earth, wind, and fire

Spain

Spent the morning quickly hoeing up yet more weeds down the terraces by the house. The family was out for the day again, giving us an ideal opportunity to catch up on blog posts and continue reading - so that's what we did for a few hours, swapping the computer back and forth until we had finally spewed a month's worth of hazy recollections onto our hard drive. We also cooked up some pasta with tuna-tomato-pesto sauce, taking advantage of the rare opportunity to use a multi-burner stove; although we are fairly adept at one-burner cooking by now, it is definitely easier and faster to cook pasta in one pot while stirring sauce in the other!

After typing the blog posts up, our computer was about to run out of battery; our afternoon was therefore spent recharging it in a small café down in mostly closed Casinos. Weekends run into Monday here for many shopkeepers - the bodegas are closed; the bakeries are closed; many of the cafés are closed; but we manage to find one café open next to the main square, which predictably is close to full with just about everyone in town. We order a couple of the house ice cream concoctions, then wash them down with a coffee for Valkyrie and a horchata for myself - the whole while polishing off a couple of the posts, commenting photos - in general, attending to our habitual backlog of trip-recording duties.

Our efforts over the last week have created a sizeable brush pile by the carob tree down at the swimming-pool-to-be, and it is finally time tonight for a blazing bonfire. The heat is enough that we must stand well back, sitting on the rim of the pool while the weeds and loose wood pieces are consumed. Once it dies down, we pull out our trusty laptop and present the photos from our travels; these number nearly 2000 by now, so we have adopted the practice of showing only our favourites. It is astounding to recount our journey to this point, even though we are still short of halfway there - the Danish countryside, ports of Hamburg, and turbine roads in Holland are far off by now, as though part of a separate trip that is somehow vaguely connected with the one unfolding every day in midsummer Spain. Darkness has fallen by the time we finish, leaving us no choice - in the absence of electricity, sunset marks the hour of sleep...