Fuegos Artificiales

After your shoes, your socks are your most important gear. I have two pair for walking and one pair for street wear, the ones I wear with my light-weight, casual shoes when we have arrived at our destination. On a long day I change my socks mid day. Damp socks set the stage for blisters. The heat is often unreliable in the places we stay and I don’t want to be caught with wet socks so I wash one pair every few days, usually when the room comes with a hair dryer. After a few days of wearing the same pair I have a right and a left sock. They have adjusted themselves to the shape of of my feet and putting the wrong one on would lead to bunching and more blisters. When it rains, like it is supposed to for the whole day tomorrow, all bets are off.

Last night in Astorga we stayed in an apartmento. We’ve never done AirBnB or those sorts of things but it was a big holiday and most places in Astorga were full. It was way more space than we need but we did take advantage of the patio by having our dinner out there. We got in bed early with a glass of wine and the strangest thing happened. The bottom fell out of Peggi’s glass. It was one of those short glasses with really thick base. The base just fell off and vino tinto splashed on the pillow, the sheets and soaked though to the mattress. We rinsed out the wine from all the sheets and blankets and made to another bedroom. I plugged in the little lamp next to the bed and all the lights in the place went out. We emailed the contact from booking.com and he gave us a call back. He was in Catalonia, on the other side of the country, and he tried to talk us (in Spanish) through resetting the circuit breakers. When he got to the part about “no toques las naranjas!” we stopped and the owner said he would get someone to stop up. He got the lights back on and plugged in the lamp again. Sparks flew and the lights went out again. “Fuegos atificiales!” The cord had a serious short in it.

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