Atienza

I was like a little kid on Christmas Eve last night. I lay in bed and I thinking about the crazy little trip I had cooked up for today. When I was a junior in college, studying in Spain in 1970, I took a course on the history of Spanish art. This course entailed weekly visits to the Prado with a tutor and two days a week of lectures with the tremendously esteemed Professor Azcarate. . This is where I learned about Romanesque and about the Camino. The Prado has many of the original frescoes from a tiny Romanesque church, San Baudelio de Berganza. The church is about 30 km from today’s stop in Retortillo. How could I be so close to the church whose paintings were the start of my love of Romanesque? And how I learned about the Camino? So I called a taxi located in a town close to the church to see what it would cost. Since his proposal was less than half of my mental euro limit, I jumped at the opportunity. So today, at 4 o’clock, I will get a chance to see San Baudelio. Never mind that most of the paintings were spirited away by the Prado Museum and several rich Americans. I just want to go inside and see it.

Today’s walk was on the short side, and very enjoyable. We are clearly in a part of the country that has been less impacted by the drought. There were tons of wildflowers, including some that I think were lupines. The walk really had three different parts. First an ascent up to a pine forest that extended for several kilometers. Then a descent and a long stretch on flat open fields. And then third, the rocky steep ascent to the border between Castilla y La Mancha and Castilla y León. No rain, some clouds, beautiful views.

I spent a lot of my walk today thinking back to that year in Madrid. That was more than 50 years ago! I remember our cute little apartment on Galileo 82, second floor. It’s now a very gentrified part of Madrid, but when I lived there, it was a pretty normal neighborhood. A few cows down the street in a little shed, and tons of little shops. My roommates were Gail, daughter of an army colonel who was a surgeon in Vietnam, and Nicole, daughter of the Senegalese ambassador to Italy. You can imagine that we had a lot of fun. Our biggest challenge was to figure out how to get to the end of the month on our small budgets. It usually meant that the last few nights our dinners consisted of fried onions and popcorn. An unusual aspect about living in Madrid at that time was the”sereno,” This was a man, usually inebriated, who wandered the streets of the neighborhood all night, with a huge ring of keys that opened every front door of every apartment building. When you needed to get in, you just stood on your doorstep and clapped, and he would eventually show up. Oh, the memories.Lue lisää