I may not ever have believed that storks brought babies when I was very young. For one thing, my parents' stories kept changing. One day it was storks, the next, babies were found under cabbage leaves. And I could never square any of it with the fact than Mom kept going to the hospital and coming home with little ones.

However, I did believe that storks built nests on chimneys in Holland. Just as I believed that Dutch people wore wooden shoes and little boys saved the country by putting their fingers in dikes—a terrifying responsibility in my opinion at the time.

I had largely forgotten about storks' nests in chimneys until, during the taxi ride to the airport in Marrakech, I spotted a huge nest built of branches on top of a building. Although it was abandoned, I immediately knew it for what it was.

Almost a month later, in Consuego, Spain, I photographed this church.

After shooting, I noticed the nest on a roof ornament.

A nesting pair stood guard over what I assumed were baby storks, although they weren't visible.

In another part of La Mancha, I finally got to see chicks. They were in yet another nest, this one in a chimney just the way it is supposed to be.

For some reason, seeing these storks was special; more so than seeing, for example, the egrets that live in Parque Juaréz next to my house. Something about their mythology. For example, whoever has storks nesting in her chimney will have good luck. Or her next baby will be a boy. (Bad luck?)

Someone has set up a web cam on a stork nest. You can watch two parents and three fuzzy babies in real time. And you can listen to the noises they make, as well as the sounds of traffic, dogs barking and children playing. Check it out here.

We visited the small La Mancha town of Puerto Lápice. It's a sleepy, attractive place, with a small square shaded by a wooden arcade.

We re-energized ourselves with a cup of excellent Spanish coffee. Note the profound lack of tourists here. My kind of place.

(I'm afraid coffee has been ruined for us. Throughout Spain we drank nothing but espresso with a little water added to make café Americano. When we get home, we'll have to look into getting our own espresso maker. I can't imagine going back to drip.)

Driving the small back roads through farmland, you occasionally see wells with crude mechanisms for raising irrigation water. One such has been preserved in the main plaza.

This one was probably driven by a power takeoff from a tractor via a flat leather belt. The gear train turned the wheel which scooped up water, one bucket at a time, and dumped it into a flume which fed the fields. It's an old design; its ancestors probably were mule-driven.

They don't make 'em like that anymore.

But we didn't come here for coffee or wells. A hint of our true objective appeared on the four tiled benches that surround the well.

The quotation is from Chapter 2 of Don Quixote, referring to his delusional tilting at windmills, thinking they are giants. The tiles depict him charging one while Sancho Panza looks on in consternation.

The windmills somehow have been preserved, just as they were when Cervantes wrote about them at the beginning of the 17th Century. They're just up the road in the town of Consuegra.

The hilltop we visited was, as we expected, windy. The windmills had been built where they would work best.

Only one of those at Consuegra was still in working condition, and it is operated only in October, during a Saffron festival for some reason.

I would have liked to view the millstones and the gears, but the buildings were closed. Not enough visitors come here in May to warrant staffing the site; a pity. However, from the outside, I could observe at least a few things about how they worked.

The main axle and vanes are mounted on a conical top that can be rotated, to face them into the wind so as to extract maximum power. In all the mills I saw, the top had to be rotated manually, by swinging the long beam at the rear into the lee. In contrast, many Dutch windmills and all of the old Aeromotor-type windmills once familiar on American and Canadian farms employ mechanisms for automatically pointing into the wind.

The beams apparently serve another purpose. The stone towers are cylindrical, meaning that masonry walls would have to withstand considerable shear forces; perhaps enough to knock them over. The long post serves as a brace to resist these forces. The towers of Dutch windmills are more cone-shaped, making them self-bracing.

I could also see that the vanes were attached to the rotors weakly, so that they would break away in unusually high winds, again to protect the mills from being knocked down.

The windmills represent a technology that was developed through trial and error, before the days when physics became well enough understood to permit paper designs. Yet, I could see a sophistication in their structures and mechanisms. On another distant hilltop, we could just make out the shapes of modern windmills generating electricity. Their designs are the result of computer simulations of blade shapes and airflows. They extract far more power from the wind than these 300-year-old mills. But they are nowhere near as romantic.

We've never been city dwellers. Jean and I have lived our whole lives in small towns or the 'burbs. But Spain's two great cities, Madrid and Barcelona, have so much to offer that we have spent the greater portion of our visit in one or the other.

By now, sirens and rushing people, aggressive drivers and jammed restaurants started getting to us, so we wanted to take off for someplace less crowded. We considered the great tourist destinations: Toledo, Segovia, Cordoba. But we underestimated the crush of Europeans who travel during May. Checking online, we were unable to find a single hotel room available in any of those cities. We thought about just going to one and gambling on finding accommodations, but we were hoping to get away from crowds, not join them.

Time for Plan B. We drove down to La Mancha, the stony, bleak plains (at least, that's how Miguél Cervantes described them) south of Madrid. There we got the peace and solitude we were looking for.

They grow wheat and raise sheep and goats here. Agriculture is still comfortably small scale although farms appear to be larger than the family holdings in France or Japan.

Where fields are too stony, grapes and olives grow. You find such crops in the most pleasant places in the world: Province, Italy, Greece, California.

Speaking of California, the state flower is the California Poppy, and in certain parts of the countryside, you can see vast fields of them, glowing yellow-orange in the sun.

In Spain, wild poppies are red.

These are the same poppies that grow in Flanders Fields. My Dad bought paper versions of them on "Poppy Day," in remembrance of soldiers who died in the First World War.

The flowers took my breath away: such intense color, and so much of it.

Cervantes wrote about the barren, windswept plains of La Mancha. I couldn't find them. After 400 years, La Mancha has been made to bloom.

One of the great treats to come out of the Spanish-speaking world is churros and chocolate. Churros are sort of linear donuts—gently curved but not ring-shaped— cooked in deep oil. They are important sources of two nutrients: sugar and fat.

Hot chocolate, as prepared in Mexico, is much richer than the "cocoa" we drink in the USA. Those of us who live in San Miguel de Allende know that the place for the best hot chocolate (and churros) is the restaurant San Augustín. When, occasionally, I feel like I'm ahead of the calorie game, I stop in there.

But now, in Madrid, I have experienced the apotheosis of chocolate and churros. It'll never be the same again.

Here, churros are made by specialists who stand over vats of hot oil, extruding large spirals of dough from a machine, whirling it in the air until it contains maybe twenty turns before plunging it into the cooking pot. Unlike the churros at San Augustín, Spanish churros are not sugared, are not very sweet. But the crusty, biscuit-like flavor is more than enough.

Even more outstanding is the chocolate. Spanish hot chocolate is made with water, a little sugar, and more than 50% dark chocolate. If you let it cool, you can almost stand your churro up in it. It's incredibly rich.

You can't really drink it. You can slurp a spoonful, or you can do like the Madrileños and dip your churros in it.

Jean and I went to a place that specializes in chocolate and churros. We each ordered a serving. At the table next to us, three natives ordered a cup of coffee apiece and one order of chocolate and churros to split among themselves. We were wrong; they were right. There was no way we were gonna finish ours. We each consumed half an order and staggered out of the café on the brink of a sugar coma.

I don't know how the Spanish do it, breakfasting on this stuff. For me, once in a lifetime is all I can take.

Jean and I made a trade: she accompanied me through Madrid's Museo Naval and I tolerated a visit to the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas. Cheerfully.

Afterward, exhausted from all that mutual indulgence, we sought out the nearest place for a cup of coffee. The Ritz Hotel.

It was built by King Alfonso XIII in 1910 for his wedding reception. He was marrying Queen Victoria's granddaughter, and at that time Madrid had no other building that was... uh... suitable for housing British royalty.

It is a grandly excessive neoclassical pile of granite; not as posh as, say, the Waldorf-Astoria, but pretty darn elegant nonetheless. It has the best location in Madrid: right next door to the Prado.

We took our seats in the lobby bar and a waiter in tails hustled over to see what we wanted. Dos cafés Americanos, por favor. While a mediocre pianist attempted arpeggios beyond his reach, the waiter brought us our order.

Jean checks the quality of Ritz Hotel coffee.

Well, it was just the break we needed. Footsore, we were pampered with: china and silverplate service, linen napkins, our very own anthurium blossom, two coffees and eight small cookies on a paper doily. Twenty minutes of just sitting, far away from sirens and unmuffled motorcycles and crowds of tourists.

Cost: €18.70. That's $25. Before tip.

It was worth it.

One of the great Modernist treasures of Barcelona is the Palau de la Música Catalana. We were lucky to get a glimpse of it toward the end of an overcast day.

The interior makes the exterior look plain and dowdy. But we were not allowed to photograph inside. You're pretty much not allowed to photograph inside anything in Spain anymore.

The theater is a riot of flowing shapes and exuberant decoration.

Who would have thought you could make brickwork curve like this? Privately funded, stone was too expensive. Economy forced architect Domènech i Montaner to find delightful and creative solutions that we can all enjoy today.

Playful decorations appear everywhere. A building that's fun to look at—what a concept.

You can see toward the bottom of the column that some tiles are missing. The Palau de la Música Catalana needs renovation. So this is what it looked like when we returned the next day.

We repeatedly ran into this situation. On the Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Euhàlia, for example, you can see weeds growing from cracks and crumbling stonework.

That meant we couldn't view the beautiful Neogothic exterior, hidden as it was under scaffolding. The front elevation is spectacular, but it was invisible under tarps this May. From the side, it's all scaffolding and cranes.

More than anything, I wanted to photograph Gaudí's unfinished masterpiece, La Sagrada Família. When I got there, this is what I saw.

Yeah, they're working on the unfinished portion of the church. Also, they're renovating the parts that have been crumbling over the years since construction was more or less halted.

If you make an effort to peer through the scaffolding, you can see some of the delightful details.

But the architects who are guiding the building's completion don't share Gaudí's concept. It's becoming a mishmosh of different styles. A pity. There are some wonderful interior views, but again, we weren't allowed to take photos.

Disappointed, I headed back to the Plaça Sant Jaume for some people watching. Sure enough, a huge crane was setting up for some project, right smack in front of City Hall.

The good news is that Barcelonans are taking good care of their city. Ever since the 1992 Olympic Games put Barcelona on the map as an international tourist destination, they've been scrubbing, restoring and rebuilding it. And it appears that the work has accelerated recently.

The bad news is that a substantial number of the sights were inaccessible or views of them were blocked. Since the focal point of my visit was to photograph Barcelona's incredible collection of buildings, I was disappointed. The photographs I've shared with you in this series of posts are the result of careful selection of sites and camera positions.

I'm going to have to return. I don't know if that's good news or bad news. Good news, I guess. It's a warm, livable city, worth an extended stay. Meanwhile, it's back to Madrid, this time by plane. I want to see if I've learned how to run the gantlet of pickpockets at the airport successfully.

Whenever Jean and I get fried, we like to head for a city park, and Barcelona has a good one. It has a small indoor zoological museum and a Victorian glass hothouse, but both were being restored, so all I can show you is the wonderful glass lighthouse atop the zoo.

Dragons guard neoclassical staircases.

Nearby is the building that houses the Catalonian Legislature.

Jean clowns around a statue of a mammoth, a favorite of children as well. The mammoth, I mean.

A small peaceful lake attracts amateur boaters.

Knots of schoolchildren are a sign you're in a good park.

La Cascada is a wonderful fountain containing the first work Gaudí did as an assistant architect on the project. Unfortunately, it wasn't wonderful this day. It had been drained for cleaning, and the stench was unbelievable.

On the right, a gardener waters the lawn, Mexican-style.

These huge herringbone gears are left over from the 1888 International Exposition. We engineers love this kind of thing.

Nearby a peaceful street leads away, lined with Sycamores and urns.

The urns are examples of those intriguing art deco details you find all over Barcelona. I love the snails crawling over the lip.

Two men are playing that quintessential French game, pétanque.

A place like this really helps you let off tension. It's not always necessary to be running around, fighting the crowds, seeing all the sights before time runs out. Sometimes, a day in the park is just the ticket.

Catalonians tend to be skinny and in shape. I read that about a third of Americans are considered obese; that is, have a Body Mass Index greater than 30. For the Spanish, it's little more than a tenth.

Maybe Barcelonans look good because so many of them smoke. Maybe they're not really in shape.

Mexican people are modest. They are rarely, if ever, seen in public partly undressed. Not here.

Showing skin is good. Underwear is meant to be seen.

Hair should be colored, and any color is OK, for both men and women.

Convention is nothing; your statement is what counts.

The dog walker on the left is abusing his pet, strangling it with its leash which, you'll note, is attached to the animal's collar, not its harness.

The French Bulldog on the right is abusing its owner. It's chewing on a plastic water bottle and its human can damn well just wait there until it's done.

Not every Barcelonan is slim. Jean and I were sitting on a bench eating our lunches when this old guy sat next to us, hocked a big loogie at our feet and lit up.

We moved to another bench. He fell asleep holding his cigarette. I hope he doesn't smoke in bed.

Here's a crowd attracted by the window display of a candy and pastry maker.

They don't look like typical Catalonians.

Mannequins reflect society's appearance ideals.

In Barcelona, they are: be skinny, color your hair, show some skin and above all, make a statement.