mountaineers

from the window at Fuente De

An angel dropped us off in the mountains, and another one picked up our worn-out carcasses out on the plains a week later.
We started our hike at a clifftop monastery, and ended it -- spiritually at least -- at a severe little Cistercian sanctuary with 20 sisters singing psalms.

In between was seven days of breathtaking, knockout, spectacular scenes -- glacial cirques, thousand-foot walls of rock, gangs of Scouts camped out in meadows, salamanders, eagles, storks, owls, cows and calves, goats and kids, even a baby donkey. (Baby donkeys may be the most cute things on this planet.)

I walked the Camino Vadiniense with Kathy, my best camino mate. She traveled here from San Francisco to do this hike. She walks at the same speed I do, she knows a million stories and can identify all kinds of plants, and she knows how to pray. She has a disturbing ability to look chic and fashionable, even halfway down a mountain with a high wind blowing. But I forgive her for that.

It was cold up there, and lonesome. These mountains are prime tourist territory, and Spain is supposed to be on vacation about now. The "Crisis" is cutting deep up north, deep enough that the national bus company is only sending out one bus every three days from Leon to Potes. Tracy, an expat author and lover of arcane Spain, lives down in Andalucia, but was passing this way in her car. She gave Kathy and I a ride up to the mountains, saving us about seven hours on a combination of trains and buses. With Tracy we scanned facsimiles of bizarre apocolyptic manuscripts written in the neighborhood about a thousand years ago, and put on display in downtown Potes. We wandered the twee town, saw the nice (and empty) pilgrim albergue, and touched with our own fingers the True Cross relic so deeply revered at the Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liebana, up on the nearest mountain.

We left Tracy up there, and hiked 20 kilometers up the Deva river to Fuente De -- home to a cable-car that hauls the hardy another 500 or so meters up to the very top of the peaks and the trail-heads that scatter outward from there. It´s the edge of the Picos de Europa national park, a huge patch of skyscraper peaks that march in ranks right up to the Cantabrian Sea. We were, apparently, the only guests in our Fuente De hotel. The tour buses looked empty. The queues at the cable-car station just were not there. We were too tired to care very much, and the next day promised even more high-altitude wanderings.

the reservoir at Riaño

The maps tell us the mountain path we followed is only about 11 kilometers long, but it took us five hours to reach the Pandetrava Pass from Fuente De. We walked in glory, with eagles hovering overhead and long, green views down valleys and upward to the blue heaven. (The weather was very kind -- it was apparently pouring rain on the Leon side of the massif.) We ate a soft white cheese we bought in Camaleño, drank water from the springs along the route, cooled our toes in the watersheds and stock-watering tanks. The ten additional kilometers to Portilla de la Reina were gently downhill, following a babbling river past sheep herds and massive mastiff dogs. We were beat, and the paved surface was not kind to our feet. This is a stupendous camino, but it follows narrow valleys -- once you leave the mountain trail, there´s often noplace to walk but along the quiet country road. Which is covered in asphalt.

The locals

We slept in a private albergue in Portilla, a tiny town nestled in the folds of three mountains. The roof above us was new, and snapped and groaned all night. "It took those timbers a hundred years to grow. Now it will take them a hundred years to die," the owner said. I heard no other noise.

a water fountain/ancient tombstone

We walked a narrow gorge, then a tractor path along a stream with a thriving marijuana plantation on one bank. We dined like queens at a truck-stop in Boca de Huergano, and followed alongside the haunted reservoir of the Embalse de Riaño, a great blue  mountain lake made when the Esla was dammed in 1990. (It´s along here we found the tombstones and rock carvings left by the Vadiniense, a pre-Roman tribe that lived here before the Romans showed up, and gave their name to the trail.) The dam project drowned nine little towns in the river valley. Their church bells hang in a little memorial park in the new concrete-and-plaster town of Riaño. When the wind blows, the bells sing and wail.

These are just the first three days of the hike. I am now writing a guide to the path for the CSJ in London, and I need to get back to that... so hang on for more travelogue soon. Here are some photos from then, and maybe even one of Kathy´s videos!

Potatoes, and Being

I have not been a full-time journalist for several years now, but I still carry a notebook, and I still write down things I see and hear that are interesting. Most of them never go anywhere, but they make for interesting reading when I find them rolled-up and stuck inside old shoes out in the barn. I sometimes wonder where I was when I wrote that. And what was I thinking?
Here is a bit of grafitto I saw on a wall and copied-down:

"Quiero hacer contigo
lo que hace la primavera
con los cerezas." 

That translates to:
"I want to do with you
the thing that Spring does
with the cherry trees." 

I looked it up. Pablo Neruda wrote that, and it is beautiful. I wonder where is that wall?

And here is a description I found, apparently I wrote this whilst hospitalera-ing someplace.

His name is Alberto, he is Italian with 71 years and a pot belly with his trousers pulled way up over it, all held together with suspenders. He is exhausted, red in the face, unshaven. He has lost the arm off one side of his eyeglasses. One of his boots is split. He is a small man carrying a huge 20-kilo backpack. He says this trail is too hard for him. He needs an optician and a shoe repair shop, a coffee and maybe a shot of something stronger. He needs to make up his mind today, whether to keep going or to get on the bus for home. I am making him coffee. It is about all I can offer him. Poor old guy. What the hell is he doing out here?

I observed the famous Goya portrait of King Carlos III dressed as a hunter, which makes the king look like a dope. The king looks a lot like my dad did, when he was acting silly. Somehow I doubt they were related.  Goobers are goobers, no matter when or where they show up in history.

I wrote about how much I would like to have a vegetable garden, and a canary. Now I have both. The hailstorm destroyed a good bit of the garden, and this week we dug out the potatoes. They are small, beautiful, and delicious. There are not very many of them, but Paddy is over the moon. He boils them, and puts some mint leaves (also from our garden) in with them, and they are More Than Tatties. This week we ate courgettes, cabbage, and a few French beans, all grown out back. A dream come true, delicious and nutritious. 

I look at these old notes, and I see how seriously I took things, not so long ago. How caught-up I was in the lives around me, how significant were the plans for next week or next year. I was still realizing dreams, I was laying foundations and learning how to navigate and occupy a new life. So much was still so  strange and terrifying.

Now we are moved-in and settled-down. We still are laying foundations, but now they are for patios and studios and garden-beds, not for entire houses. We know where to go for the best lunch, sharp knives, fresh fruit, fast trains. The people whose doings were so fascinating and intimate to ours have all given up on this place and moved back to civilization.

The Camino doesn´t stop here so much any more. I rarely volunteer as a hospitalera, unless helping out at Bruno´s or hosting people here counts toward the total. The travelers who stay with us these days are students and neo-retirees, nice, deodorized middle-class people of a particular, self-selecting, safe type. I like them, but I kinda miss the hippies and drifters and fire-worshipping stone-masons, the shrieking Spanglish-speaking Swiss ladies and the bony Germans who think they are Jesus. 

I have become safe now, too (if not deodorized). I no longer feel like a valiant pioneer. I no longer imagine the things I do are important. I am getting over doing. I am shifting slowly into being.

I am disappearing into the landscape. Which is a good thing, as this landscape is as beautiful as anyplace I have ever seen, or been.

I don´t mind vanishing, long as I can still get out and hike a trail and write a guide for it, and see it published. Long as my neighbors still manage to smile when they see me, and I can pay my bills when they come due, and long as there´s still dog food and chicken-scratch in the bins. Long as my friends and family  still love me, and come to visit now and then.

Long as I am able to notice enough to take notes. And maybe even
hago contigo
lo que hace el verano
con las patatas.
  

Can´t Be Easy

Beautiful weather for walking. Had three fine pilgrims from Oregon stay here last night, a teacher and two students, part of a group that´s on the Road. They were enjoyable company, but they made me feel quite old and out of touch.

This morning Patrick and I began the monumental task of moving his painting things out of the little kitchen and out to his new studio in the back yard. It is one of the domino-theory frustrations here -- in order to do Job A, you must first do Job B. But to do Job B, everything already in the corner of Space J must be moved to Space K. It is much like one of those sliding-square puzzles. I hate puzzles.

But the back yard was a shambles, and something had to be done, so me and Paddy girded our loins and set to it. We moved a big length of fence alongside the chicken coop, only slightly damaging the existing fence. We shifted a large pile of boards from one side of the woodpile to another -- they all were right-angles and Zs and Ts, spiked and studded with pointy nails and screws and bits of string. I dismantled this year´s garden irrigation hose system, seeing as the builders had pretty well demolished it anyway. I started a pile of things to go to the trash, another to go to the gardening shed, another to go to the tool storage. I was getting into the rhythm of it, accustomed as I am to feeling spiders run up my arms and bits of adobe dribble off the beams and into my hair. And then I asked Paddy to help me move a great sheet of corrugated iron from the middle of the yard into the woodshed. We couldn´t find a second pair of gloves, so I gave Paddy half of my pair. Of course you know what happened next.

No stitches, but a pretty tightly-bound bandage round the middle finger and across the palm of my right hand. So that is my excuse for not blogging more. It hurts when I type, and I don´t want to keep breaking it open. 
 
None of this would be remarkable, except for one factor: We expected a volunteer a week ago who was to stay right through the end of summer, helping out with these heavy chores. (We´ve been saving them up for a while now, and they´re hitting critical mass.) The guy has not called or written, nor has he answered my emails. I guess he isn´t coming. People do that a lot these days, and not just builders.

The piles are still out there.
The wheelbarrow needs to be wheeled to the bin. Paddy goes light-headed when stoop-and-lift are required. It will be a while before my right hand picks up anything heavier than a Coke bottle.
I hope it doesn´t rain anytime soon.
I hope the volunteer shows up.
I hope the cuts close up before next week. I want to go Camino-ing again!

Harvest Lost

It hadn´t rained in a month, but nobody here was complaining. The fields had gone brown to match the khaki ground. The drains started stinking of dirt. Squadrons of flies arrived, outside and in. And sometime last week the farmers received a signal that we cannot hear, and the harvest began.

Paco, a little man, climbed into the cab of his John Deere combine and disappeared behind the controls. From dawn to 1 a.m. he was out there in the fields with a herd of similar city-sized machines, lumbering through the rows of wheat, rye, alfalfa, oats, soy. On each family´s era, their ancient threshing-floor, the wheat began to heap. The new-cut fields were corrugated with lines of straw, or chockablock with bales and rolls of green or gold, drying there in the hot sun until the men came back to truck and tuck them away.

It happens fast, the harvest. Once the flurry finishes, the farmers go off to the beach for a holiday, or visit their mums in Madrid. Or cook up a fine fiesta for mid-August. The fields stand brown and dry until the next planting goes in, starting in September. 

Even at harvest time, most of our farmers take Sunday mornings off, even if only to not interrupt the Mass with their roaring, clanking machines. After church this Sunday, out on the steps outside, Pilar asked me how we´re doing. "We are OK, but for the asthma, the allergies. Even Paddy is coughing," I said. "It´s the dust, the chaff off the fields. We could use a bit of rain, no?"

Her eyes widened. "Mujer, no! The harvest isn´t finished. Rain now? No. No. Later on. Once the barn is full and the door is closed."

Faux pas. Cut grain and straw need to lie and dry for a little while before they can be baled up and stored away. Wet weather during the harvest means rot and mold, a ruined crop. That´s why it´s so important to "make hay while the sun shines." 

And seven hours later, a season´s worth of wind and stacked-up cumulonimbus rolled in from the northeast and smashed headlong into Moratinos. It took only about a half-hour, but the sideways wind, monsoon-force rain, and repeated doses of horizontally-driven hail blasted the heads off the grain still standing in the fields. Beans and grapes, tomatoes and marigolds were shredded, torn away, flattened where they stood. Carefully tended garden rows were plastered with the leaves ripped from the fruit trees.

Our patio flooded. Flowerpots floated free. The power went out. The herb garden was battered flat -- the patio filled with the fragrance of basil, cilantro, thyme, and wet earth. The rain kept coming. Murphy came howling in through the window, disgusted and muddy. 

The sun did not go down for another hour or so, but nobody went outside.
We waited until morning to go down the street. Maybe, like us, the other families were busy indoors, sweeping and mopping up the back rooms and kitchens where the wind had driven water into every little crack and fault. They were reaching shoulder-deep into the drain at the bottom of the patio, into the brown, hail-chilled water, to open the clogged grate and let the backed-up water run away.

Maybe they were asking God why the rain came now, when the fruit was just forming on the trees and vines, and so much of the feed-crop was still in the field.  

I walked the town this morning in the usual white light of July, to see what the storm had done. The hail  had a sand-blast effect on northward-facing walls. The white paint Justi put on his house last week is spalled and bubbled on one side. The front of the Alamo, rendered five years ago by professional adobe artists, is transformed -- fine gravel lies all along the pavement out front, gravel that yesterday was part of  the street-side edifice. Now all that remains of the protective render is straw and mud, clinging to the adobe bricks beneath. The straws stick out now. From down the street, when the sun hits it, the abandoned little house looks furry.

The hail beat the windows of the little adobe house for sale on Calle Ontanon. One of the window-sills is slipping. Another good storm and its right angles will slip into curves and slide down the face of the wall. (I wish I could buy it and preserve its rustic beauty, but I just don´t have the wherewithal.)  

It was rain that did the most damage, tons of water suddenly dumped onto clay so dry it´s turned to dust. The tons of dirt we hauled up to the bodega roof in May unclenched and flowed, leaving  swaths of asphalt exposed. Streams flowed beneath the door of each windward bodega, soaking the walls and doors and floors. Another piece of roof collapsed into the derelict house on the way into town. The crack in its face is a bit wider, the lean a bit more severe. Out at the abandoned Fabrica de Luz along the N120, the center part of the house fell down. And out in the fields the dogs found rabbits and mice and a lizard drowned in the ditches.

The streets are littered with stones and dirt, leaves and branches.
The men were out today with their tractors, finding out how bad it is, saving what they could. 
It´s bad, Feliciano said. The grapes are ruined. A lot of the grain is ruined. The garden? The acre of potatoes planted with such great expectation?
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled his twinkly smile. "It´s the weather. What can you do?"    

These monumental storms happen every three or four years. They are part of the rhythm around here. This very blog opened with a monumental storm, if you go back to the very start you will see it there.

I asked for rain, and got a minor disaster.
I gotta watch what I say.  

Mysterious Ways

The mystery began on Saturday, a hot market-day morning in Sahagun. I´d parked up by the pilgrim albergue, and so was toiling back up the hill on Calle Constitucion with my shopping-bag full of vegetables and dog-bones from from the butcher. At the top of the rise, across from the Irish pub, the leafy shade of Asturcon Bakery beckoned to me. The little terrace was full of happy pilgrims downing apple tarts. And the lady in charge turned from one of the tables and called out to me: "Rebekah! Stop a minute!"

Like many people in Sahagun, I know the lady by sight. Even so, after five years of buying buns and tarts and goodies at her takeout counter, I still do not know her name. But she knew mine. I put down by bag under the plane tree.

"Did you see Maria Jesus yet?" she asked. "She has something for you, a bottle. A pilgrim was here, must be a week ago, a pilgrim who needed to get it to you, a pilgrim who said he stayed at Moratinos, and said you were very nice, so we knew right away who he meant. He left it here for a while. And yesterday Maria Jesus took it, to bring it to you."

I thanked her for the nice words, and assured her I had not seen Maria Jesus lately, nor taken delivery of any bottles. I bought an apple tart, retreived my bag, and headed home.

"What pilgrim would buy us wine?" I thought. Some pilgrims leave our place swearing never to drink again. Most know we are fond of a dram. We had a big run of pilgrims in June. Perhaps one of them  forgot to leave a donation in the box, and only realized it after he´d been on the road for an hour. (I´ve done that myself.) This was a way to get something to us, a thoughtful way to ease his conscience. Maybe. But the donation box was appropriately flush. I could think of no likely suspects. 

"Maria Jesus," I thought -- the woman who´d taken the bottle from the bakery. The only Maria Jesus I could recall is better known as "Chus." She is Julia´s daughter-in-law, soon to be mother to Julia´s first grandchild, a fun, talkative woman we see only on occasional weekends. Chus lives in Santander, her hometown is San Justo de la Vega, near Astorga. She is not likely to hang out in bakeries in Sahagun.

There had to be another Maria Jesus around. Someone local. Whoever it was, she had a bottle with my name on it. She´d had it for a day already, and this was Corpus Christi, a holiday weekend, when the families all get together out here on the campo. Wherever the pilgrim´s bottle was, it was unlikely to survive the weekend unmolested, I thought. I let it go. But I felt a prickle of expectation, too.

And late this morning a knock was heard at our door. Under her straw hat smiled the garden lady, another woman I have seen and greeted for many seasons now -- she and her taciturn husband used to run the Escaleras grocery in Sahagun, but retired a couple of years ago to their little house in San Nicolas, the village next to ours. This year, the lady took over the hot, heavy summer brush-cutting and weeding job for both San Nicolas and Moratinos -- a post in the past held by a strapping young man with a hot little Opel. In the spring I interrupted her spading the flower beds and asked her if she needed help. She waved me away, saying she loves this kind of work.

I did not know her name was Maria Jesus. And here she was on the doorstep, with a gift-wrapped bottle in her hands and a big smile. "Don´t thank me," she said. "There´s a note here, stapled on. It will explain, I think."

We thanked her anyway, and took the note out of the folds of the worse-for-wear gift-wrap. It is written with a pencil on paper from a spiral-bound notebook. It says:

"Hello Rebecca and Paddy, it is 17 June 2011 in Sahagun, I am a peregrino from Luxembourg and you don´t know me from Eve, but we have a common acquaintance. An Irishman by the name of John Murphy. He was on his way from the Meditarenean cost and endevored to go to Finisterre and meet Father Atlantic. Unfortunately some problems at home forced him to interrupt his camino. A pitty because we had a similar sense of humor and I got along with him. John must have really appreciated your hospitality, because as we parted he gave me money to buy a good bottle of wine for you. As I was unable to stop at your place in Moratinos myself, I left it to the good hands of this the owner of  cafe-bakery Asturcon in Sahagun.


The ways of the camino are mysterious, as you are well aware. 
All the best, Marc."

Mystery solved. John Murphy is a perennial pilgrim. He´s stayed with us twice now, is never any trouble, is always almost too grateful. Our cat is named for him.

So, thanks to John Murphy, Marc from Luxembourg, the Asturcon lady, Maria Jesus, and Santiago, we now are possessed of a fine bottle of 2007 Bordon Crianza, a Rioja fit to grace any table. I think we should wait for the next pilgrim to open it.  A Texan is expected tomorrow.

Matter of fact, I think his name is John.

Out With the Lads

Stephen and John, Road Warriors

Long time no blog. You Faithful Readers are being pushed aside. Sorry about that.
I sometimes wonder if the blog has passed its sell-by date. What do you think?

After a week of hearty Australian company I finally made a break for it. I abandoned Paddy to the
tender mercies of our Antipodian friends, and I lit out for Palacio de Godas, a rusty, dusty hamlet near Arevalo, in the heart of Valladolid province. There, with two fine Scottish pilgrims called John and Stephen, I started walking northwest on the Camino Levante.

Those two started in Valencia, where the Levante begins. They´d already been at it for three weeks when I showed up, trail-hardened veterans. They had asked me to join them for a few days, and promised to go easy on me, seeing as I am a friend of theirs. It was getting lonesome out there, I guess. Or they needed a bit of comic relief. Or a good reason to get up earlier, cover fewer kilometers in a longer time, and drink more cold, fizzy liquids. (I am good at motivating all these things, I admit.)

And so we walked. The country is rough, rolling farmland, with lots of scrub and rocks, wheat and sometimes vineyard. It is the Spain of Delibes and Cervantes -- severe. Big wide skies, black eagles, tiny towns huddled in hollows. It is not so different from our beloved Tierra de Campos, really... but it feels  more harsh there somehow. (Their wine is better. But they probably need it more.)

If you are a map person, you can trace our route:
Day 1, Arevalo to Ataquines.
Day 2: Ataquines to Medina del Campo. (there we attended a beautiful sung Mass at a parish fiesta);
Day 3: Medina to Rueda (oops! followed arrows for another camino in town! Who knew the Camino Sureste came through there? But Rueda is noted for its lovely white table wine. No complaints here, except 14 extra kilometers makes a real difference when the temperatures are hitting 36C in the afternoon...) Late afternoon we staggered into Sieta Iglesias de Trabancos, a town straight out of a spaghetti western. We stayed at the Castillian concrete version of the Bates Motel. Room decor featured lawn furniture from the San Miguel brewery, and bathroom ventilation inspired by industrial feedlots. But out in the gloaming, under the mimosas, we sipped our Fantas and found redemption. Crickets sang. A church bell rang across the drying wheat fields, and the trucks moaned out on the autopista. Inside the nicotine linoleum bar a boom-box yippy-i-ohed ranchero songs. It called the good men of Siete Iglesias up to the junction for a hand of Brisca and a shot of booze.

Day 4: We agreed to rise very early the next day, for the long haul into Toro. Not many places to stop, and a heat wave on its way. The morning was beautiful, the scenery rugged and lonely. We got a little lost, then found again... added another 2 kilometers to the 30+ on the schedule. By the time we hit 17 kilometers, the asphalt was bubbly in the streets of the last-stop village. We huddled in the shade of the local bar, and I told the guys I was calling a cab. I would take their backpacks with me ahead to Toro, check into the hotel there and ease my already-aching head.

John and Stephen did not cavil, especially when I mentioned a Gin and Tonic prize they´d set aside for the big Toro welcome. They started re-arranging their packs, to ensure they´d have water enough for the rest of the trip. But alas -- it was Blood-Draw Day at the local health center, and all three taxis listed were engaged, right up through 5 p.m. Damn. I was in for it.

It was a beautiful walk, most of the way. It tracked along the great Rio Duero, where cornfields were irrigated with elaborate earthworks and canals. We came round a bend in the road into an apparantly-abandoned village and surprised a little man standing naked in his front garden, showering under a jolly yellow watering-can. He shrieked and ran inside, and we kept right on going, pretending we´d seen nothing. And as we passed he reappeared outside the gate, wrapped in a towel, dripping onto the dirt road. "Where are you from?" he sang out. "Where did you start?" His eyes were full of fun. He told us the path split there, and the right-hand branch went through a bird sanctuary, right along the river. And lo, it turned out to be breathtakingly beautiful, scented with piñon trees, fluttering with white ibis, with water, water flowing all ´round. But it did not last.

Once the trees thinned out, and the river took a bend away from us, we were back out in the sun in a blasted landscape of gravel quarries and scrub oak, skinny dogs tied to tractor-tires, warm water, and no breeze, no shade.  For many miles Toro could be seen, standing brave atop a bluff across the river. Cruel, it was. A mileage sign on the distant highway said "Toro 6." I thought I might cry. Then I told myself I might be hallucinating by now. My head pounded, my stomach was nauseated. I told Santiago he better get on the case, because I have treated plenty of pilgs myself for heat exhaustion. I know what that looks like. And I knew I was there.

I felt terrible and a little scared, but I was still, fundamentally, happy to be there. I was with people I love in a land I love, doing something I believe in, pushing my limits... maybe a bit too hard. I was not really there to walk that camino, much as I enjoy a good hike. I was there to hang out with my friends. And when your friends are long-distance hikers, you sign up for this. 

The last three kilometers into Toro are a showcase of Roman foundations and pavements, and finally a spectacular Roman bridge across the deep Duero valley. I wish I´d enjoyed it more. I promised myself I will go back someday. And the last, 17-percent grade haul up that bluff onto the ramparts? It was a picture of two men very patiently waiting while a Woman Of a Certain Age reeled from one patch of shade to the next, all the way up, making cooling sounds, whispering softly of gin-and-tonics, ice pops, showers...

the Roman bridge and road into Toro

And soon we were at the splendid 3-star hotel that dear Stephen had booked ahead -- lolling in bathtubs, sipping refreshing beverages, napping in crisp sheets. Soon I was back to my vibrant and scintillating self again, albeit a little burnt on the edges. I managed to take a walk round the old town, and had a quick little tasting of the new 2010 jovenes. (Toro is my favorite wine town in all of Spain, you know!)

And so, scrubbed and re-hydrated, we dined on the terrace, with a breathtaking view of the day´s achievement. We agreed it was a very fine few days on the trail, with all manner of topics discussed, problems solved, and plots hatched, even. We ching-chinged our glasses of Cañus Verus Crianza. And we called it a day.

Big Fun in Squidgy Mud

Gordon & his boys

thoroughly modern Miraz

The busy season is upon us, and it may have peaked this week. I did an overnighter to Galicia, where I visited friendly, feisty South African hospitalero Gordon Bell at Casa Banderas, and attended the bishop´s blessing of the newly reconstructed pilgrim hostel at Miraz, a Confraternity of St. James (London) project on the Camino del Norte. I picked up lots of wonderful Galician and Bierzo wine for the bodega, and a fresh cow-milk soft cheese from Arzua, and cherries from the orchards in Cacabelos.

We then spent two fun, raucous days hosting 13 people from the architecture program at University of Michigan. (the Arzua cheese and the cherries and 14 liters of Bierzo Mencia vanished without a trace!) We made earth plaster and cob mortar, and the students rendered one wall of the bodega in the spiky goo that all our houses are made of. Big educational fun in squidgy mud. I would have taken pictures, but I was too muddy to handle cameras. So much of architecture education is conceptual, philosphical, aesthetical. I felt good, showing them how "vernacular architecture" lives and dies before our eyes. And it was good getting them down in the mud, where all buildings really begin... some of them really dug it. 

 I made the year´s first gazpacho! YUM!

Paddy and I also oversaw the ongoing patio and studio projects out back, and looked at a house that´s for sale in San Nicolas. (no, we didn´t buy it.) We got some sobering results of our bi-annual health checkups, and good news from Laurie, a friend who is now in the heart of Galicia, beta-testing the updated Camino Invierno guide. (It works! Now if the CSJ people would only post it on the website, other people could benefit this summer.) 

I started a rewrite on eight chapters of a novel sent over by Mitch, a Pulitzer-winner bud who used to go grafitti-painting with me, back in the day. I love doing re-write. It is a dying craft. I am doing a chapter per evening, after everyone else is gone to bed.  

Over the weekend we rested. We are tired, but still able to smile at one another.  The house is a bit messy, but everyone is fine and relatively healthy. And tomorrow, we pick up pilgrims at the train station, for a hospitalero training session on Tuesday.

Aside from all that, the Camino is calling my name. Once the calendar clears out, I may have to join some friend or other out there on the road. Just for a few days. Just to keep my head straight.

Added later: Yes, I now realize I repeated myself up there at the start with the Miraz stuff... I think it´s because I uploaded the photos of the whole week at once. And because I forgot, OK? Didn´t I say it´s the Busy Season, and that I have lost my mind a little?