Selected Notes

Please enjoy these sentences from my daily notes.  Sorry I seem to have a pee fixation.

- [In a mediocre dorm:] Gross, close, warm room, snoring and coughing, I would douse you all in gasoline and torch you if I could.

- [In my first private room, with my own bathroom:] I took a long hot shower that did not involve smelling anyone else's pee.

- Up a big hill with grand view of meseta and exhausted sunflower fields; had to pee off to the side in gale-force wind and some puddled on my shoe.

- [In a dormitory run by friendly nuns, all 80+ years old:] The nuns are the fucking best -- real butter at breakfast -- I ate about half a stick with bread.

- I washed my pants(!) and started reading "Brideshead Revisited."

- Woke up from a dream that I was dating an incredibly charming Ian McKellen.

- Fruit salad and a mediocre donut; off in the dark, crisp  morning; lovely pink sunrise; looks like Iowa.

- [Departing the city of Leon:] Smiling irrepressibly, caring naught for the rain and shitty urban landscape, chatting away as semi-trucks roar past on the highway.

- Never seen anyone eat an enormous ice cream-filled crepe with tequila chaser.

Fiona en marche!

There are trillions of petrified corpses.

Where to pee, where to pee?

canal

Behold, elevation change!

All I saw of Leon cathedral.

Welcome to Kansas...?

Ladies livin' large

Mucho Pan

The trees are disappearing.  The landscape is flattening, and I am on the cusp of the meseta, at least a week's walking across tableland for which I'm struggling to muster enthusiasm.  Luckily, a couple French friends and a streak of good communal dinners are spurring me on.  

After two weeks, I'm seasoned enough to identify an inverse relationship between meal price and taste: the cheapest places have the best food.  The two-euro egg sandwich is always better than one that costs three.  A couple nights ago I dined with tablecloth and multiple courses, and it was fine.  Far better was the "innkeeper" lady who insisted we eat first and then donate as we thought appropriate (she made a soul-pleasing paella).  Even the beer was handed out to passersby with a brief mention of the donativo box.  At another place, seven euros got me more salad and excellent bacon-y spaghetti carbonara than I could eat.  At yet another, a sort of self-appointed priest served deliciously garlicky lentil-chorizo stew in inch-thick hand-carved bowls.  

Some hostels are old homes converted to the purpose.  300-year-old staircases constructed with stone or plaster and thick wooden beams, crooked doors, sloping floors, walls built thick to protect against the blazing sun and retain warmth at night.  Our charging cell phones and high-tech rain gear contrast oddly with the aesthetic.  But drenching bread in olive oil and drinking wine with friendly strangers is timeless.

Claire loves chicken and rice

A surprise tiny single room!

hay cube

pre-dawn

Yep, it's getting real flat.

my frenchies, Fiona and Jeff

One of countless awesome-looking churches that are never open.

Peregrinación

Chaucer begins "The Canterbury Tales" with a treacly description of springtime in the English countryside.  The gentle warm breezes playing over the freshly-plowed fields and gamboling newborn farm animals entice pilgrims -- eager for the novelty of a journey -- to travel.  This is the frame story around a wide variety of fart jokes, satirizing of authority figures, creative cuckolding, and perhaps the most vivid description of acne ever penned.  

It's only Day 6 of the Camino de Santiago (Frances route) for me, so there's plenty of time to meet colorful characters.  Unlike Chaucer's band of pilgrims, most of us are traveling alone, and may keep company for a few days but likely will drift and flow according to different paces and rest days.  There's plenty of camaraderie and conversation if that's what you seek.  One can also maintain a retiring demeanor, abjure the made-for-Instagram photo ops, and find less popular rocks behind which to pee.

Because I like structure, I'm honing my own version of liturgical hours.  As it still gets pretty hot, like 80F in the afternoon, I start walking early (6:30am) in the cool dark.  This is one of my favorite times of day, as it's been clear and there are moon shadows.  The sky lightens, blending oranges and pinks and dissolving them into day.  At 9:30am, I have First Lunch (apple + cheese + nuts).  The back of my shirt is sweat-soaked but it's cool enough yet to trade out for a sweater while sitting still.  I walk until sometime in the early afternoon, then stumble gratefully into the oasis of a hostel.  After casting off the burden of my backpack, I perform my ablutions/emerge from the shower, and change into my Evening Wear (aka the clean set of clothes).  

At some point I consume Second Lunch, often also Afternoon Chocolate.  I nap, write notes, read the news, look at where I'm going tomorrow, and eventually go get tapas or perhaps a jar of fancy tuna in olive oil.  This is also the time of Evening Cucumber, my guaranteed daily vegetable intake.  Maybe I stop to look at the massive gold-painted wood carvings inside a church; maybe I chat with an old British man about our respective careers.  By 9pm it's time to pass out listening to a podcast about infrastructure design, or Hercules, or debt restructuring, which helps block out the snoring from the bunk above.

The beginning!  St Jean Pied-de-Port

Actually, the morning I began was very, very foggy.

passing through a charismatic medieval town center

hostel window view

hostel bed view

hilltown view

Puente la Reina

one of thousands goo-ing all up on the vegetation

I hung out around some neat volcanoes

Mt. Etna rises an improbable 11,000+ feet, just about next to the sea.  I trundled partway up to gaze at some of its craters.  In places the trail and scree consistency reminded me strongly of a favorite path in Antarctica.  Our guide gleefully led the way down, jog-skipping, kicking up clouds of dust, relieved to leave behind the Arctic gusts of 70F air that had buffeted us, necessitating a wool cap and two jackets.

A couple days later, I took a ferry to Vulcano, a small island north of Sicily.  A great diversity of rocks and minerals crowded together there, with a black sand beach across the way from a sulfurous hot spring next to the bubbling sea.  Here, too, was a magnificent crater to climb up to, seething above the idyllic beaches.

Unfortunately, I somehow caught a cold.  There was a lot of lazing around my Airbnb, alternately reading the Victorian literary classic "Vanity Fair" and listening to the comedy podcast classic "My Dad Wrote a Porno."  I willed myself the energy to kayak along the cliff-y coast and explore some caves with my wonderful guide Eugenio.  He was affable, informative, fun; he shared stories about the island's geologic history, its role in Italian film scandal history, and his personal history rescuing goats stranded at the base of ravines.  He equipped and encouraged me to swim through some small underwater caves, which was somewhat terrifying and pretty cool.

I took another ferry to Stromboli, which is in fact a volcanic island and not a pastry.  The village of Ginostra boasts a population of 40, with a couple cafes and tiny shops, a beautiful and savage beach, and a view of the almost constantly active volcano.  There is no better place to recover from a cold, cook in a semi-outdoor kitchen, and let the warm wind and wild waves and window-rattling seismic activity realign one's sense of perspective.

One night when several of us watched glowing rocks spew into the air, an old guy struck up conversation.  He happened to be a French volcanologist, there to place sensors across the mountainside.  He explained some of his research and enjoyed the colossal blasts with unjaded wonder.  He also shared with me some favorite patisseries in Paris, which intel I'll follow up on in a few weeks.

scampering down Etna

sulfur pond and geothermal sea

adventurin'

I guess a high school marching band from Malta came? And played songs from "Grease" and The Killers...

the eponymous Vulcano

my deck on Stromboli

stirred up seas

Stromboli at dusk

Stromboli at night