Spanish views from a small town

I haven't walked at all this summer. Partially, because I didn't feel like getting up at seven in the morning to walk and be ready for my classes by ten. And partially because I became a little lazy. Then, the month of September came with things to do and places to go, and the weather started to frown a little bit, so I stayed put until this week. When I returned to my old paths, I realized I should have taken a scythe with me. Back at the beginning of June, the exuberance of late spring was beginning to create monsters of broom and twining brambles along most of the paths. I was the only one using them, it seemed, since the loggers had come through to clear the wood from the fire of 2019. So, the paths had mostly been abandoned for a year, more or less. Still, they were pretty much passable, just not in shorts, which was another reason I didn't go walking this summer. It gets too hot too soon walking in long pants.  So, when I went along my usual paths to get to the princi...

If the streets of old Boston are rumored to have been laid out by cows, then our roads here were laid out by oxen. Thanks to the hilliness of the area, a road here never goes in a straight line for more than a kilometer. The road which goes around the peninsula of the Barbanza in western Galicia hugs the coast. The coast is an accidental coast worse than a granola bar; you don't know what you're going to bite into next, just like you don't know where the sea will bite into land next. Therefore there are curves where you end up thinking you've just changed directions and are going back where you came from. That is most noticeable on a sunny day when, from having the sun at your back, it's suddenly blinding you. At a crossing near Rianxo. The tarmac road that goes from Padron to Ribeira was originally laid out in the middle of the nineteenth century. Though it took its own sweet time, like most civil constructions around here. They began in 1864 in Padron and en...