Living with the Unknown

The previous 24 hours provided some extreme examples of one aspect of this type of travel. There are many enigmas. It’s due to a combination of not understanding the traditions, culture and language and having to fill in the blanks from an incomplete database.
For background, this starts on our second night in a campground 20 minutes south of Valencia. It’s a fully developed campground in a rural area near the beach, some flooded fields and a lagoon. It includes tightly packed cabins, trailers, a market (closed), a restaurant and bar, conference rooms, horse stables and riding fields, 6 tennis courts, a pool, a bull ring and a min- zoo. Here’s what happened:
1) Around 10:00 pm on Friday night we heard a rash of explosions lasting 20 seconds off in the distance. These were echoed a minute later from a different part of town. Not a big deal and we’ll probably never know the reason. Is it a holiday or perhaps a football celebration?
2) Around 2:00 am, “Grease is the Word” started blaring from the campground bar. This was followed by songs equally horrible in other languages. I had to move to the lower bed to avoid the “music”.
3) At sunrise I heard shotgun blasts going off. There were singles, doubles, triples and some that must have been ten blasts in two seconds. There are a lot of flooded fields full of ducks, snowy egrets, great blue herons, plovers and grebes. I went out to look and listened but didn’t see anyone. The blasting went on for at least two hours on a constant basis. I can only imagine machine gun shotguns or guys standing shoulder to shoulder just blasting away. There must be thousands of dead birds around here.
4) Accompanying the shotgun blasts at dawn were birdsong, brays and roars. The zoo icon out front had a lion on it. Surely, there isn’t a lion next door!
5) Any good food market leaves us wondering what some things are, how you would cook them and what they would taste like. These are fun questions that we can answer by eating. Valencia’s Central Market had fish with eel bodies, many dried animal limbs and shrimp with moth like tails. I bet it’s all tasty.
6) When buying a new coffee pot, the shopkeepers (an older man and a younger women) were in what seemed like a heated argument. If this was at home, I’d be witnessing the moments leading up to his violent murder. In this case, she went into the backroom and he seemed to joke about her to the other customers. Or maybe he was joking about me. I won’t ever know.
7) The English Pub with free wifi was closed even though the sign said it would be open a few hours ago. Are we misreading the sign? Is this a holiday we aren’t aware of? Should we try back later? There’s enough draw between the Guiness and Wifi that we will be back.
8) We tour the cathedral and enjoy the stories and explanations on the audioguide. At the end we come into the room holding the Holy Grail. This is believed to be the cup Christ drank from during the last supper. It seems plausible that it’s true. Ben drops a coin into an electric candle bank with thoughts of Nat’s recovery.
9) As we leave the city, the bus departs 10 minutes before it’s scheduled time. We are lucky to be onboard. We don’t fully understand how to use mass transportation.

These open questions challenge my equanimity. Some really need to be answered or you wind up stranded or in a dangerous situation (or hungry). Others are interesting but we’ll just never know. A few days like this though and we crave some more familiar activities.
Eventually, we do get answers to some of these questions. It really is bird hunting season (though I don’t know if machine gun style shotguns are used), they really do have a tiger and a cougar in tiny cages, the bus stop wasn’t the terminal point and the pub just opened late. We’ll just have to keep learning Spanish to know what people are saying and we’ll have to leave it to others to verify the authenticity of the Holy Grail. And the more we eat, the more we find tasty new treats (and some that we haven’t acquired a taste for).

Ben curtailed his outdoor time after seeing the tiger. We left the next day and are now at a heavily used campground near Cartagena. It’s full of retired British, Dutch and German snowbirds and we are developing a whole new set of stories involving WiFi that isn’t, muddy beaches and multi-language Karaoke!

MD

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Ben's Neopets Cartoons

Hello, Its Ben again, and to cheer up the blog I added neopets gifs.(also to practice computer skill) Its very nice staying here, in Catalonia with Andrew,CATALONIA IS NOT SPAIN , IF YOU THINK IT IS , GO EAT CAT LITTER.OR A DUNG SLORG.I am wearing sandels
that have the Catalonean flag on them. As another unpleasant story , the Catalonean flag was made when a Willfred the Harry reached into his bleeding heart and the resulting wipe on his gold sheld was a great flag! sit back and enjoy the show-ben













and also a creepy never ending syrup



"(c) 2000-2006 Neopets, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission"

Our Stolen Van (again)

Here's the truth about our van saga.......

CARCASSONE AND BARCELONA

Hello, this is ben and I am writing this from our hotel room before we leave. I have my feet propped up because I banged one on a rock and twisted the other one funny and I think I sprained it . Ouch. Oh,have to go ,we’re going to Barcelona. YAY!!!!

A FEW HOURS AND ALOT OF GRIPING LATER.....
Ahhh... finally we have reached our campground, and when we stopped at our parking spot (YES THE VAN STORY WAS FAKE TRUST ME ,I HATED THE VERY IDEA OF THE VAN-WAS-STOLEN STORY,TO PROVE IT A PICTURE OF THE VAN IS INCLUDED)Our campground is filled with stray cats who try too hard to look cute. mom just fed one.Though this place is far away from the city its close to the beach......dunno ‘bout going tonight though,it ‘s starting to get late.Mom and Dad met some fellow campers from England,and then they had some ginatonics( gintonic?ginetonic?gin-a-tonic?)but did not get drunk.Before I go here ‘s a legend about Carcassone :
Once a time lord Carcass became a carcass.Lady Carcass was in charge. Then Charlemange began a seige against Carcassone. The people began to starve.So Lady Carcass came up with a plan ; she took the last of the rare corn and feed it to a pig. Then she threw it off the wall.It spatted the corn everywhere and seeing the village had enough food the feed the pigs like that, the soldiers gave up. sweet dreams about splattering pigs, I mean butterflys
signing off; ben dane

From Digne to Carcassonne, one hotel at a time...

Ok people, the van is fine. We are only staying in hotels because its cold and we are sick. I gotta say the CNN access is pretty cool though. How about those DEMOCRATS! How about that Don RUMSFELD?

Anyways, my convalescence began in Digne-Sur-Bains after two rough nights with the Mistral winds in Arles. Mark, always thinking of me, thought he had just found a nearby hot springs to help me recover fast. Alas, it appeared closed, at least until the following Monday morning. We went on to enjoy an excellent provincial market, The Gorge du Verdon (largest gorge in Europe), and multiple Andy Goldsworthy exhibits! In the picture above, we had also inexplicably become the lucky free visitors that day at the Musee Gassendi, and the Reserve Geologique showcased several cairn installations along an outdoor trail. By Monday morning, the springs were looking too crowded to pursue so we opted out.

Our next stop was Carcassonne, a spectacular castle in South-western France. The place began as the Gallic village of Carcaso in the second century; then as the Roman fort, Castellum (they kicked the Gauls out); finally,it was held by the Visigoths for awhile and they named it Carcassona (after they killed off the Romans). The place became a full-on feudal fort with multiple defensive walls and devices enough to repel the Franks in the 6th century but not the Saracens in the 8th century. In Charlemagne’s time it belonged to the Franks, a fellow called Trencavel who lived during the 13th century. In Trencavel’s day there was a religious heresy in place known as Catharosy--as opposed to the Catholic brand of heresy--it was a fascinating thing, adherents believed the soul was God’s and the body was the Devil’s so most of them ended up starving themselves to death.

Well, anyways, religious beliefs notwithstanding, this 13th century civilization had a really big problem because Pope Innocent III sent a crusade against them and though Trencavel was sheltering a variety of besieged people (Cathars, troubadors, Jews, intelligent women) all were killed by Simon de Montfort and his 20K+ crusaders (and assorted mercenaries and tag-alongs hoping for salvation). By 1240 it seemed obvious to the French Kings they needed to beef-up the defenses and they added another circling wall that worked against the British during the 14th century, but by the 17th century, the place was abandoned and crumbling. It was “restored” to some level of fashion a hundred years later so it now resembles every fairy tale you can think of. It was occupied by the Germans during WWI and WWII, but folks moved right back after they left.

Now THATS a STORY! Its taken three days of convalescence here to figure all this out! What a blast to touch 1800 years of construction and wander it freely, though I have no idea how we are going to get the van out of here tomorrow!

JB

Western Provence

We completed our time in Provence focusing on the Roman amphitheaters, aquaducts and smaller towns. We even went through a cave with pancake stalagmites and a great prehistoric museum. Jules has Ben filling out a timeline and sketching what he’s seeing. Maybe some of it will stick for a few years.

We did reach a burnout point with the ruins. Since the Romans intentionally built their buildings from similar plans, there is some truth to “seen one, seen them all”. But this was only after seeing an incredible stage wall in a theater in Orange, The Pont du Gard aquaduct and remains of some villages.

Ben was lamenting missing Halloween while we were in Arles. As we saw kids starting to trick or treat in the stores downtown, we got a brainstorm. We unzipped this funky bag Jules bought and wrapped it mummy style around Ben’s head. He then went store to store mumbling something (not knowing the proper thing to say). He did pretty good in the stores and bars. It paled compared to our normal Halloween, but at least we had a taste of it.

The pictures show the type of wall Jules wants at home. It is a huge vertical wall on a marketplace building with plants growing directly out of it. We don’t know how they do it but it looked great. These towns were great and we had a lot of fun till the cold Mistral winds started blowing. We hunkered down then decided it was time for some thermal baths to nurse our colds.

Provence

We camped for all of October, pretty much looking like this. An awning with a couple of sheets gives us some privacy, protection from the rain and makes us look like gypsies (we think). We use the built-in appliances and cabinets to cook and store our food. The heavy dish cleaning is done in a campground sink.
We’ve become fond of breakfast in the van, lunch in town and dinner and a movie in the van. There are great tratieurs or caterers that prepare meal fixings ready to be warmed and eaten. These include soups, meats in sauces, and great side dishes. This has been a fun way to enjoy the local gourmet food without the difficulties and expense of a late restaurant meal.
The other choice for dinners is buying and cooking ourselves. Ideally, this is done after hitting a street market or at least a few specialty shops. While there are lots of top quality ingredients our favorites so far are the mushrooms. They are fresh (and dirty) and varied.
When I wanted to make one of our favorite dishes, fried fish filets, I selected a meaty, white fish called congre. In my baby french, I asked for a kilo. The fishmonger pulled out a piece and it just kept coming. She weighed this three inch by three foot long piece and it was near a kilo. I was too deep into it to back out so I asked her to remove some and happily bought it. It wasn’t till I bought a cookbook that afternoon that I realized it was a type of eel. It was tasty.

MD
http://burtondanetravels.blogspot.com
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