Day: September 5, 2013

From Leon

Thursday 5th September
I rode 265 miles today nearly all on motorways, on my journey back east toward Bilbao where I leave from on Tuesday morning. Motorways here are more twisting than at home and have only a fraction of the traffic. At some points, as they span deep valleys, the sense is vertiginous, with the valley hundreds of feet below and the other lane of traffic, hundred of feet above, high on its own stilts.
from Galicia to Leon at EveryTrail

I saw this hotel, Infantas de Leon on Tripadvisor. I fancied a break from camping and was expecting a wet day which it hasn’t turned out to be though it rained lightly for the first couple of hours and threatened with dark skies all day. So I’m here, in a rather smart place though the first three reviews I read all rated the welcome – two were from motorcyclists and one from a Camino walker wanting to give herself a treat. With breakfast and secure parking for bertha all for €60 (camping is about €18 a night). Finding my way on the big bike to a hotel in a city is a different experience to searching for a campsite in the country but in a way no harder. One review praised the view of the cathedral from the hotel but there is no cathedral in sight. The bed is comfortable. Its time to take a stroll. Let me fish out my cleanest smartest clothes.
Cathedral at Leon, Spain
at Leon, the walker's sign
Leon Spain

I had dinner in the bar, hearty with white wine at €1.40 a glass. I wish I had realised how cheap it was, I would have not said no to the third glass. I need to find a way to get out onto the balcony to have a camel now…

Deciding to move on

Weds 4th September part 2
I have decided to move on tomorrow. The weather forecast says thunderstorms for the next few days though it was, and still is at after half past eight in the evening deliciously warm and sunny. But I feel I have to take the forecast serioiusly. I swam in the sea today. The beach was so delicious, warm sun yet constant cooling by the breeze and no flies. But to turn back toward the ports feel like the beginning of the end of the trip though there are still 6 night before I sail home.
Having given up Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Being and Time, I’ve turned to ‘Venture to the Interior’ by Laurens Van Der Post. He starts off by writing about flying to Africa from Health Row Aerodrome (in 1949). The book deals with British colonialism, as the other Laurence did, though post second world war not in the lead up to WWI. Of course I have no part in this, but my mother came from Germany the year before his story starts and my sister was born only three years after. So all his discussion of the role of Britain in the world and British values of decency ‘a nation should try to be fair, good and true, not merely an industrial sausage machine’, would sill have been in the air when my parents started their family. But I’m not sure I feel nostalgic for his vision of British virtue: only on page 44 so far, and with limited knowledge of the issues affecting post-war Britiain, I have the feeling that interest has always shaped British action, though it used to be dressed up with rhetoric of value and decency. I think people actually believed it themselves.
As I started cooking I heard the residents of the convent singing hymns, their harmonies wafting over the garden wall.