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Sunday, August 25, 2013

My Tree-climbing dog

Last Sunday we made another trip to el chorro.  This time it was just the three of us.  Unfortunately, August is everyone's vacation month and so even on a Sunday evening (we didn't get there until around 7pm), the lake was teaming with people.  They've hung up new signs saying that dogs can't swim in the lake or be off a leash... as you can see from the video below, we decided we didn't see those signs.  I think it's mostly an August precaution because there are just too many people to have your dog running around.  And of course there's always the posibilty that your dog isn't as friendly or harmless as my Bela. ;)

Anyway, she's a water dog and didn't stray from the semi-hidden beach  we found the whole time we were there.  The willows blocked us from view somewhat so we weren't bothering anyone (nor were we too visibly breaking the rules).  My pup had a blast digging up roots, fetching sticks and even trying to fetch low-lying branches.  She looked like a monkey as she wrestled with this bush.  I nearly died laughing.  Thankfully, she continued once we jumped out of the water and grabbed the camera. :)

Enjoy!


Sunday, August 18, 2013

El Valle del Jerte

This was to be our most favorite day of the entire trip.  We woke up early and piled into the car sans suitcases (a relief for my poor parents) and took a windy, narrow mountain road up over the ridge and down into the Jerte valley.  Those of you who have visited me in Andalucia know that the landscape is pretty monotonous--dominated nearly entirely by rows upon rows of olive trees.  In the Jerte valley, the same is true of cherry trees.  The hillsides are completely covered!  It must be a fabulous place to visit in Spring when all the trees are in bloom.  But I was thankful to be there when we were: cherry season. :)

The boughs were drooping from the weight of the ruby-red fruits.  The cherries were so perfectly round and red it looked as though the trees were hung with Christmas ornaments.  When we stopped for gas just outside the small town of El Torno (some prankster changed the "T" on the sign to a "P"), we picked a handful from a nearby tree--delicious!

So beautiful...and so delicious!
We had a rough idea for an itenerary, since Juani had equipped us with a guide book and also recommended a hike to some natural swimming pools.  Somehow, throughout our whole trip, the heat was following us!  The day we left Lisbon, the temperatures dropped.  The morning we pulled out of Logrosa, Galicia, it was foggy and cool.  And of course we arrived in Extremadura when the day's temperatures weren't expected to drop below 38º C (roughly 99F).  Swimming was exactly the kind of activity that all of us (even Bela) could agree was a good idea.  So we wound our way down into the valley planning to ask some locals how to get to the "Garganta de los infiernos" y "los pilones".

...before the cops came.
11:30 (coffee time) caught us in Cabezuela del Valle and so we pulled over at a little restaurant overlooking the Jerte river.  Our guide book mentioned that all through the valley, but especially in this town, people had build small dams along the river to create artificial swimming holes.  Sure enough, just below us on the river was a little slat-board dam with a very inviting pool built up behind it.  After coffee, we decided a swim was in order... especially in light of just how much my puppy loves the water!  Unfortunately, we didn't notice the "No Dogs" sign and only about twenty minutes after getting in, the local police showed up to kick us out. :(
picture break

There was an information center right near the restaurant where we'd had our coffee, so while Bela was drying off some and my dad was changing his clothes, I poped in to see if I could get a map or directions to these natural swimming holes we'd heard of.  Success!  Just 3km. up the road was the turn-off for the trail head.  Refreshed and caffeinated, we got back in Pata Negra, grateful to have a short drive since our wet dog was smelling up the car!

The hike was short, but very vertical.  It was just over two miles, but virtually all climbing.  Bela had a blast.  My parents were lagging a little behind on the way up.  It seems that being Rotary District Governor isn't very compatible with an active lifestyle.  So after nearly a year of sitting in front of the computer and sitting in the car driving between meetings and other Big Cheese functions, but dad was huffing and puffing.
Thankfully, most of the trail was shaded.  It was a beautiful hike, really.
However brutal the walk up to los pilones, it was well worth it.  They were amazing!  Unfortunately, I think because we'd dallied in the river after coffee, we arrived at the pilones just about "rush hour".  There were quite a lot of people and sadly we had to keep our Bela on the leash.  Everyone else was fully prepared with picnic lunches and at about 2 o'clock we realized that as much as we'd like to stay, we needed to hurry down the hill if we wanted to have any hope of having lunch!  If we'd thought ahead a bit more we would have brought sandwiches with us...because none of us wanted to leave.  We took one last dip in the cool, crystal water and then headed down the trail as fast as we could in the 40º sun.

Los pilones!!!
Angelines jumps in after me. :)
Mom enjoys the "king's throne"
My dessert! :)
We made it into the town of Jerte just in time for lunch.  A woman sorting cherries on the restaurant terraza assured us that we weren't too late for the menu del dia.  And so we enjoyed yet another fantastic meal and made plans for the afternoon.  Originally we had wanted to make a circle all the way through the valley and back around to Villar de Plascencia, but it seemed as though that would be too much driving considering how late in the day it was already.  We decided to head up to the northern-most town in the valley, Tornavacas, because it was supposedly very well "preserved" (?) and then wind our way back home the way we'd come.  After my postre of (you guessed it!) cherries and a shot of cherry liquour each, we headed up the road to Tornavacas.

The facade of the house.  You can see the date over the window: 1655.
In Tornavacas as we were looking for a place to get a post-lunch coffee, a local man approached us and offered to give us a tour of his house (?!).  I guess we stuck out as tourists. ;) He claimed it was the oldest house in the villiage and "filled with old things".  He assured us that there was no charge...but they did ask that you leave a tip if you liked it.  We agreed to see the house...and we were not disappointed.  This man and his wife had basically made a museum out of the house.  It was brimming with antiques of all sorts.  The house itself was incredible--built in 1655!  Only 135 years after Cortés participated in the fall of Tetnochilán (Mexico City), and just 34 years after the First Thanksgiving.  The house had been in his wife's family since its construction.  Amazing.  It was like stepping back in time.

The wooden staircase.
Mom models the cherry picking basket.  A wooden hook goes over the shoulder to hold the basket freeing both hands for picking.
This is the kitchen.  The haning pot is above the fire pit.

This picture looks like something from Gulliver's Travels!
My dad had to bend over to fit into most of the rooms.  The ceilings were only about 5.5 ft!  When I commented that he was the tallest man ever to enter the house, our hosts, laughing, immediately agreed with me.  The staircase was a narrow wooden affair, similar to the stairs in the casa rural where we were staying.  The "kitchen" was an open room, the ceiling black with centuries of soot from the fire.  There was a hole cut in the roof for ventilation...but it didn't seem to have helped a whole lot.  The rafters above the kitchen were exposed so that you could see into the attic space.  This is where they dried chestnuts and cured meats.  We spent about 30 minutes with this man and his wife on the house tour.  It was pretty incredible.  More than anything, it was wonderful to see how passionate this couple was about preserving their own history.

After our tour, we thanked our hosts, made our way to a little café for coffee and then headed back to Tia Emilia's.  It was a fantastic day.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Extremadura

We left Santiago with no reservations for the night...and the only goals of having a glass of wine in Toro , getting as close as possible to home, and finding a place with availability for two nights.  At this point we had learned that the only way to see ANYTHING is to stay at least two nights in one place.  That gives you a full day in situ to explore the area.  I Googled "casas rurales extremadura"  on my smart phone and came up with a list of places to begin calling.  After our experience in Monchique, Portugal, Angelines had made it clear that she didn't want to stay anywhere too far from the freeway: possibly a tall order to fill given that casas rurales tend to be hidden away from civilization; but first on my list of places to call was a house which according to GoogleMaps was in a small town just off the main freeway through Extremadura.  I made the call and not only was there availability for two nights, but they also allowed dogs!  ¡Qué suerte!  We agreed to meet around 6:30 and proceeded to make our way through the end of Galicia and into Castilla León for our lunch in Toro.

The "toro" in Toro dates to the Neolithic period.
We arrived just barely in time for luch (about 3:30) and so we sat down at the first bar we found and ordered from the menú del día.  Lunch was great and my parents marvelled at how we hadn't had a bad meal our entire trip, yet we hadn't been eating anywhere exceptional.  They couldn't believe that even the funkiest, divey looking places on the outside served up great meals.

And the wine didn't disappoint either. ;)  After asking our waitress for directions to a bodega where we could buy a few bottles for ourselves, we were disappointed to discover that there were no tours offered.  I suppose that we didn't have time to tour anyway, but I had hoped that they would have a tasting bar available or something of the sort.  Nothing.  We purchased a few bottles from their store and hit the road again.  We were running a little behind schedule for "La Casa de Tía Emilia".

(A small parenthetical: at this point in our trip, unbeknownst to us, we had received TWO speeding tickets...damned sneaky radars!  We're only just now getting them in the mail.  The first was leaving La Roda passing Huelva and the second was this long day's drive to Extremadura through León.  Poo.)

...bored in the backseat...
A post-lunch coffee break was in order around 5ish, so we pulled off the road pehaps an hour from our destination.  The road into town was lined with large industrial buildings, nothing abnormal.  Many times entering towns right along the freeway you pass through the industrial area of the city: olive oil factories, fiberglass tank factories, tractor dealerships, etc.  However, I noticed in this particular town that all the warehouses we passed were meat processing plants: productos ibéricos--venta al público.

Pata Negra: before the butcher's...
Not until this trip had I ever noticed that the best Iberian cured ham you can buy--pata negra--nearly always comes from Extremadura.  We were in ham-land!  What a happy surprise.  Of course, now we had a double purpose to our stop: café, and jamón!

Only in Spain will you find first-class cured meats (pork loin, whole hams, salami, chorizo, blood sausage...) in a coffee shop. :)  We actually ended up buying from a place right next door, but there were meats on display in the coffee place.  The facade of our coffee stop was covered with a giant picture of black pigs grazing amidst scrubby oak trees.  These are the famous, Iberian, black-footed pigs.  They eat wild acorns from the native encinas and graze over acres and acres of land--they were "free-range" before that became a buzz-word!  The meat from these pigs is often refered to as pata negra (black hoof) and is known to be the best quality.  However, in some places you can find "normal" hams with black nail polish applied to the hoof...  So the terms "Iberian ham" or "Acorn ham" are also used as synonyms.  It was at this point in the trip, that we dubbed our rental car "Pata Negra"...although, I'm not sure it really reached those high quality standards. ;)

Of course my mom wanted a picture with the woman selling the meat...

Look at the amazing archway! (Not Tia Emilia)
Around seven, we finally made it to La Casa de Tía Emilia: wonderful!  I think it was a very close second to the great place we found our last night in Portugal.  The house itself was a wonderfully maintained, very big, old home.  There were four bedrooms and three bathrooms, a living room an ample landing at the top of the stairs, a kitchen and a washroom!  The staircase was the made of chestnut (traditional in the region) and the steps were bowed from use of the many years.  The ceilings downstairs had a few dangerously low beams (also chestnut)--beautiful.

Our hostess, who was not Emilia, was an ebullient elderly woman named Juana who insisted on making us a huge cake for the next day's breakfast and bringing us fresh lettuce from her garden!  She also had a great guidebook for the region and pointed out some of her favorite places to visit.  We had no idea about anything in the area, of course, because we hadn't planned to stay there.  As it turns out, it was our very favorite part of the trip.

Lettuce from "Juani's" garden.
We were staying just on the other side of the ridge from the Jerte river and the Valle del Jerte (Jerte Valley), famous for cherries and alabaster carvings (!?).  Several months before our trip, Angelines and I had been watching a documentary on television about the Jerte Valley and it struck me as an incredibly beautiful area.  Both of us agreed that we wanted to visit some day... and suddenly here we were without having even planned it!

Our first evening we strolled through the little villiage of Villar de Plasencia and were struck by how much history was conserved in this tiny town.  Villar de Plasencia conserves a portion of the ancient Ruta de la Plata, a Roman highway connecting Seville in the south with Gijón in the north.  Some of the homes with stone facades reminded me of villiages we'd seen in Southern France.  One home even conserved a stone archway over the front door that surely dated from at least the Middle Ages.  It was impressive to say the least.  We strolled out of town along the roman road for a bit and took in a spectacular sunset.
 

La Ruta de la Plata: Roman road

Stone wall at sunset.

My super driver...tired from a day on the road.

Friday, August 9, 2013

Summer Studying

...Or perhaps summer procrastinating!

That's right, I'm still studying. For the first time in my academic life, I failed one of my final exams.  Thankfully, in Spain you get a second go-around before you have to retake the class.  So on September 7th I will be taking my Didactics of Physical Educacion final--again.

I have vowed to make August my study month.  So far, so good.  I will exclude weekends...but today being Friday, it's hard to find the motivation.  The professor gave us a list of forty possible short answer/essay questions from which six will be on the exam and of those we must answer four.  I was too busy to actually study the list the first time around.  I answered about ten or tweleve questions--a few from each unit--and then crossed my fingers.  This time around I am answering them all.

There are nine units and I've got through three this first week...but I'm hoping to finish unit four today (at least get half-way through).  If you're wondering why I'm telling you this, it's my way of committing.  If I publicly announce that I'll be studying for at least an hour every week-day through the end of August, I think I'm more likely to stick to it.

With that, I guess I should get a move on because it's already 10:30am and I have done no studying so far.  ...Knowing myself, leaving it for the afternoon is the best way NOT to study at all!

See ya!

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Santiago...Sort of


The countryside through Northern Portugal and into Galicia, Spain is beautiful--roads wind through rolling tree-and-farm-covered hills; the coastline is dramatic and craggy with beautiful inlets and rocky islands offshore.  We got an early start after the delicious breakfast at our chance find outside Pont da Barca, Portugal and headed north to Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, my mom snapping a new picture every thirty seconds or so.

It was, as I say, a beautiful drive and not too long either.  Just over the Spanish boarder, we stopped for lunch in the small town of Gondomar: empanada gallega, pimientos de padrón, tortilla de papas, ensalada mixta, y carne en salsa.  What a culinary relief to be back in España!  I stuffed myself and smiled the whole time.  The food in Portugal was good and our seafood meal in Lavra might very well have been the best meal of the whole trip, but there's nothing like coming "home" to the foods you know after travelling.  The four of us ate until we could eat no more and even with drinks included the bill was under forty euros!

From Gondomar we headed onward and upward (on the map, anyway).  As usual, we got a bit turned around when it came time to find our hostal for the night.  We weren't actually staying in Santiago and so when we found ourselves headed toward Santiago "centro urbano" we pulled over and asked for directions...thankfully, this time all parties concerned spoke Spanish so things were much less confusing. ;)

Around six in the evening we found our hostal in Logrosa, a tiny little town outside Negreira, Galicia.  After the day's drive we were too tired for much exploring, though my mom and I did wander around Negreira a bit while we waited for the pizzas we'd ordered for dinner.  We also enjoyed some light tapas and a glass of wine each. ;)

Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia
The next day was Sunday and the plan was to go to mass at the Cathedral in Santiago.  Santiago is the destiation of one of the most famous pilgrimages in Christian history.  In the Middle Ages, Santiago was second only to Rome and Jerusalem.  But given the dangers involved with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the midst of the Crusades, many people chose to visit Santiago.  The remains of Saint James are said to burried in the cathedral and pilgrims who made their way to Santiago were given a "compostela" which was an official pardon of all sins authorized by the Pope.  Centuries ago, weathly noblemen would pay servants to do the pilgrimage in their name and thus achieve the coveted pardon of the Church.

Bela and Me outside the cathedral.
Today, thousands of people still make the pilgrimage to Santiago and the roads along the way are covered with the iconic yellow shells that indicate the route to walkers and cyclists.  The history of Santiago has shaped Galician development for centuries.  Monestaries and villages, therefore, have sprung up over the years all within walking distance from one another and along the main routes to Santiago.  The Galician open, welcoming attitude towards foreigners is also something deeply rooted in the culture.  Albergues (cheap hostals) are a dime a dozen.  Even the smallest of villages has one or two.  And if there's no room, many times travellers are diverted to school gymnasiums or other such shelter for the night.  A friend of mine who has done the camino twice now even says that you can find vending machienes set up in the middle of fields (plugged into barns or garages) along the way for pilgrims to get a cool drink!  We saw many walkers with back-packs full to bursting, walking sticks in hand and the pilgrim's clam shell hanging off the pack.

The Sunday, tweleve o'clock mass is the Pilgrim's mass.  A cathedral full of sweaty, un-showered pilgrims can be a bit smelly and so it is tradition in Santiago to "purify" the cathedral by swinging a giant incense burner--113lbs!  Eight men raise the burner by means of a pulley system and swing it in front of the apse and perpendicular to the nave of the cathedral--if you think of a cross, the burner (botafumeiro in Spanish) would swing along the arms, parallel to the ground.



My mom and I really wanted to see the botafumeiro, which has obviously become quite the tourist attraction.  We were lucky to be allowed in at the last minute after standing in line in the hot, morning sun (something as rare in NW Spain as it is the NW of the United States!...even in summer) for at least a good twenty-five minutes.  We squeezed as close as we thought polite (the chuch seemed dangerously full, despite guards who regulated entrance), and held our cameras up as the Bishop of Santiago's words trailed off into the thunder of organ chords and the tradition commenced.  I'm glad we didn't miss it.

Galicians insist on changing the Spanish signs into their native tongue.
Unfortunately, our time in Santiago was very poorly spent.  It was unusually hot during our visit, which made sight-seeing and touring around unpleasant.  In short, we opted to do very little of that.  After mass we wanted to eat, but against our better judgement ended up getting sucked into one of the expensive restaurants that crowd the narrow, medieval streets, winding around the cathedral like a labyrinth.  This particular place lured us in with a shaded table in the outdoor seating area (remember we had the dog).  This was the most expensive meal of our whole trip: 60 euros; a drink a piece included.  You might think that sounds reasonable, but the dishes were extremely small and we decided not to order more food because it was so outrageously priced.  I was hungry after lunch--not a pretty picture.

To top things off, of course these labrinthine streets were home to MANY small shops selling all manner of touristy things that were painfully irresistable to my shop-a-holic mother.  For a second time, we forced her to shop at race-pace, something she is loathe to do, and then decided (once again, perhaps against better judgement) to take a round-about way back to the car along a river-path that the information desk had advised was a nice walk.  It was TOO hot.  We made it back to the car hot, sweaty and grumpy.  In the end, we were so zapped from our sunny little jaunt through Santiago that we didn't even have energy to look for a swimming hole to cool off in.  Instead, we headed back to the hostal and napped until around five.

This is how Bela spent nearly every lunch from Portugal to Extremadura!
We spent the evening in Negreira.  My mom and I showed Angelines and my dad the little tapas place we'd found the night before and we ended up having a very nice dinner.  So the day wasn't a complete waste, but given that it was the only full day we would have in Santiago (and in Galicia for that matter), we did a very poor job of time management.

In hindsight, it's easy to see that we just decided to pack too many things and too many kilometers (over 3,000 in the end!) into too little time.  We had originally planned our itenerary for two weeks on the road, but Angelines and I decided that closing the bar for more than one weekend wasn't a good idea.  When we suddenly cut our vacation time in half, we should have re-planned our driving route, but we didn't.  The end result was that much of what we saw was seen from the car, and there were times we just couldn't stop because we had to get to where we'd be staying for the night.

The bottom line is that Galicia and Santiago deserve another, more relaxed visit.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

A quicky

Just for fun.  This is a quick video I took by the poolside at our wonderful little rural hotel in Northern Portugal.

My Handsome Grandpa

Here's a picture of my Grandpa when he was younger.  This is a snapshot from one of his acting jobs...I couldn't tell you which.  All of his boys look very much like him.  Can you see my dad's face in his (the tall one in the middle)?