Posts Tagged ‘walkin’

So the last week has been all about storms here. Lots of wind, waves and rain. The UK press even reported a bit of it (thanks to the tragic collapse of a sports centre which killed 4 children near Barcelona). Despite all that, and despite a forecast which said rain, almost a full coachload of walkers assembled on Sunday with resigned smiles and shrugs and ‘we must be mad’ comments. The walk was close to Oviedo, and amazingly, as we left the city on the coach, the rain stopped, the clouds fled and the sun came out.

The walk was a horseshoe, so once we were up we had fantastic views of the snow covered cordillera cantabrica. The clouds built to the west but kept slipping past us to the South. It was a bit breezy (Lakeland breezy, like a cool spring day on the fells) and we walked and chatted (one guy told me all about buying LPs from England in the Franco years… his first album was Bob Dylan, which I didn’t understand because he pronounced it Vov-dye-lan). In a hamlet we stopped for a coffee de pote (brewed in a pot, old style) fortified with orujo and the owner of the bar opened up his ‘museum’ for us. It was his old bar, unchanged from the fifties (except for the addition of dust, pigeon droppings and mould). It was very rustic, both bar and grocers, with broken old radios, dusty empty bottles and stacks of folded old newspapers. On the wall was the then-obligatory photo of Franco.

Two kilometres from the end the route went past a restaurant. The group had booked places for those who wanted to eat. I had been told about this restaurant before, it’s got a limited menu but it’s famous for what it does cook. We arrived at 4:30 and the place was packed. We slotted into the limited space and set to eating the bread and sipping the cold red wine. What they do in this place is Pote or Fabada to start… but really good pote and really good fabada. Then chicken (pitu in Asturian) or lamb, then flan or rice pudding (the cold stuff they do here which is rather good). I should say and rather than or because they just bring everything and you eat what you want… if you run out, you ask for more. Ignacio, the president of the group said afterwards that he’d just had two plates of pote and two of fabada and a tiny amount of rice pudding. He’s very fond of his Asturian food and always asks us if we’ve tried something and whether we enjoyed it. The noise level was pretty high too… a roomful of Spaniards eating is like a pub full of English folk drinking…

Sometime while we were eating, the rain caught up with us and we did the last 2k in a torrent of rain. That’s okay though, we all had umbrellas, it wasn’t too windy, and the coach ride back was 15 minutes.