to France and back again, coasting

We decided that the best way to celebrate Quin becoming a man (or at least a teenager) was to let him spend his birthday in France, where he could speak the language he loves (after nearly 9 months of study).  So we rented another car and set off to caravan through Asturias, Cantabria, and the Basque Country.  Our first stop, just an hour out of Oviedo, was in Ribadesella, which was featured in an earlier post, this time to visit a cave with neolithic paintings.  Unfortunately, Eric failed to see that reservations were required, despite scanning the website carefully (or so he thought), and there were no spots available.  It's neolithic cave central here in northern Spain, however, and my boo boo was not fatal.  The EXTREMELY nice people at the Tito Bustillo ticket desk called over to another cave, El Pindal, on the eastern border of Asturias, and got us reservations for later that day.  I first asked about another cave that we'd visited some years ago, Puente Viesgo, but they said "That's in Cantabria," like it was the other side of the earth, and so we were happy to have them find us slots in a cave a literal stone's throw this side of Cantabria.  After a quick coffee-and-nosh in the bustling town of Llanes, we headed down the coast to El Pindal, which turned out to be in a beautiful setting high above the sea.  A very unprepossessing exterior, and unfortunately pictures aren't allowed inside (see the link above for some of the art), but maybe you can get a sense of the gorgeous location.

We planned to stop often on the trip to let the kids let off steam.  Here you can see how well they got along.  At least Annabel is smiling while slugging her cousin.  (They're actually having a lot of fun here, and the roughhousing never got ugly the entire trip.)

This mammoth sculpture is based on one of the drawings in the cave.  We couldn't resist the opportunity to continue our photo-series of posing-in-signs.  Unfortunately, the photographer's skills seem to be deteriorating with each new sign.  There was also a hermitage and a ruined monastery nearby, and a network of trails.

Our next stop was lunch, and we decided to revisit our old stomping grounds in Cantabria.  We ate at one of the many seafood places on the water in San Vincente de la Barquera, which some faithful readers may recall visiting in 2001.  After lunch we wandered up to the church, because the castle was locked up, and it turned out to be beautiful up there, high above the castle and the large winding bay, the highest point in the town, and I was amazed that we'd not visited it ten years ago.  I didn't take my camera up there, but even if I had I wouldn't have been able to take pictures (inside the church) of the pilgrims on the altarpieces that looked exactly like pirates, or the relic shards of bone from St. Vicente.  I did take before-and-after pictures of the bay, looking toward the Roman bridge.  Before and after the tide came in, that is.  These pictures also give a pretty good sense of the range of weather we had, shifting quickly from mostly sunny to mostly cloudy and back again.

By the time we left San Vicente, we felt a little urgency about getting to our lodgings for the night.  This was the day that Eric was responsible for booking, and for a while there it looked like the casa rural that he'd booked was going to be as problematic as the cave trip he'd planned.  But the owner of the bed and breakfast was helpful, giving us directions by phone and finally driving out in our direction to steer us on the right course.  We needed all this help because the directions she provided in the first place were extremely vague, pointing us in the general direction of a rather large chunk of Pais Vasco.  We were pretty sure we were in the right river valley, at least, but it was a very long river.  Her first set of phone directions took us back ten kilometers to a turn-off that we'd passed, then along that road, which she said would "go up," and then we would be there.  After we followed that road for what felt like a very long time, we called again, and she headed out to meet us as we continued up the road.  By the time we met her we only had, as it turned out, four more kilometers to go, assuming we could manage to stay on the correct road.  Yikes!  But the place was beautiful, the food was good, and not even a windstorm that blew all night could put a damper on our stay.  I tried to capture the wind in the photo below, which is otherwise not as scenic as it could have been.

The next morning we had a beautiful but exceedingly winding (as opposed to windy) drive to San Sebastian, where we parked far out but for free (because of the Easter weekend) and spent most of the day.  The weather was spectacular, the town was packed, and we actually had trouble finding a place to eat because of the crowds.  How about yet another shot of the two sweet children, in front of the famous San Sebastian beach?  Aren't they adorable?

Of the many, many versions of St. Sebastian (the martyr, not the town) that we saw in churches and museums, this was one of my favorites.  There's no mistaking those iconic arrows sticking out all over.  Some saints are hard to identify, but not this one.

These kids aren't hard to identify either.  I couldn't resist this picture of them taken in a moment when they were not being ironic or snarky or reciting lines from YouTube videos.  They had a lot of steam to blow off after lunch, and sometimes a teeter-totter is just what's called for.

Can't hardly have a post on this here blog without a single bug picture, can we?

We had a bit of trouble finding a place to eat lunch, as I said, and already by the second day of the trip Lauren and Leon, who don't much like seafood, were growing alarmed at the range of meal options in Basque country.  We found something for everyone at lunch, but poor Leon ended up with suckling pig at dinner that night in St. Jean de Luz, not so much because he wanted to munch on a baby animal as that he wanted something, anything, that didn't come from the water.  They gave him the front half of the pig, unfortunately.  Well, I guess that was unfortunate.  I think he'd have preferred, not a particular part of the piglet, but just not being able to tell exactly what part of the piglet he was eating at any given moment.

Lauren was in charge of reservations in St. Jean de Luz, and found a great place with a heated pool, so even through the weather was a little chilly when we arrived, the kids had an hour or so of watery fun.  Leon and I even joined them, after Leon got frustrated with the French keyboard on the computer in the lobby.  I sympathized, remembering when I was tried to use email in France in 2006.  I didn't take pictures in St. Jean de Luz--that's another batch of photos that I'm going to have to depend on Lauren and Leon supplying me with (hint, hint)--but I did have the camera out the next day, the Big Day, the day Quin Became a Man.  We were instructed to refer to him throughout the day as Trogdor the Burninator, and we did our best.  As you can tell from these two pictures of the kids on the beach at Biarritz (carefully selected from the approximately 50,060 I took of them on that beach), clearly Quin has Become a Man.  You can tell from the manly shoulders.  Not for the first or last time on this trip did the thought cross all of our minds that they could be siblings.

The other thought we all had was that they must be freezing.  There were almost no swimmers in the water, just a bunch of surfers in wetsuits.  But they were undaunted.  This beach outing actually came at the end of a day during which they were occasionally quite patient, putting up with us wandering around Bayonne, which turned out to be my favorite place that we visited on the whole trip, maybe because I'd never seen it before.  It was hopping on Good Friday, but less because of Holy Week than because they were in the middle of the Ham Festival.  Which is the holiday, of the two, I would prefer to celebrate, myself.

I don't know what exactly produced this diabolical look on Quin's face, but it had something to do with the goat.  Something wholesome, no doubt.  Nothing that involved burninating.  Or maybe he was just crazed from checking out the Bieb's latest haircut.

We had an unfortunate encounter with a very rude businesswoman in Bayonne, perhaps the rudest so-called "service worker" we'd ever had the bad luck to meet, but maybe she'd been driven mad by the Ham Festival crowds.  We recovered eventually, and made our way down to the beach at Biarritz, then back to St. Jean de Luz, where Leon and Lauren tried again to order something that wasn't from the sea, resulting in Leon setting aside the large portion of his salad that was in the form of dried meats (of which he was growing tired after being in Spain and southern France for a week, and from which I helped myself liberally), and the kids ran around on the beach as the darkness settled in slowly.

The next day we had to drive all the way back to Oviedo, but we broke the trip up with a long lunch break in the exceedingly cute medieval town of Santillana del Mar and a long walk on the beach at Oyambre near Comillas, once again in our old neighborhood from 2001.  There's a museum for the Altamira cave in Santillana, and their current exhibition, as you can see, was called "Sexo en Piedra," "sex in stone," which just goes to show you what lengths unscrupulous curators will go to to get people into an archeological museum.

The shot above is of the three of us at Oyambre in front of the house we rented for a month in 2001, which was our first time visiting the north of Spain together.  The kids waded in the water here, but didn't swim; as you can tell, the weather wasn't great.  We did some beach-combing and tide-pooling and scrambling around on rocks.  Since it was no longer Quin's birthday, I was allowed to take pictures he wasn't in.  Like this one of Leon with his potato rock.

Some people look for shells or fossils.  I think Leon was still worried about dinner.

I'll leave you with another of those many, many pictures from the beach in Biarritz.  The rain held off until we were on the last leg of the drive to Oviedo, and then it poured after Lauren and Leon and Quin headed back to Madrid on Easter Sunday.  That weather was perfect for our mood, and we sat in the house all day.  I miss those crazy kids already.

Family comes to visit--eats, walks, roves

So my sister Lauren, her husband Leon, and their son Quin arrived in Oviedo last Friday, and we immediately took them out for sidra.  We're going to have to get some again tonight, because Lauren wants to film the whole pouring ritual, so you may be able to check out her Facebook page to see what it looks like.  We did a day trip to Gijon with them on Saturday, tooled around Oviedo on Sunday, and then yesterday we went to Leon for the night, to celebrate the city and the province named after Leon.  (I'm deliberately not using an accent mark just to confuse you.)  Before we get into the celebration of all things LEE-awn and lay-OHN, however, here are a few pictures from Gijon and Oviedo.

These are from the park on the point of Gijon sticking into the ocean, well above the city with wonderful views in all directions.  The kids loved running wild in this huge park.  It was extremely windy, although the wind is blowing into Leon's face in the shot above, so does not explain this crazy lean.  It was way too windy and chilly for any sane person to go swimming in the ocean, so of course the kids insisted, and we chose the less interesting but also more sheltered beach.

Doesn't that just look like an ad for the city, with extremely good-looking professional models posing on the sign?  They won't look quite as good in a minute on another sign in another city, but the fault in that case will be that of the very unprofessional photographer.  The next couple of shots are on the big hill to the northwest of Oviedo.  We took the opportunity of them having a rental car to buzz up to the top of the hill and say hi to the Big Jesus.

In the picture above Lauren is showing Quin what a cow looks like.  We also saw sheep and lizards up close.

The weather was beautiful through most of our first day in Leon, as some of these pictures indicate.   Now our long stretch of good weather has and we're looking at rain for the rest of their visit, unfortunately.  But we enjoyed the sunny weather in the mid-70s, yes we did, in case any of you folks in rainy Seattle or chilly Fairbanks were wondering.

We had a great deal of fun with the fact that so many things in this Spanish city are named after Leon, like this sign advertising the "flavors of Leon."  He felt very tall around all the short people, and began noting all the other short things in the city, like this bus.

I couldn't resist including the picture below, because it shows Leon's attitude toward the entire Leon-centric experience.  The rest of us were just walking around the city, but Leon was strutting.

While Leon gloated, the rest of us shopped or climbed trees and leaped around in the park, or drank beer.  Later we all went out and watched one of the Semana Santa processions.  Those are the ones with the penitents in what look like Klu Klux Klan outfits.  There were fifteen thousand people participating in three different processions that night, and we didn't even make it entirely through one of the three.  The fact that it started raining gave us an excuse to go find dinner, but actually we were tired of standing against the wall, and our beer was gone.  Lots of the little ones shook Annabel's and Quin's hands, for some reason.  This particular group, associated with the Virgin of Anguish and Solitude, was dressed in black, and the small children with their black masks and gloves were a bit creepy.  I didn't take my camera, but Annabel, Leon, and Lauren all took lots of pictures, and if none of them make it into this blog, you can always check Facebook (where Leon has probably already posted several).

By the way, to faithful readers like Tim and Siri and Ryan and Jen who request more pictures of food, Quin is always taking pictures of food, so I may be able to link to some on Facebook or even port a couple over here.  Last night he had tremendous fun with his octopus tentacle, and we managed to photograph some of the food hijinks.

Their visit is half over, but the best is yet to come, as we head to France to celebrate Quin's thirteenth birthday.  From all things Leon to all things Quin--some fun!  I'll leave you with the cousins in the lobby of our very cool art deco hotel in Leon, and then, sadly, one of the rainy cloister of the Collegiata de San Isidro, with the leftover Palm Sunday debris and the rain making it look like a hurricane hit north-central Spain.  Hasta luego.

It's like summer here

We had some very hot weather here last week, into the 80s, and took advantage of it by taking a long walk above the city, playing golf, and going on an outing to Aviles and Salinas just north of here.  I didn't take my camera golfing, but here are a few pictures from the walk Alex and I took on a path that runs along the large hill, Naranco, that forms the northwestern boundary of Oviedo, and a bunch more from the fun outing we had yesterday on the coast.

I'd been wanting to take this particular shot of the cathedral and the bigger mountains to the south for a while, but by the time I got around to it (and got clear weather in the morning to shoot it) most of the snow was gone from the mountains.  This is a couple of blocks from our apartment, looking uphill towards the old part of town.

One fun thing about Oviedo, and European cities in general in my limited experience, is that they are relatively compact with a clear boundary where the country begins.  Thus we go under the highway and train tracks from what feels like the middle of the city and we're immediately among the farms.

On of my greatest pleasures in living outside Fairbanks this year has been listening to all the different birds singing.  Three-quarters of the year in Fairbanks is relatively birdless.  I could see myself turning into a serious birder in retirement.  But for now I'll try to take an occasional picture and mostly just enjoy the sounds, without worrying about identifying the species.

It was already pretty hazy in Oviedo by 11:00 in the morning, a sign of the heat.  We were down the slope before the worst of it, and I am most definitely NOT complaining about the weather, but it was a scorcher.

That round white lump in the middle of the bottom picture is a new, huge, double-ferris-wheel-shaped building that has government offices and a shopping center.  Unfortunately, the building's wild shape gets completely lost--so far I've looked at it from every possible angle, and there's no clear view of it except right below it, which of course is not the best angle from which to see its shape.  They did not think this through.  Our friend Merche works there, and Alex and I sometimes shop there while we're killing time during Annabel's dance class.  That's the far end of town from where we live, which in both pictures is a ways off to the left.

We took our long walk on Thursday morning.  Friday I went golfing, on the steepest course I've ever played, just gorgeous, the municipal course for Oviedo, a ten-minute bus ride out of town.  Saturday we took the bus north to the coast, to Aviles, the third-largest city in Asturias (after Gijon and Oviedo), and spent a couple of hours wandering through the old part, having coffee in this plaza, and shopping a little.

There's a wedding going on behind Alex in the town hall.  The ship on the bells of the tower is a sign of this town's historical identification with the sea.  A nobleman from this town (that's his statue below) founded St. Augustine, the oldest European settlement in the U.S., and most of the big houses in the north of Asturias were built by folks who went off to the Americas to make their fortune and returned home to Spain to spread it around.  The harbor area is undergoing revitalization centered around a very fancy new civic center (part of it is that white lump below), but the backdrop for the new building is an aging steel mill.

Every part of the city that we saw displays a similar juxtaposition of sprucing up and decrepitude.  This is another shot of the town hall square.

At one point we passed a grating in a wall, and peeked into something like a small chapel, but with this weird penitential tableau.

We took a stroll through a very large city park, full of birds like these black swans and blooming trees perfect for a little climbing.  Beneath another tree nearby a young girl was being photographed in her first communion dress.  I prefer Annabel in her tree-climbing clothes.

The backpack contained a ball that we never actually got around to playing with, but also, secretly smuggled along, a bathing suit and towel.  Annabel was determined to go in the ocean no matter how cold it was.  We were picked up in downtown Aviles by our friend Carmen (the AHA site director for Oviedo, Alex's equivalent of Rosemary for me in Athens), who drove us around and then to her house in the cute little beach community of Salinas.  Here's Carmen along with my girls, after we walked out to view the jetty where her husband (on a day of much rougher seas) was washed off by a wave and almost killed.

Carmen is originally from Cuba, but some of her ancestors moved there from Asturias.  Her family moved to the U.S. when she was a girl and she grew up there, but then ended up marrying and settling in Asturias, so that her own family history recapitulates a cycle of Asturian history.

Carmen had prepared a feast for us, which we ate on the terrace of her eighth-floor condo overlooking the ocean and the bluff behind Salinas.  A beach walk afterwards was just what we needed to work off a little of the delicious meal.  We went first to a small rocky cove to beach-comb, and then to the big municipal beach where Annabel got the chance to make good on her vow to go swimming in the ocean at the first opportunity.

She timed it just right, because the weather turned very quickly, and by the time we got on the bus to Oviedo an hour later, it was cold and windy and threatening.  This girl has no fear.  Her standard question is, "Is it colder than the Chena?"

Join us again in a week or so, when we should have more ocean-swimming pictures, perhaps including visiting family members Lauren and Leon and Quin.  'Til then, hasta luego.