Author Archives: The Chronicler

Stravaig + TheNightWalker

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It’s a few years back now. I’m on the ‘meet-an’-greet’ counter at a local castle in Scotland. A family enter, and one younger member mutters “oh… another bloody castle”. Frankly I’m not entirely sure how she knew it was a castle, not having surfaced from the virtual world. Maybe it will be like yesterday when I refunded the entry fees due to a tantrum that concluded in an explosive meltdown. My explanation that the lack of ‘phone connectivity was part of the ‘authentic historical experience’ on offer to the visitor probably didn’t go down too well.

That unfortunate, vaguely derogatory visiting Aussie acronym, A-B-C, might come to mind. Another Bloody City; Castle; Cathedral.

It started in Burgos simply because Burgos got in the way of our progression south. That, and I was vaguely aware of its place in British empire’s military history or at least its references in the Bernard Cornwell novels themed on the Napoleonic Peninsular War.

We’ve found a spacious room in the old town, entry off a narrow, cobbled, pedestrianised street. Calling it narrow doesn’t narrow down its location; all the thoroughfares are narrow. Some still carry the deep, worn scars of carts from the horse-drawn era. Still, the ubiquitous white Ford ‘tranny-van’ manages to negotiate the corners, even those augmented with the café-bars’ occupied tables.

A central location has a real benefit, as we can come and go throughout the day, do siesta and then paseo with the multitudes after dark. A forgiving place to retreat into. The hell-heat of summer might have gone but the habits it induces remain. The Locals are crepuscular, living in cool twilight.

Christmas cometh. The decorations of illuminated animation are placed strategically, exclusively for the photo’ opportunity for the pram-bound mother and the doting grand-dam. Twinkling installations of teddy bears and giant stars, crystal carriages and hauling reindeer. The municipality’s Christmas tree a fusion of fir tree thinnings. The plane trees crafted into arches. The latter – inosculaton, the arboreal grafting together of branches – such that when spotlit from above, throw a graphic script onto the pavement. Words of unknown provenance.

This morning The Navigator had been somewhat overwhelmed by the internals of ‘The Holy Metropolitan Cathedral Basilica Church of Saint Mary of Burgos’, the name as heavy as the ornate ceilings, the claustrophobia of chapels, the vertiginous cliffs of gilded altars pieces.

We return for something simpler.

Siesta complete, we turn left out the door and onto the cobbles to join the end-of-workday crowds for a dark-time wander onto the vast plaza that sets off the edifice. The buildings to my back, retreating to offer reverence, a breathing space, the floodlighting so artfully placed that the structure appears illuminated from within. No tackinesses of a Christmas market’s huts, no abandoned commercial traffic, no dazzle-flares to clutter the view. The cathedral rendered stark, the delicate twin spires a skeletal ossuary of bare bones, the spectral evasion of disturbed pigeon, the ghost flight of falcon. A soft focus of reflected light on the properties to its rear, an opaque arrangement of a congregational choir. All other information has been muted, all extraneous details discarded. The ‘scape a near monochromatic rendition of aesthetic simplicity.

A cathedral that will set the standard and form the pattern for the subsequent pontification of ABCs.

Stravaig + TheMenu

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Menu del Día was once just that. A set menu of a starter, a main and, if you were lucky, a pot of jelly. Or really, really lucky, ‘flan’, as in crème caramel. It was ‘set’, as in no choices, a simple way to experience a local cuisine, to get a good value meal. We liked its pot-luck elements, only taking recourse to translation app when the offer was an unidentifiable melange of dissected body parts swimming around in a bowl. (Caucau comes to mind: a Bolivian chicken’s viscera). It made for simplified ordering. “Menú para dos, por favor”. Which self-translates as: “just feed us”. If there was a row of white works vans outside, you could guarantee quality as well as fast slick service; the staff needed to serve everyone within that one hour slot, they also needed the workies to come back tomorrow.
That was then.

Possibly because we’re moving through country that has a more international transient visitor, particularly those who are walking the Caminos, there’s an assumption for a requirement for choice.

There’s no printed list, so I listen to the waitress intently searching for recognisable key words, in this situation it’s my default method of selection. Hear ‘pollo’: I’ll have the chicken. “Sopa” is obvious, “frijoles y morcilla ”: beans and blood pudding, I know. That’s the ‘primera’ safely sorted. I can do this. For me and my pitiful language skills, the comprehension comes from knowing the normas, the rules – understanding the format.

Now for the main course.

Por segunda: ‘Lechazo de Castilla’ and I hear ‘main course…lettuce and something local’. There are several other offerings, but that one has caught my ear.

I start with the thick soup of dark beans with a few slices of purple-black sausage, a meal all in itself, accompanied by the inevitable basket of refined white bread.

Now for the main. What arrives requires some anatomical dissection and a modicum of botanical knowledge. The latter is simple; green vegetation is always a low priority with ‘menú’ and most can identify an iceberg lettuce, even if it’s swimming in a greasy puddle. The succulent fat on the lip said sheep, the small thin ribs and the proglottid string of tiny tail bones confirmed it.

So I had partially understood the verbal list; only confusing ‘lechuga’ for ‘lechazo’, lettuce for suckling lamb. A flexitarian’s faux pas, the vegetarian’s nightmare.

Suckling lamb: the ovine equivalent of bovine veal. A thirty-five day old naturally milk fed beast, weighing in at dead weight of 9-12kg. The economics of which at first confuse me; that is until I find on-line sales of a roast leg retailing for twenty euros. That and the cynical assumption that the majority of the dam’s milk goes into cheese production. Presumably the rear-end, the tail must be cheap, ergo its presence on the menú del día.

We partake of a further three ‘menús’ over the next few days and start to recognise a commonality. The multiple choice, the size of offerings, the quantity of meat, and most particularly, the ubiquity of salt. No condiment salt pot graces the table; everything comes pre-seasoned, in particular the chips.

None of this was new to us. I’ve watched steaks being prepared for the Argentine asado. Fistfuls of salt thrown onto the grill, meat turned, more fistfuls to follow. The result a perfection of tenderised beef, never to be matched in northern Europe.

Only after a succession of similarly seasoned ‘menus’, does my gut react with a protest and that previously noted ‘medical hiatus’, leading to the volte-face to our travelling mode. Salt, and possibly UPF processed meats are now off the menu.

So with the rejection of laissez-faire, pot-luck, idle decision making, we take to a translation app. Clarity and enlightenment are bound to follow.

Menú del Día at the railway station has: Deep fried pork lizard, hake meatballs, lean with tomato and grilled headboard.

Stravaig + TheThrong

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The demented piping of a shoreline wader reminds you to step off the curb. That bird then spots the marauding gull and frantically encourages you to make haste. The rapidly descending counter, the clarion call to get move on. However, a similar rank and file of citizenry are drawn up in full battle array, shoulder to shoulder right across the opposition’s kerb. Strategies. Go wide, aim to outflank. But others have a similar intent. Tactics. Aim for the fur-coated pensioner, she’s bound to be slower. A gap will appear, but she’s got a zimmer-plough and can use it with ruthless intent, cleaving her own personal path.

Mobilise. Do as everybody else does and play coward-chicken. Weave, dodge, barge, right behind the native decoy, the local somebody else.

The crossing clears. No fallen comrades, and the vehicular traffic re-invades. Daunder on along the pavement to the next crossing and find one that comes with an upgrade. Disability dimples, and a long light-up strip mounted into the pavement; a distraction field-of-vision red light to warn the oblivious, vacant, zombie ‘phoners.

It’s a holiday weekend, a ‘fin de semana’ buttressed by the Days of the National Constitution and the Immaculate Conception. For three of those four days the shops will be closed. Every single shop, with the exception of a few select metro markets and the panaderías. When this happens at home as an essential part of the New Year’s festivities, the consternation, the panic, in the Tesco car park is palpable. “What? … It’s closed? Again?” The world endeth as the tumbleweeds blow down the High Street.

Not so Spain.

Three perambulating generations, a dog, and a pram, strung across the trafficless street, moving without intent, but in a vague direction, possibly, perhaps, maybe, into the plaza. Or mayhap not. They’re not alone, for the town and all its visitors are joining in. For me it’s people-watching – on steroids.

It’s what’s missing that’s intriguing. Nobody appears to have the added appendage of a surgically attached ‘coffee to go’ cup, or is emitting vaporous clouds of cloyingly fruity pollutants. Café bars spill their terraces of tables out over the cobbles, so why would you take your coffee for a walk down the road when you can sit in the still sunshine, albeit at 6°C? Vape shops are nonexistent and the food delivery gig economy is stagnant: the offices are closed. But what is most obviously missing is the utter lack of angst, vexation or aggravation. Just consider Edinburgh in its ‘time of festivals’; that mixing of workday locals and gawping visitors, rushing burghers and selfie influencers, to realise the difference. There, it’s a place bifurcated by the schism between the ‘haves’, who are operating in the short-term occupancy property market, identifiable by the key-safes in their door jambs, and the ‘have-nots’, who don’t. Those who are happy to be over-touristified and those who are not.

Tomorrow is Saturday, a day for trading. Perhaps that will dilute the throng, as shops sift out their chosen clientele. It doesn’t; it only attracts even more onto the street. Which is now augmented with tour groups, who drift behind their leaders. Leaders who call a halt, a hesitation that reverberates back down the street; a stopper-stone around which the next group attempts to flow. I’m standing above the street outside the cathedral, a superior gaze down on the crowded cafés, and four tour groups evenly spaced along the narrow passage, being lectured at length. The body language of some screams “bored”.

We’ve watched these groups on several occasions. Usually whilst waiting for an hotel check-in. One of note did his welcome and introduction for fully five minutes beside the plaza fountain, then walked his group five metres left, to lecture them on the first building of note… for a further five minutes. The participants look chilled; why had they not stopped in that patch of warm sunshine? Because yet another group has purloined it.

This is Spanish tourism for Spaniards. And as these historical city centres are high density living, have by perforce come with their own throngs. Places where the sheer weight of pedestrian numbers overwhelms the car. There’s a comfort in these crowds.

We’ve moved city, and we’re now in Salamanca’s old town centre. It’s dark but I know that the ecclesiastical and academic buildings will be illuminated. We set out and slowly become aware that ’a happening’ is underway. A growing multitude are moving purposefully in the same direction; that the direction is the Plaza Mayor seems hopeful. We’re swept up and follow the crowd right into the square to an ever-increasing throng that surrounds the giant tree.

The clock strikes seven and all the lights blink out. A murmur of anticipation spreads through the throng.

Serendipity has served us up a ’luz y sonido’. A light and sound show, entitled ‘La luz que nos uno’, ‘the light that unites us’. A telling of civic history and the Christian Christmas story, of animated StreetArt on a grand scale. Featuring, with others, that creepy gent slinking along the balconies, peering in windows, who then turns to the plaza, the two-dimensional rolling tableau morphing into the third dimension. Grinning manically, he stomps out over the crowd, to the closing anthem ‘Joy to the World’.

“Thank you Santa. Ah… an earworm. Just what I’ve always wanted”.

Stravaig + TheNavidad

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Christmas the Christian festival has a defined start date. Christmas the Retail festival has a more expansive, elasticised beginning. A commencement that’s held back from its corpulent expansion by a gastric band called ‘Black Friday’, whose adjunct is a postscript to another country’s feast day. All the shop windows have morphed from white on black scripts exhorting numerals and percentages of savings to ones in red, green and snow. The arborists are pruning the street trees ready to be draped in lights, forklifts are arranging wooden cabins around the plaza. Two persons up ‘cherry pickers’ creating a gigantic Christmas tree out fir tree saplings, an unnatural natural rendition of the ‘perfect’ perfectly symmetrical Arbol de Navidad.

Christmas is a-coming.

At least it is December, so Christmas has a right to make its presence felt, even if I’m leaf-shuffling through long drifts and swirling in eddies of autumnal colour.

Life-sized figures, some of which are clearly very old.

In Spain, Christian Christmas has an official start date, created by Pope Pius IX on the eighth December 1859 for the celebration of the Immaculate Conception. It’s the accepted day to dress the tree and to retrieve the nativity scene from the back of the cupboard.

The Navigator’s present. Feeding the earring habit

We wandered the Christmas artisanal craft market in the Plaza Mayor yesterday, watching the world and his wife perambulating, and the vintage roundabout turning. Right in the middle was a large, anonymous box structure created out of panel boards with a bronze man stuck up on a plinth poking out of the top. I thought it a curious oddity, putting it down to some civic memorial restoration. Today we’re back in that same plaza to buy a gift, drink a coffee in the sun and to discover that the rough-hewn boards have been removed to reveal the belén: The Nativity. All the traditional characters are depicted, as is the shepherd’s hut with a string of bells on the wall, a cart with authentic straw bales circa 2024, as well as a field of ridged-up soil growing ornamental cabbages and a washing line of The Baby’s clothes.

Pretty sure they didn’t make bales like this back in the day.
The shepherds’ accoutrements .

It’s the great reveal…. they’re in blue and white… it’s a boy!

Stravaig + TheBikeBoxBeasties

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Now I know why The Navigator bought a hank of rope two days ago. It had been more of a ‘just in case’ purchase, a ‘belt and braces’ for when it came time to trussing the bike box beasties.

Yesterday we finished the day as it started, still in possession of two dismantled cycles in boxes. No further forward. However between The Navigator and the hotel’s reception desk, a possible solution is concocted. Our hotel has a sister establishment across the river which is on an open, normal street, so removing one impediment and one potential excuse. Which moves us on to the next problem.

How to shift ‘the beasties’. First walk the route, as there’s so many alleys and passages in the old town that Sr. Google could miss. We don’t want a falling-out divorce over repeating then retreating back down the same street hauling one of those beasties.

A helping hand. Ghosts from our ancestral past. Europe’s earliest human remains were found just outside town.

Routing solved, now to consider the shift, a ‘flitting’ of 2×28 kg bike box beasties. Fox, chicken, grain across the river conundrum time. The simplest solution always is to have a secure place on the other side. We don’t have a hen coop; instead we get the code for the sister hotel’s night time door, all courtesy of our guardian angel manifesting as the receptionist Wahiba.

A taxi might work, but we can both write a scenario that contains far too many imponderables, snafus and b-ups. We’ve encountered them all before, and there’s bound to be a new, improved 13.0 version awaiting release. At the end of the day it pays to be blessed with the control-freak gene. Just do it yourself.

In the dead of early dawn, the beasties slung in a hammock knotted out of that serendipitous hank of polyprop rope we set off across the river, taking up more road space than a SUV. Revenge of the bicycle.

Two trips and we’ve beaten the sunrise, beaten the hotel’s café bar’s opening. Now to beat the FedEx system.

It does take five hours, but the relief of an anonymous white van’s materialisation is palpable.

Bon Voyage bicis!

The slimmed-down cycle tourist sans bici, now reduced to a 30 litre rucksack.

Stravaig + The Bazaars

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I do like a good ‘Bazaar Plastico’.

They have, over the years, acquired a near talismanic standing, a journey’s benediction.  First day of a Latin trip and the quest to replace the previously discarded plastic boxes; the last day the troll for a roll of sticky tape.  

Bazaars Plastico are caves of wonder.  Take a standard £/€+ shop add a bit of big-box hardware store, some garden centre, and top off with the potential of lost time.  Squash it all together to create a maze of winding aisles.  To wander through is to be assaulted by a miasma of colour and late-form capitalism.  The mantra of ‘stack high – sell cheap’ meets incomprehensible logic.  A Jenga tower of wooden stools beside flashing Santas, a wall of hand tools beside a glass cabinet of drinking mugs.  Plastic boxes behind bubble wrap, sparkling party stetsons beside flowering plasti-cactus.  All is ChinaBuild.  

We’re here today not for a journey’s ordination but to effect a partial closure; more ‘end of a beginning’, a journey’s mid-life crisis.  We need sticky tape.  

Our journey to our first proper international house-sit in Madrid has taken a distinct swerve for reasons that might be summarised as a medical hiatus caused by bit of self-inflicted, unthinking stupidity.  We’re still heading for that ‘sit’, just not by bike.  

We’ve decided to experience the dubious pleasure of ‘send-my-bag-home’.  Unaccompanied baggage exported from the EU to a third country.  Essentially importing goods into the UK that carry the potential of tariffs and import duties.  (Yes it’s the b-Brexit yet again).  

We’ve retreated back to Burgos, a place we know will provide all the elements required to pack up and ship two cycles and their associated paraphernalia alongside camping’s impedimenta.  

We’re going to need two large cardboard boxes of a precise shape, I’ve already mapped nineteen cycle shops, so at least there’s a potential source of bespoke second hand boxes. We’ve already noted that the town’s council collect waste on a daily basis so those small cycle shops are unlikely to store bulky and valueless card, we would need to be lucky.  We also need to buy two rucksacks.  

Step forward The Decathlon.  I honorific it with ‘The’ for its ability never to disappoint; it sits alongside the other ‘The’. Of government, church and wife.  It’s saved us before, it saves us again.  

A half-hour tramp to the outskirts of town to find this emporium of hope.  A vast warehouse; a lower/ midrange sports shop that spans horses to snow, yoga to racquets, running to bikes; lots and lots of bikes.  

On the grounds that we are trying to scran, scarf and beg a freebie, we show willing and first buy those two rucksacks. (Not a wheeled suitcase, not after a previous diatribe), and approach the cycle sales person.  On presenting our unusual request we are immediately told ‘conmigo’ and follow him to the depths of the storage area.  Not such an unusual request after all.  

We have two boxes, and our guardian angel their first bonus points.  We start the caterpillar march back to town, to the bemusement of the local shopping pensioners.  

Partway back that cornucopia of mercantilian paradise materialises and the Navigator disappears inside like the proverbial ferret.  I settle to wait, to protect our treasure trove from the authority’s waste collectors.  She returns, arms filled with three tapes: duct, clear, and measuring, a length of rope, and a sheet of plastic.  Our guardian angel smirks, and adds to their bonus scores.  

First re-construct the boxes to the precise dimensions and de-construct the first bike.  A major dismantling, but it goes as it should; the second not so much.  There was always going to be a balancing of luck. The wee gremlins have arrived, the seat post is seized.  Seized solid, it’s going to require hammers, stillsons and probably surgery.  However a bit of judicious repositioning shifts the problem to another place, another time.  

Time to truss the beasties, time to tape the boxes, print labels and return to that Bazaar Plastico

for more sticky tape. Twice. I do like a good Bazaar Plastico.  At this rate I’m expecting to be offered a loyalty card.  

I’m sitting in the narrow, draughty foyer of our hotel composing this piece, awaiting a ‘collect’, one that comes with a nine hour window, and to further pass the day, counting delivery vans.  We’re on a narrow cobbled pedestrian street that has vehicular access controlled by rising bollards to prevent rat running. 

In a world of ‘anywhere is everywhere corporate high streets’, we’re on its antithesis.  

‘Street of the Independents’, it’s only 240 metres long yet can score:

Convenience shop:  1

Photo studio:  1

Herbalist:  1

Fast food:  2

ATM:  2

Hotel:  2

Furniture shop:  3

Clothes shop:  6

Café Bars:  12

Not quite the twelve days of Christmas as there’s no roosting partridge, just a lady selling roasted chestnuts from a wee wooden booth.  With all these establishments, it’s of little surprise that my stick-tally of white vans comes in at 122.  All those places are requiring stock replenishment.  Which leads to a puzzle.

Eight hours stuck in that foyer, cold and ignored still guarding the uncollected boxes, we find we’ve been listed as ‘missed pick-up’. Why? “Because it’s a pedestrian street therefore the van couldn’t get in… “. Duh?

Evri would be proud.

Silence and Incongruities

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A silent, empty world.  

The only movement the slow indolent flaps of a red kite, it’s twisting forktail catching the low morning light, a chiaroscuro of russet and shade. A lazy economical progression across the bleached stubble, quartering the ground, searching for carrion, yet covering a vast area in mere moments.  It’s the only visible living entity in this wide open viewscape.  

The villages are similarly silent, their pale limestone walls dissolving into the weathered winter soil, the houses’ eyes blinded: the roller shutters dropped.  Others sag underneath the accumulated weight of decades, forlorn defenceless buildings just before the roof falls in.  Bramble and nettle clamber out through glaze-less frames escaping the deluge and the dereliction.  Some carry aged ‘Se Vende’ boards, time-worn and weather-beaten such that you have to wonder if the ‘phone number for a sale is even current.  

A field crop of sunflowers: ‘girasols’ the sun watchers, now stand withered, their heads hung low like a devout penitential congregation. All face west, just like the chapels.  Forfeiting the will to live, they await the finality of the scythe, or at least the combine harvester.  

We’re riding through farming country, draped in a winter patina of muted colours, vaguely spooked by the silent, wide open emptiness.  Watching, observing, noticing and can’t help pondering an interesting incongruity. The small fenceless pocket fields versus the engrossed tractors and their commensurate tackle.  Never fieldworking, they’re either parked up in yards or negotiating the tight confines of a meandering village street.  Some might suggest that this is a neat summation of the vagaries of EU mandates and the capriciousness of a Common Agricultural Policy.  I, however as a Brexit’d third country person, can’t comment.

Walking into another hilltop village and another incongruity.  A stasis, a timeless scene lost in the silent expanse of white light in the plaza, the echoing scrunch of our steps snagged by the walls of centuries-ancient houses. It could be a view from one of many ages, one that is shattered by a glossy black SUV pushing itself past us. 

Silent, empty, ancient, perhaps, but look a little closer and life seeps in. For one, that bloated charabanc had to be going somewhere in the immediate locality.  For another the library window carries the information that the Post Office will operate here between midday and ten past, the doctor will consult for two hours tomorrow, and the geraniums in the town hall’s widow boxes are still flowering. Somebody must water them.  The gutters have been recently hoed of their accumulated weeds; I can still see the bristle strokes and shovel patterns.

Ghost Bank

Behind those aged eyeless facades in some of these places there must be life, the evidence is there.  In many others it’s not so.  

The official Postbox. “Correos y Télégrafos” – Letters and Telegrams.

‘España vacia’: empty Spain is a simple fact and a political conundrum.  The flight from rural to urban, soil to city, only accelerates, such that now 90% of the population live in town.  The falling birth rate exacerbates the demographics of an aging population whilst estate agents offer whole villages for sale and the visitor can purchase a voyeuristic ghost-villages sightseeing tour.

In adversity there will always be someone’s opportunity.

Eventually a confirmation of living village life  does materialise: the hesitant notes of a music lesson drifting from the almost shuttered window. 

Which Way?

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Down the ferry ramp with the motorbikes and the heavy goods vehicles, stamped through immigration and into an early morning Spain. It takes mere moments. Deposited into warm sunshine, near-deserted Saturday streets and a strong wind that rattles the palm tree fronds. Desiccated autumnal leaves race each other along the pavement as if chasing a rumour to the next Black Friday sale. They at least have an idea of where they need to go, which is more than we have.

Truthfully we have not planned on anything. No route, no accommodation, just that commitment to be in central Madrid in four weeks’ time.

There’s a form of time freedom that is invigorating, whilst tinged with a frisson of angst, which over time has become our modus operandi. Logistical planning smothers spontaneity.

So first stop is a bench in the sun to plan a city escape. We could, of course, book into an hotel, only check-in, inevitably, will be late afternoon, so killing time with our tethering anchor of bicycles is less than convenient. We would be no different to that frustration of wheeled-suitcases, a grumble of trundle-carts, who suddenly materialise post-checkout-time on Princes Street, only to echo-rumble the cobbles down in the canyons of the Old Town.

There’s three general directions on offer and as we’ve cycled from west to east along the coastline previously, that leaves ‘south’. South and uphill. A brief and basic perusal of Spanish physical geography shows a verdant flat(ish) coast bordered by a brown scrabble of hills, morphing to the purple of the high tops and on to the arid tans and duns of the central plateau.

Coast, mountains, and high plateau.

It’s time to resurrect whose climbing legs last tested in southern Norway. The routing app prophesies over two thousand metres of ascent which does not quite correlate with the fact that much of the route will be on an old rail bed. Steam locomotives don’t climb much beyond 4% gradients, yet the profile graph shows a maximum of 21%. The answer will eventually become apparent.

A ‘Camino Natural’, that goes by the style ‘Santander-Mediteraneo’ which the remnant trackside distance posts suggest that it was intended to run for around 400km. It was a ‘works-in-progress’ that was never truly completed. Now it’s a phoenix project, a resurrection that will delivery us nearly traffic-free to the city of Burgos in a few days time.

Great riding surface
Wide and stable tunnels. The longer ones were lit, the lights being motion-activated.
Canyons

The city escape is easy and we find ourselves on the intended rail bed, albeit into a strong headwind. Stopping for lunch we consider our overnight options, which turn out to be marginal. Still we push on; we do have the emergency of the tent as a final solution. However a room in an hotel would be preferable… there seems to be a selection in the next town, thereafter nothing. It’s siesta, the streets deserted, all is closed; is that for lunch, the season or permanent… it’s never clear. There’s a ‘phone number on the reception door but nobody answers. So the logistician cum Navigator interrogates the booking app, securing a room 8km back the way. Downhill, tailwind we make very short work of it, to find the silent establishment’s door adorned with twenty years worth of Michelin guide recommendations and a ‘phone contact. No answer. No answer. Again, no answer. With the sun setting, eventually a connection is made and we’re advised that the place isn’t opening tonight, despite the restaurant tables being set with linen and glasses, and despite our confirmed booking. So it’s a further 5 kilometres further downhill, all the way back past that lunch stop, to a beautiful old parador…. that’s open.

Gorgeous Parador

Logistical planning smothers spontaneity….. sometimes it does not.

Next morning we recoup that squandered distance and take on the climb; at its best: 600 metres of ascent in 6kms, into a headwind. As to how the trains negotiated the hilly impediment, it was blindingly obvious: it went through a tunnel…. seven kilometres of tunnel. But, it never did.

Still smiling!

Postscript: whist we were battling the gradient and that wind, the Spanish mainland was recording a new wind speed record. Just to our west in the Picos de Europa a gust of 236kph was recorded.

Just sayin’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enga%C3%B1a_Tunnel

https://www.mapa.gob.es/en/desarrollo-rural/temas/caminos-naturales/caminos-naturales/sector-noroeste/santander-mediterraneo/default.aspx

Another Beginning

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That tabloid has been wailing about an imminent 800 mile ‘snow bomb’ for more than three weeks: “Brits to be hit by Arctic blast”, “exact date when winter will arrive”.  Clickbait pontifications that the UK Met Office attempt to counter by reasoning that it’s near impossible to accurately predict snowfall even seventy-two hours in advance.  The accompanying stock-sourced photos are of the general genre ‘snorting red stag with snowflake-speckled coat – Richmond Park’.  Depictions and headlines easily condensed to a précis of ‘potential snowflake spotting event in central London’.  

Or so my cynical mind surmises.  

We’re off to a housesitting gig; one flat, two cats, no garden.  Christmas in Madrid, and trying to maintain to a land/sea travelling itinerary.  Which entails planning a route that tries to marry trains and a ferry, accommodation and cycle reservations.  Interesting logistics that comes with one non-negotiable caveat: “not via London”.  

We’ve oft considered the ferries that sail out of the channel ports to the north coast of Spain as an option for heading into southern Europe.  The ‘Ride home from Malaga’, that ended prematurely with the pandemic curtailment had been a possibility.  Again on a subsequent trip, the “Covid completion tour”, the Spanish ferry ports were eclipsed by the promise of 1400 km of French cycle paths north along the Atlantic coast.  

So at the third attempt it seemed pertinent to start by booking the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander, then to work the logistics backwards.  Type in ‘travel to ferry port from the north’ to any search and inevitably the result ‘through London’ comes up.  Which would be perfectly doable if it was a case of alighting from one train, crossing the platform and climbing aboard another.  But of course that’s not possible.  You can’t even just cross the station, you have to cross the city – in the dark, at rush hour with loaded bikes, enhanced by the predicted prospect of a snowflake-spotting opportunity.  It’s not the only impediment to routing through the UK’s capital.  Whilst it’s possible to throu’ ticket a passenger, all the railway companies’ booking apps have a blind spot when it comes to a cycle reservation.  The possible explanation might be, although never indicated: no spaces remaining, bus replacement service in operation, or – and here you need to do some deep rabbit hole researching – the algorithms cannot conceive that a cyclist could ride between two adjoining stations.  

In frustration The Navigator turns the question around.  Where do the trains go to from Portsmouth?  To London of course but also to Cardiff.  Haddington, Edinburgh, Cardiff, so neatly avoiding the southeast.  With the added possibility of a morning wandering in the Welsh capital’s city centre.  We have the makings of plan.  

A plan that hasn’t taken account of that one imponderable.  The Snow Bomb has acquired some authentication with the met officials declaring several yellow weather warnings.  Amoeba blobs that shapeshift, coalesce and divide, floating uncertainty around on a map, the unpredictability a weather forecaster’s fingered rejoinder to the tabloid press.  To wake on the morning of our intended day of travel, with all those tickets in their timed slots, to a foot of snow outside the window now seems a possibility.  

At times we will look at each other and wonder if we’re over-thinking the potential problems, creating an alphabet of alternate plan Bs, contingency plan Cs, all facilitated by being time-rich pensioners.  It’s going to take from Tuesday midday to Saturday morning just to get to the northern Iberian coast.  I suppose flying might have been quicker.  It would without a doubt have been cheaper.

Day of departure, cloudless sky, frosty, but dry; no snow bomb, just a ping.  Yet another warning; this time it’s orange.  Seems that Met Eireann is feeling neglected, and the Irish weather service have declared a ‘named’ storm. ‘Bert’ is gathering his energies out in the Atlantic and we’re going to be sailing across the Bay of Biscay.

Weather
Railway station. No, it’s not a train station.
Another railway station
And another railway station
Waiting to get on to the ferry. It was perishing. Hurry up and wait.
And waiting to get off. It was considerably warmer.

Dogs, in Several Acts

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Public Service Warning….. this is a DogRant.  Part One of a DogRant.

Over one third of British households own eleven million dogs. The Germans top the EU league, and the Dutch claim to be the first country in the world to be stray-dog free.  However, statistics garnered from FAQs are questionable at best.  Consider this: “Scotland has six million households with a dog”. Not bad for a country of sub-five million souls. Where “Wallace the Fire Hound” is its most famous dug.  So, housing crisis solved and “whaur’s yer Greyfriars’ Bobby noo?”.

Stats are one thing, personal experience is another.  

The Navigator carries the scars of three dog attacks. One of her old panniers has stitches and a large patch from another.   I can claim only one, but would like to be credited with a bonus point for its media topicality; a US Bully type attack in redneck USA.  Those are historical examples, whilst this trip has collected a few more.  Blood might not have been shed, but amusement, expletives and adrenaline were.   

Act 1, Scene One: twenty kilometres on the clock and we’re making our way along Portobello’s esplanade.  Locals will know exactly what’s coming next, but for the rest: it’s a cold bright Sunday morning, there’s a gathering of foodtrucks and a couple of coffee shops. All the outside seating is occupied by family gatherings, whilst overflow customers are perched on the sea wall.  I always push through this congested bottleneck, for I can guarantee something will happen.  I’m not to be disappointed this time.  Black poodle on a flexi lead lunges and makes contact with the Navigator’s pannier. There’s too much slack for the owner to take control, and certainly no apology. 

Act 1, Scene 2:  ten paces further on and I’m stopped, as is everybody else. This time it’s another of those designer mongrels, whose owner has a five metre training leash – as mandated by YouTube. Coils of mismanaged, tangled, fankled, fluorescent tape.  Owner to one side of the Espi whilst pooch is on the other, mooching for fallen fodder under a strangers’ table, whose youngest member has reacted by withdrawing her legs up onto her seat. The doting, supposedly responsible, owner seems unable to read body language and to observe the now stationary public, and makes no effort to restrain or retain her dog.  Everybody is very British, so nobody says anything.

Both are minor inconsequential incidents, yet they offer a commentary on how the canine has assumed a disproportionate place in modern British life.

Act 1, Scene 3. Bo’ness harbour.  It’s now a warm afternoon, there’s a promise of early summer, the shore front is busy with kids on scoots; a dad encourages his son to learn to ride, grandpa’s been allotted the pushchair, the swings still need some grease and the steam train’s whistling on its way into town.  A busy, happening scene.  

It’s the classic slow-motion incident.  Speed is leisurely ambulant… a terrier dog whose owner in running kit is some considerable distance hence, runs straight towards Navigator’s front wheel. Navigator instinctively brakes to stationary; I don’t.  Front and rear panniers glance, no momentum to stay upright, so I’m on the ground.  Terrier, and utterly oblivious owner, exit stage left, leaving me to pick myself up and for a most curious altercation to take place.  I have assured one couple that ‘I’m fine’ and leave the scene.  It’s often best not to become involved. However, two uninvolved women, I choose my ‘xx chromosome lady-descriptive’ carefully and make no mention of the tattoos or the BMI, decide they must offer their views.  “If ya dinna wanna’ ride whar there’s dugs ya shud go sumer else”.  Point one: the park path is part of the UK’s national cycle network. Point two: “WTF has it to do with you?”.  

Just another silly, minor incident; no blood, no major damage, not even a bruised ego.  Just a cricked digit.

Day One: Three Scenes, and a reflection on society’s associations with dogs.  What would the reaction have been had a buggy-bound baby been snapped at by that poodle, had a toddler been tripped by that designer mutt, had a pensioner been knocked off by that terrier?  Why were all three dogs not under close supervision?  

Stand at any public park gate and you’ll get one answer.  Dog and owner are tethered together… both enter park… dog released… owner opens ‘phone… dog cocks leg on lamp post… owner falls into ‘ZombiePhoneMode’… dog runs to hedge… owner stuck in ZPM… dog squats… owner lost in ZPM… dog leaves crime scene… owner awol in ZPM… result, yet another bio-hazard.  What always amazes me, the ZPM never seams to tread in the hazard, which would be perfect poetic justice.  On a similar and related theme: one of our local charitable citizens crafted a poop bag dispenser from a milk carton and attached it to a prominent post.  Stuffed it with clean bags and penned a subliminal graphic to encourage usage: a painting of a turd tree.  The response of one dog was to bag its own production and tie it to said dispenser, or so I assumed, the dog being illiterate.  Or was it just a budding art installationist?


There’s a plethora of empirical evidence to suggest that the pandemic has had an effect on both canine numbers and dog training. And possibly entering an era where the mutt is solely responsible for setting its own rules, for arranging its own parameters.  

The Navigator is on one of her favourite quests: hunting quality bread.  At the rear of the Kinloch Hotel, Arran, is a bakery that sells coffee out the back door and loaves out of a hutch.  She’s hunkered down perusing the selection when a hound snout snuffles in and checks the freshness of the sourdoughs.  It’s possibly the age related diminution of the frontal lobe; once she might have ignored the intrusion, only to rant vehemently afterwards.  Not on this occasion and requests that the owner remove her dog, to be informed that “it’s only doing what dogs do”…. Er, no. It’s doing what you allow it to do.

So dogs have got themselves onto the travelling agenda from the beginning and as we’re heading for the EuroScandi there’s going to be an opportunity to watch how those EuroHumans interact with the EuroCanines.  

OK, that’s the first intermission. It’s time for you to go and get a coffee, and I to splint a finger.