Contrasting weekend days

I was sitting on the bench, minding my own business, reading New Scientist (on my ebook reader, I’m so 21st century) and waiting for the Renault F1 roadshow to start, or, as it should be called, the we-love-Fernando show. The streets had been fenced off, and the crowd along the circuit was five or six deep so I had decided to head to the park and the big screen.

A big chap with a comb-over was on the next bench and after a few minutes silence, where his breathing became louder and louder as the big screen showed Fernando accepting the adulation of the city in 2007, he suddenly burst into a massive (and hard to follow) rant about how much it was costing and what a waste of money it was. I was the only person nearby and I mildly mentioned that I had read that Renault was doing it for free and that the only thing the city was paying for was the police. He ignored me completely and continued to call the mayor all kinds of very bad things.

Then he left and we were able to listen to the F1 car utterly destroying the speed limit.

Then on Sunday, a different sort of day. Julio and Liz (not Liz Evans, a different Liz (hmmm, need some sort of Liz notation, Liz₂ perhaps…) and I went up a hill. It’s called Pico La Hoya, it’s fairly close to the city and, as usual, we were the only people on it.

I was the guide, that is, I had the guide book and the blame if we went wrong. It’s pretty easy to go wrong too, because the guide book had helpful guidance like:- take the goat track. Paths in the hills here are prone to disappear under vigorous fern growth and sometimes trusting that the faint crushed grass is a path is the only way forward.

The ascent was steep up to a saddle and then along a ridge. The guidebook warned about not taking the paths leading down, so I kept high, although I was following little more than a path that could have been made by a particularly heavy rabbit. Julio decided that the lower path was better and, thanks to an understandable unwillingness to cross a scree slope, Liz₂ followed him. I arrived at the summit with no problems, and 20 minutes later, so did they, after a bit of extreme grass scrambling (or as Liz₂ said, I’ve just done my first bit of rock climbing but there was no rock). But the views from the top were more than sufficient reward. The hill is isolated, giving great views in every direction, and it’s nice to have walked over many of them, and to get a good feeling for which valley links to which and which mountains are where.

Then the descent. Turn left at the rock shaped like a chicken’s head, said the guide, and there it was. So we did. Down a steep channel, then a left turn to avoid the cliff, then down down down. We made it just in time to have a cider shandy before catching the bus back. We were sitting outside the bar, and an old dear on the next table was asking where we’d been. Julio said the descent was jodida (hard, knackered, but literally fucked). Liz₂ and I smirked… you can’t talk to a granny that way!