Spanish views from a small town

I am so out of it. I am tired . I got my second shot yesterday morning. I was fine all day, with only minor aching in my arm. But then, around evening, I got extremely tired. My body ached. I had a small headache. I took a paracetamol, and I got a bit better. But then, during the night, I was cold, couldn't sleep well because of that, and awoke with a low-grade fever and general achyness. Now, I'm a bit better, with another paracetamol. Hopefully, by tomorrow, I'll be my normal self. It's been busy for me since I finished classes last Tuesday. The car was in the garage Wednesday and Thursday, having the clutch fixed. Wednesday night, Midsummer, we had our own little bonfire to jump over and keep witches away. Friday, I went on one of my road trips, the first since last June, and yesterday I got my second shot and got zonked out. My road trip had been up in the air. I had been intending to go down to Porto, where I haven't been in at least two or three years. But, in...

Before the winter and its dark arrives, I tend to do one last long drive. The next one won't be until Holy Week in spring. The sun is shortening his stay, and the night is lengthening her hold. It's not as much fun to see somewhere new only by night. So, I decided to make another long trip into Asturias. A long trip, indeed. It took me three hours to drive to Avilés, the third largest city in Asturias (or the smallest of the three large cities, depending on how you look at it). Avilés is situated at the foot of a peninsula that juts out into the Cantabrian Sea (the Bay of Biscay for some), right smack in the middle of the Asturian coast. It has been inhabited since Roman times, with utensils from the Iron Age found in the area. It sits a little inland, on its own fjord or ría . It was, and still is, an industrial city, and one of the most polluted cities in Europe until the 1990's. It's problem is not the breadth of its industry, but its position in respect to the pre...

My vacation week is here, and the temperatures have gone down to what it should feel like in the spring, after the second half of last week gave us a taste of what it feels like to melt. It seems that with the introduction of summer at full speed, someone hit the brakes and took us back a couple of weeks.  As usual, I went on one of my all-day wanderings this past Monday. This time, instead of going south, I went northeast, to Asturias. I visited its coast and its mountains. One might say it's the birthplace of modern Spain. It was at Covadonga that through divine intervention (ahem), Don Pelayo won against the Moors, and the expulsion began, only eleven years after the Moorish invasion. Though, this was more of a propaganda ploy than anything else, keeping in mind that the Moors remained in Spain until 1492.  I didn't reach Covadonga, though. That's far to the east, near Cantabria, and too far to go and come back in a day. I did reach the seaside town of Cudillero, a g...