Another day of miscellaneous hoeing, laying rock circles around trees, and such...but there is not much to do while the Cooperativa and hardware stores are closed, so instead we hang out for a while reading, put a second coat of paint on the bedroom, clean the floor, help Bill plaster over the cracked patches in the swimming pool - which, it turns out, is an old basin that has been on the property for some 30 years - and join them in the evening on a ride into Vilamarxante, where the town is bristling with excitement for the upcoming Encierro. Streets are lined with makeshift balconies supported underneath by metal cages whose bars are wide enough to admit people but not bulls, and the sky brightens with fireworks...
...the drive into Vilamarxante takes us through Pedralba, which we now know as the only place to get wireless within 10 km - and one of precisely two places to charge up our various battery-equipped gadgets, the other being the town of Casinos down the backcountry highway in the other direction. Pedralba is silent tonight, its residents almost invariably over in Vilamarxante for the festivities. Festivals are serious business in Spain, a time of utter social obligation to pack the streets and run from large dangerous animals and blast noisemaker fireworks off into the sky; when we reach Vilamarxante, the municipal parking lots are full - but only by North American standards, as newly arrived vehicles from the surrounding towns continue to cram into every last space imaginable...
We sit down in one of the bars eating bocadillos and roasted almendras with our copas of cerveza while the kids run off to get ice cream over at the heladeria. Kali wastes no time in bolting off across the square as fast as her two-year-old legs will carry her, followed closely behind by her vigilant mother...but we sit here, enjoying the cold beer and the general background noise of the square and the violent explosions overhead. We grab a couple of pints, talk about the unwaveringly pitiful state of the world and the relative peace of a life in rural Spain, then we pack ourselves back into the car and carefully edge our way through the car-choked lot...the normal exit is firmly blocked, so we take a ramp up and over the sidewalk at high speed, this being the only possible means of escape...but this is all par-for-the-course in Spain, where festivals, days of rest, and siesta are law - and no one is above this law, least of all the police, and so we ride back to the granja without interruption to continue the work of rest...