It’s been longer than usual between posts. Our son got married at the end of August and most of the last month since we returned from our Iceland and Norway trip was consumed by activities surrounding that. Between the wedding and my growing client list, Spain planning (and the newsletter) got less of my attention than it deserved for longer than I’d like to admit. I’m caught up now and I want to share more with you about how that trip came to be.

The Spain trip was made possible by a flight credit we received when I rebooked our international flights for the Iceland trip. When I originally booked the air in January, it was incredibly expensive, so I kept an eye on it out of habit, and in the spring I found a different set of open-jaw flights that cut our original airfare nearly in half. That left us with a substantial airline credit that had to be used by the end of the year, and that credit is really what determined we were taking another trip in 2026 at all.

The when came next, and it wasn’t really a choice so much as the available space between two other things. We couldn’t go anywhere until after the wedding, and we already have a trip to Southeast Asia on the books for February next year. Splitting the distance between those two put us somewhere between October and November. October won easily—it’s one of our favorite months in Europe, with weather and crowds both working in our favor. November would have made sense for the Caribbean or Hawaii (and I do love a good beach vacation), but it wouldn’t have used the entire credit and I didn’t want to leave that on the table.

Once we settled on Europe in October, the actual where turned into a real back-and-forth. There’s a version of us that is always enticed by something we haven’t done, and a version that leans towards what’s comfortable and already loved—Italy or France especially, where we know them well enough to plan without much research at all. Spain does not fit into that category. We’d talked about going for years, but never actually booked it because it simply never won out over returning somewhere we already loved. This time, we decided on new over known, primarily because I found a Barcelona roundtrip fare from Vancouver, BC that was significantly less than either Rome or Paris.

Once Spain was the clear winner, everything after that ran through three things we already knew about how we like to travel. We wanted warm, not hot, and not cold. We wanted a leisurely pace, not an attempt to see the whole country, which meant picking a handful of places and actually settling into them rather than moving every two to three days. And I wanted what I think of as the trifecta: coastal time, wine region time, and enough time in a larger city to feel culturally immersed rather than just passing through. Twenty-three days, wheels up to wheels down, is what I had to work with.

We started thinking about what three specific locations to focus on, and we’d both wanted to see Seville for years, so that was an easy answer to satisfy the cultural immersion portion. However, it felt like a shame to land in Barcelona and not spend real time there so we added in Barcelona as well. For the coastal segment, it came down to the southern coast vs. the Balearic Islands. We may have made a different decision if getting to the southern coast was efficient by train, because I’ll always choose train over flying if I can. With needing to fly to either place, the Balearics won out, specifically Mallorca.

With three of four destinations set, we turned our attention to where we (or rather, I) wanted to explore for the wine-focused portion of the trip. We debated just doing day trips from Barcelona and Seville to Priorat and Jerez respectively, but a day trip isn’t immersive, and if I’m going to be in Spain for wine, I decided it should be Rioja or Ribera del Duero. I chose Rioja specifically because it’s my first time to the Spanish wine regions—and in my head, skipping it would be the equivalent of going to France and skipping Bordeaux or Burgundy.

Rioja is also what turned this trip into a five-stop trip instead of four. It’s harvest season during the period we will be traveling, and the properties I shortlisted were full for the dates I’d first mapped out. I emailed my top choice, a small property with only nine suites owned by the Rothschild family, and asked whether they had any four-night window available across our twenty-three days. They had one, and those four nights, toward the back half of the trip, became the first fixed dates on the itinerary, and everything else got built around them.

We knew we wanted to visit Mallorca earlier in the trip for seasonality—like many coastal areas in Europe, restaurants and activities begin to shut down in October. That left eleven days between Mallorca and Rioja, which was more time than we wanted to spend in Seville. We went looking for somewhere else that wasn’t a long detour from Seville and gave us something genuinely different from everywhere else on the list, and landed on Granada.

The trip architecture was then set: Mallorca for five nights, Granada for three, Seville for six (with a day trip to Jerez), Rioja for four, and Barcelona for three to close it out.

If you’ve spent time in any of these places, I’d genuinely like to hear about it. A restaurant, a specific bodega, something you’d tell a friend not to skip. Reply and tell me all about it.

I wanted to share this trip evolution because unlike where trip planning generally begins, none of this started with a place. It started with warm-not-hot, a slower pace, and a desire for coastal, wine, and city all in the same trip—then we searched for the place that could match the feeling. If that’s closer to where you are right now than an actual destination, that’s a fine place to start.