Travels in the Van 2024: Week One

The long drive

Seasoned travellers now, it no longer bothers me to do what our forebears did, and use a piss-pot as necessary during the hours of darkness, when we’re en route and parked up for the night. Luckily for us, running water is plentiful and a good rinse after watering the grass, and the persistent rainfall washes away all sin. 

Seasoned or not it was harder to wrench myself away from wintering at home, cosy in a routine and not minding the grey short days. The thrill of the new was not so intense as we passed through more familiar landscapes on efficient French motorways, with consistently high quality services. I became aware of a kind of separation anxiety, a familiar emotion of unease. It manifests as an annoying self perception of being a scaredy-cat, a stuck-in-the-mud, a holding back, like a horse refusing a simple jump. It can be visceral, not wanting to enter a bar for example, a hyper-vigilance that puts the breaks on having fun. I know it comes from childhood insecurity, which I harnessed as an adult into the productive taking on of responsibility, a benign way of being in control of myself. So my focus returns to noticing things; changes in vegetation, landscape and vernacular architecture. Breathing in nature. Going with the flow. 

Noticeable things are; Tall things, the shape of trees, the abundance of mistletoe in the plane tree copses at the side of the motorway, the spines of chimneys, water towers. Flat plains straight roads and caterpillar lorries nose to tail.

Once in Galicia, one of the first things I notice which turn out to be a thing are Galician gallery windows, which to be brutally honest are very ugly, especially in the modern interpretation. Kitch almost. Occasionally, the elegance of old metal ones, letting the sun in during harsh winters, painted green or powdery blue, hit the spot, but otherwise they look like an end of season factory sale of double-glazing odds and ends. 

We've spent 4 nights sleeping 'on the road', in recommended stop-overs, but nevertheless without facilities. so finding Camping Costa da Morte, brand new, in the middle of nowhere on a family run farm's converted farmyard with fantastic hot showers, all to ourselves (we were the only visitors) was heaven. There was even a puppy!

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We exit the new, perfect, empty campsite, with its solar powered fairy lights, and welcome showers, through the rolling gates into the lane, into the medieval past, the smell of manure permanently in the air since we arrived, out on our bikes, and onto the road, farm buildings of stone at impossible angles, and barking dogs everywhere behind gates, keeping us alert to the danger at every turn, another of the strange structures like tombs on stilts with a pike on one end of the pitched roof and a crucifix on the other, made a stone or sometimes brick raised up high on mushroom like discs, first seen yesterday, they're definitely a thing, then we wondered what they were, but now we know and cannot unknow.

(prompt from The Snow Globe by Jenny Pagdin) 

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Note: These structures are grain stores kept by every household to protect corn cobs and other grain from vermin. They have slatted panels for ventilation and vary in size. They're called Horrẽos. 

Note: These structures are grain stores kept by every household to protect corn cobs and other grain from vermin. They have slatted panels for ventilation and vary in size. They're called Horrẽos.