choices for us and serve them to us at an outdoor table, and the bar next door would bring beer and plates of merluza, a fried fish I can't translate into English. Food does not get a great deal yummier than this. (That's my exwife Lydia at the far right. I have no idea who the other people are.)

Meanwhile, Rota itself was a sleepy little town in southwestern Spain, right on the Mediterranean coast. I was there for eight weeks, and only taught MTWTh afternoons, so I was off every week from around 4:30 on Thursday until 1:00 the following Monday. My weekend jaunts included two trips to Portugal, one to Morocco, one to Madrid, one to Granada and a couple spent soaking up rays on the beach. Lydia was with me for two weeks, I think, and I spent quite a bit of time in the local tapas bars with fellow Marylanders Tom Moore (and his wife Lynn and daughter Lexey) and Tom Quigley (and his wife Wendy).

A month after I left, Maryland sent me back to Rota to catch a military hop to Bahrain, but the flight wound up being postponed for a full week, so I got to eat more mariscos, absorb more rays ... and take my one and only flying lesson from Deon Greer, another Maryland instructor and a licensed flight instructor, who offered to show me around a cockpit if I'd pay the Navy base's flying club for the one-hour airplane rental. I was thrilled to have the opportunity, and assumed I'd just sit there for an hour and listen to Deon explain what handle had what purpose. At one point, though, he told me to pull back on this stick-like thing in the middle — and suddenly we were rolling! "This is called taxiing," Deon explained, and I sat there thinking I'd already gotten much more than I was paying for. And then he had me do something else to some other piece of apparatus — and, before I realized what was happening, we were airborne! For the next 40 minutes, Deon talked me through a series of stall-and-recovers and then a half-dozen touch-and-go landings and immediate takeoffs. That little stretch of time in the sky above Rota was one of the very most exciting experiences of my entire life.

In the summer of 2006, Maryland sent me back to Rota for another 8-week summer term, and it was fascinating to return after a 24-year absence. Rota is no longer a sleepy little town -- it's now a bustling resort, catering mainly to Spanish tourists but also attracting a lot of Germans. The only things I recognized on the base were the drive-in movie theater, the two Baskin & Robbinses, and the huge metal statue of a heavily armed bee that sits in front of the Seabee compound. Puerto is also much grown, and the simple little shellfish store I used to eat at several times a week is now a chain of upscale restaurants, Romerijo, and so expensive that I only ate there twice all summer. This time around, I was teaching a noon class MTWTh and an evening class on Mondays and Wednesdays, so I was a little more restricted and did a little less traveling, but I still made it to Portugal twice, to Cordoba and Granada, and even to Gibraltar, which was impossible to get to by land in 1982.

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