I think this is a classic

I came across a car museum, and even though this is from the USA it has an air of elegance and function. A smaller engine would improve it.

An OK Dinghy

It did something for your abdominal muscles. Especially when you were wearing a weight jacket for added stability - imagine a vest laden with 10 kgs of water.

I have since taken up walking with an 8 kg backpack.

The only other photos of Plasencia

Walled Cities

Back a bit I visited Caceres - it was good. The travel guides said Plasencia was also a good walled city. But that was Marketing and its purpose is to deceive. Free markets and the invisible hand fails when modern marketing has a role.

Plasencia was ok, Plaza Mayor the centrepiece with not much else. Some interesting features overlooking the plaza. The locals eating and drinking, few tourists.

Probably whilst drinking another Anise, Karin said she was tall and thin, and so she was. She walked through the Plaza Mayor many times, demanding I take her photo.

OK Dinghies

In my younger years I sailed Ok Dinghies. Some of my friends went to Sweden for International OK races, although I didn't, so I didn't get to meet Swedish people then. I stopped sailing when I fell off my bike after lunch, dislocated my shoulder and then had children.

Now much later I have met 2 Swedish women, veteran Camino walkers. Karin is temporarily disabled with tendinitis of the knee, and not walking. Marit is an EFI kind of girl, still walking but missing her travel companion who must now take the bus.  Rebekka from Germany near Frieberg is on the left- she is also disabled and has gone home.

The Camino can takes its toll. Back in Merida in the Albergue it was like an emergency ward. Infected blisters, tendinitis of ankles and knees, various strapping. More recently, big toe problems, and shoulders. 

Another taste of Caceres

This place had been classy, it still was. Fortunately not so crowded at the moment.

The Old City of Caceres

The other day, his master nearby, a coffee perhaps. Previously horses were part of life here.

Is this of interest?

The Avenue in Caceres

The median strip is lush, cool in the midday heat, and there was a row of many stalls selling jamon and cheese.

Camino Rituals

Way too much has been written about this for a thousand years or so. Anyway I will add my bit so it too can get lost in the annals of history.

A few years ago an Australian, Mr Tony Kevin (of SIEV X fame), walked this way and wrote a book about it. Some thought it a fine book although I have not read it. In his book he talks about 2 Swedish women he met on his journey.

Here they are again walking in Spain and I took this photo of them from their balcony overlooking the plaza just before they came down and we had breakfast, again, although not quite a ritual. They were in this plaza, "Plaza Mayor", when I arrived 2 days ago.

One of their rituals, perhaps their only one, is to have a glass🍷 or 2  🍷 🍷 of Anise of an evening, and Plaza Mayor is a fine place for that.

On Being

On Being, probably way too difficult to write about even for "him". So something tractable, "On Time in Spain".

A few posts ago there was a photo in the dark of the aqueduct in Merida, taken about 5:45 clock time. I was up much earlier and had been walking for 20 minutes or so.

Local natural time, or local solar time would have been about 3:30. Us peregrinos can be an early mob.

It is the heat that comes soon enough.

On the days leaving small villages I can have a coffee with the locals about 4:00 solar time - they want to start in the fields about dawn.

Now in Caceres for a few days. Monday morning went for the local idea of breakfast at 9 ish - few places open, still early with the sun not so high, but found one for the early office and very early shop workers. Shops typically 10am clock time.

My idea for this trip was to walk modest hours, finish by midday or a little later, still way before the real heat of the day, and to explore the local town, before an early sleep and an early start, and repeat. A key objective was to see a slice of Spain, not just walk through.

But we are having a weather pattern much hotter than the climate averages I looked at when planning this walk. The pattern has been walking (with rarely a sensible option for a longer day if need be) and being semi-comatose all afternoon.

About 9pm the locals and walkers can come to life. 

The wine and beers can be good. A glass of chilled Rioja with 2 large frozen grapes. Less walking is happening at the moment.

I spoke to a mad English man the other day. He had just cycled in this. 

On Symmetry

It is somewhat well known that perfect symmetry is not quite right, it jars, puts the mind somehow into a state of disequilibrium, and is thus not the ideal for beauty.

I think the idea is to strive for symmetry but not to quite get there.

I don't know about her.

She danced at Sunset

They had all gone, it was a little cooler and much quieter.

A group of musicians transformed the plaza near the church, they were good, or certainly good enough. It had temporarily been quiet after the others, the ones with bells, had gone. Then they played, and as she walked past she spontaneously began to move, to dance.

This is a deeply catholic place, its pervades everything, they had their very bad years. and now her muslim mother laughed, smiled at me and then unblinkingly gave me permission to take this photo.

A man at peace

The old town of Caceres is an almost perfectly preserved walled city. Most photogenic, the crowds come with cameras, often big ones which has been a pattern I have noticed recently.

The tour groups are normally not so early. When they arrive some have matching scarves, like the bells around the necks of the sheep in the fields a few kms back. It is how the shepherds have ways tended their flocks.

This local, at peace, was enjoying a quiet moment in this almost serene of spaces - as I walked past the bells arrived to shatter his moment. He knows the pattern - it was his cue to move on, take the dog home and begin his working day.

Pre Pantographs

The invention of the pantograph marked a defining time in human development. Pantographs are used on the TGV, its peers and precursors. They enabled the development of widespread cost-effective fast electrified railway networks and in doing so facilitated the flourishing of socially cohesive Nation States. Look at France and Germany. Italy gets the idea. So does Spain but public life and wealth is different here. All basically publicly owned rail networks. The English invented the railway, but they are, well, English. At the time of the retirement of the "Flying Scotsman" there was no longer seen by the English to be a need for cohesion with Scotland and their railways are not up to the same standard. The Russians did the Trans-Siberian with the same thought but without pantographs, and see!

2,000 years ago there were City States - Nation States being a very recent development. For City States water supply was a critical service and dams and aqueducts the enabling technologies. This aqueduct and this dam are both 2,000 years old. Amazingly the dam has been in almost continuous service since it was built. They were built to serve Emeritus Merita (present day Merida).

The Romans  were good.

The photo of the aqueduct was taken well before sunrise as I began what was to be a long and defining day in my journey.

Technical Tolerance

You could imagine this blog as a chapter of my life, each blog post a paragraph, of course containing sentences, some of words whilst some sentences are images.

I would prefer to control the sequence of sentences, and indeed the paragraphs. In previous travels I have done just that on my iPad. However on this walking journey I am using this Apple 🍎 clone. Whilst small and light and of goodish quality as clones go, not one of the Apple clones works properly.

Perhaps I can remind you, in mobile gadgets there are only 2 categories: Apple products, and not good enough clones. There is no other type. Even for desktops, IBM (the creator of the PC being an attempt to rival the Apple II computer) now uses Apple Macs and is reportedly about to be the largest corporate user of Macs. But I digressed.

The software on this clone (ie using Android developed by Google) does not allow me a convenient way to sequence my sentences (layout photos), size photos or the column width, or indeed a way to re-arrange my paragraphs, even though Google wrote the App and the Blogging platform.

I rely on your ability to make sense from the sequence in which the blog appears. Perhaps if you double click on the photos they will become enlarged.

Who was this lady?

It doesn't matter.

Also in Plaza

Don't get between a grandmother and her grandson

In the Plaza whilst having lunch

Some Impromptu Dancing in the Street