Seville called, and We Answered

Last week, we put the girls in charge of picking a spot to visit. After some serious research and strong opinions from each of them about where to go, they landed on a road-trip to Seville, Spain! It would be our first time crossing the border! (and also, gulp.) Would they stop us? Would they let us back in?? Spoiler alert - nothing happened. Not even a checkpoint. We just drove right in. Talk about anti-climactic. 

Anyway, before we even made it to the totally boring border-crossing, we stopped in a little castle town called Évora. Charming place, minus the BONE CHAPEL. Definition: church with human bones all over the walls. Yup, you read that right. An old gothic (of course) church wall-papered in human bones. And not like one or two... oh no. There are over 5,000 bones. HUMAN bones, you guys. Our faces say it all:

I don't even know what to say about Pearl's face. It's like she was so creeped out, her own bones left her face to join the walls. 

Almost as creepy (not even close) was the life-size nativity where someone chose to position the baby lamb like this:

Moving on. 

Seville. WAAAAY less creepy than bone churches, although apparently Christopher Columbus is buried there, so there's a super amazing shrine to him (not creepy, but still indirectly related to bones, so felt mentionable.) Of course, there's a huge controversy over whether he actually is buried there or not, because history is weird. But, other than that and this advertisement for a mattress store that's essentially assuring you you'll never sleep again if you buy from them, Seville was nothing but charm. ​

In my head, we took a lot of pictures of actual Seville, but in reality, we just took a bunch of smooshed selfies of us around Seville. You're welcome. 

We started with a ceramic class randomly on the rooftop of a hotel. 

Then we took a horse and carriage ride to see the sights. Little did we know the buggy was routed to walk...slowly...right on a busy road during what appeared to be rush hour. As you can see, we made some road-raging people...err - creatures​ very upset.  

Click here in case you can't see the above video. It's worth it. 

Next up! The Real Alcazar of Seville. Talk about charming. This quaint little cottage (she says sarcastically) is Europe's oldest palace in use. It was built in the 11th century. For anyone not great at history or math, that was a long time ago. It was stunning, to say the least. Gilded ceilings and intricate arches and more acres of gardens than we could manage without Google Maps helping us. It. Is. Huge.  

And speaking of huge, we also visited the Seville Cathedral, with its 340ft bell tower. Yes, we did climb to the top. Yes we did wonder how in the world stuff like this was built before the invention of machines. Yes we did wonder why, now that we do have machines, do we only build crappy buildings that fall apart in two seconds flat. No we did not sing any songs from the Hunchback of Notre Dame while up in the bell tower. C'mon guys, that's in Paris. (Although if I'd had thought of it at the time, I totally would've belted something out to embarrass my kids.) 

Quincy hands down took the best photo of the whole trip.

We saw a Flamenco show, which was a must since Flamenco dancing was born in Seville. But, that wasn't enough, so we took it one step (pun intended) further by doing a Flamenco dance class. Needless to say, we crushed it and are currently talking to our agents about hitting the road with our new show, The Flagg Family Flamencos. 

And finally, what's a family vacation without finding the random spots. Take, for example, the Museum of Illusion, where most of our photos were taken?

So there you have it. Seville in a nut shell. Five stars, would highly recommend. The tapas were delish and more than made up for any calorie deficit our insane amount of walking gave us. The people were nice. The weather was perfection. So yeah, take a visit for yourself to see more than just our faces covering up all the cool sites. Tell them The Flagg Family Flamencos sent you.