Northern Coast of Spain

You haven’t seen everything until you’ve seen someone eating a banana with a fork and knife, looking like that’s just how people eat bananas.

Given what we had done today by around 2:30, I was thinking that I would just write that for the first time since around 1986, we basically just took a walk up the hill to the top of town (at left) and then took naps and read all day. But then at around 2:35 we decided to go for a “ride in the country,” during which I learned that:






1. When you drive down a rural road that is the width of one tiny car and has solid stone walls butting up against both sides of the lane, when you realize that you probably shouldn’t be on that road because maybe it’s not even a place cars should be, the only way to turn around is to go in reverse back to where you started.

2. This part of the Spanish coast is nothing but mountains and if you are planning a trip in which you will be driving an Opel Corsa, it is best to plan for as many downhills and as few uphills as possible.

3. Once you get about a mile west of the town we’re staying in, it feels like you enter an entirely different ecosystem, with mountain passes, cliffs, and pretty remote beaches, like . . .

In our town, there is a square wooden hut-like thing about six feet off the ground. Next to it is a historical plaque explaining that it is a replica of a Hόrreo, a small building for storing grain that was used in northern Spain, as well as Portugal, Switzerland and Scandinavia starting in around the 1400’s. Our town’s historical people built one so that people not from here could see what they look like. But guess what? On our drive in the country we saw about twenty of them, and some of them look like they’ve been renovated, but others look like they’ve been around since the 1400’s. That alone, along with the fact that we survived the trip, made the whole excursion worth it.