Michael Kevane

Interesting travel story. We were going to take the train from Ourense, Spain to Pontevedra, Spain with our bicycles. The night before our train, I happened to look carefully at the tickets and noticed that the only way to take bicycles on the train was for them to be broken down and packed up into portable bicycle bags carried on as ordinary luggage. Of course our bicycles could not be broken down that way. Nor did we have any bicycle bags to put them in, small enough to be ordinary luggage. So we noticed that the train station was open until 11 PM so we walked over there at about 10 PM … but of course the train station was open, but the ticket counter was closed. So the next morning we went early to the train station, and to our dismay, learned that indeed the train we were booked on could not take bicycles, and moreover, all trains of the slower ordinary trains were limited to three bicycles per train. Moreover, all three bicycle spots on all of the trains that day were booked. So we had to figure out how to do it and we had a limited amount of time and moreover it was Sunday and so many places were closed. For example, car rental places were closed. In the end, we decided to leave our bikes in the Airbnb. Parentheses — because it was Sunday we could not get in touch with the Airbnb owner so we just took a gamble and left the bikes in the garage figuring we could say sorry later and that worked by the way. So we took the train to Pontevedra without our bikes. We reserved a car in Pontevedra for Monday. Early Monday morning two of our group drove back to Orense about 100 km and picked up the bikes and drove them back to Pontevedra. Tedious and about $100 of expense, but it worked. Lesson: if traveling by bike and intending to transport them on a train in Spain, stay mainly on the plain?

An interesting part of traveling in Spain this week has been watching the daily drama of the Ceuta crisis unfold. The government of Pedro Sanchez is really in a bind, and it would be interesting to think of these imperial legacies as crisis focal points… whether that is increasing or decreasing in the last several decades.

Am about 300 pages in… very intense Zola-like, Trollope-complex, anticipating Lawrence in the sensuality… like all of those, kind of a slog tbh… Will see if I carry on… might take it to a used bookshop and trade for something more modern…

Wow that was a sad two hours. The novella Réquiem por un campesino español by Ramón J. Sender telegraphs the ending right away so the feeling of dread and injustice and historical memory suffuses every page. Reading it in Spain doubles the feeling? Nicely structured, with parallel narratives- the interior monologue of the priest, the altar boy singing the local song about Paco el del Molino, the dijendas of the women in the carasol, and the actions of the hombrecitos who come to do the killing. The distant duke and his wife are never seen.

I picked the book up at random in a used bookstore in Ourense and I think it will stay in my head for the rest of my life.

Went to Reina Sofia museum today in Madrid and two degrees later … from Zulueta to Los Planetas to here…

https://youtu.be/72pAMC8QORI?si=m7308kxUfsCJEtJn

A gorgeous morning.

A Cantinflas movie on the tv in our Airbnb in Madrid. I’m twelve years old again.

The paintings by Goya, Velasquez, Fortuny, and El Greco are amazing in the nearby Prado but you can’t take photos in the museum and really what can I add about Las Meninas, just a spectacularly amazing painting? The bonsai are all about 75 years old it seemed.

Will write more about our very smooth travel later, but for now just want to say that it’s nice to be in Madrid!