Onwards to Spain

Good afternoon y'all and hope this finds you well. I'm being very inappropriate- this weekend is for all things Irish, but I've already planned that part. I will make sure to have a Red Velvet tomorrow (split a glass of port between two pints of Guinness- it's rather special), but my mind is further afield, planning the Spanish part of the trip. I will arrive in Santander on Monday first October, and will be travelling through three Spanish regions in the North; Cantabria, Asturias and Galicia, then down the coast of Portugal, and briefly back into Spain, to Andalucia to take the ferry to Morocco. I know very little about the North of Spain, although someone did tell me once how much it looked like Surrey; the whole area I'm going through is really where the rain in Spain mainly falls, and the Atlantic climate and green landscape is not so different from Ireland or Brittany.

I'll be arriving in the port of Santander at lunchtime on Monday 1st October, after 20 hours on a ferry from Roscoff, so I predict my first impressions might be a bit wobbly, so I will stay the night there and go yarn shopping the next morning. Apart from being quite obviously a banking centre, Santander is the capital city of Cantabria, and a city very focussed on the Atlantic Ocean, not just with places along this thread but through voyages to the Americas which set out from there. From there I'll be going in a very well-travelled direction, towards Santiago de Compostela, but my pilgrimage is not a religious one, so I will be hugging the coast as far as possible, rather than joining the Camino. I've chosen my route based on the local bus maps instead, and intend to stop at San Vicente de la Barquera on the Wednesday, and move to Gijon in Asturias on the Thursday, and on Friday morning get to the twin towns of Figueras and Ribadeo, which are either side of the Asturian/Galician border. 

I speak Spanish, or Castilian is it's more commonly named in Spain, having lived in Madrid for a while some years ago, but like many regions of Spain, the main language of Galicia is not Castilian. Gallego is closer to Portuguese, and no doubt this is going to confuse me yet further. On top of Spanish, I've been learning Portuguese for a while to the point that I now think I probably speak an odd mixture, whichever one I'm intending, so maybe it will miraculously turn out that what I speak is actually fluent Gallego. But I doubt it. When I lived in Madrid, I worked as a magician. My boss was a fabulously eccentric Brazilian psychologist who I thought spoke Spanish, but it later transpired that he spoke very little, but put on a Spanish accent and used his own words for what he couldn't express. I picked up a fair few of those words, so I've probably always been a Portuñol speaker of sorts anyway. Apart from the tongue twisting , I can't think of Abílio without smiling. Or Madrid; my times there were a bit extreme- it is somewhere I truly have the best of memories and the worst of memories! I don't want to say I am hoping for a calmer sojourn in Spain this time, because you should be very careful what you wish for!

Anyway, I will be getting to A Coruna on the Saturday. This is the capital of Galicia, and a port with a very rich history in textiles through its medieval Jewish population, so I'm hoping it will be a good place for yarn, so I will be swotting up at least on colours and types of yarns in Gallego at least. From there, there isn't really much of a coastal road- it is very rocky and cliffy around here, and is known as La Costa de los Muertes (the coast of the dead). But they don't really advertise that in tourist brochures; maybe it's not as inviting as La Costa del Sol? So my final Galician stop will be at Pontevedra, close to the border with Portugal.

So this week will see me researching yarn shops and campsites around these places, and twisting my brain and my tongue with languages and pronunciation. I think maybe I need that Red Velvet!

Love and Light to you all, Billy xxx