Reaching Abla from an unintended and quite uninteresting angle might not have been so stunning, yet I find all the groceries that I wanted in the only shop open on a Sunday morning. Very satisfied pulling the trailer stuffed to its maximum capacity I enter a café to eat scrambled eggs and coffee, the two things I can’t prepare myself.
Walking (for some time) is liberating in many ways. There’s a sudden very clear goal. It is a goal made by myself and even though it is deceptive one, it brings me incredible much joy. I have plenty of challenge and every second is new to my mind. I don’t know where I will sleep the night and to not know is pleasant. Worries arises in thin air because walls that bounces thoughts back and forth are not any longer there. Hot flashes are gone and excess energy get used up. I lack no social interaction and the balance between alone and adventurous input is just perfect. I have a loving partner to whom I can share my experiences, for social media I need not to switch on the roaming data. My social media are the people I talk to and Geo who is together with cat V.
I develop pinpricks in the Achilles heel and neck. Impetigo starts, a highly contagious skin infection, spreading on my hand. But most disturbing is the pain in my shin. Geo and I walk apart and have about 25 kilometer between us at the end of a day. Being a bit before Porto I feel I need a break. That means Geo has to bring himself to a halt too.
We meet in an elderly home run by Christian church that doubles as a hospital and kindergarten where also a dormitory for pilgrims is. But we can stay only one night. Geo books us a room in a private home a bit off the route for the next days and to get there is another walk through uninspiring towns. One neighborhood after the other like clay balls strung on a thread.
Compelled to share my ideas of the forest as I have never been so much in them. Not my favorite kind of landscape, by far not as there is really not much to see when it comes to sweeping distances. Unending waves of land like a desert are none. Yet, there is this strong pull to be in the forest.
‘Cold is not the issue,’ says José, ‘but the fact that your holiday is over and that you need to work again.’
I told José that I am happy to go home and work, although it is a cold Hungarian home. José is our Airbnb host and he’s accommodating us from his third floor apartment in Málaga. He works behind a couple of computers, curtains drawn closed, balcony door open for the cigarette smoke to escape and a can of beer within reach.
When cycling had stopped, the full outdoor lifestyle came to a halt as well. Yet desperately wanting to be out in nature there needed to be other outlets. That is not always easy to combine as the mindset has troubles adjusting: from a home base to try grasping that fleeting living-outside-having-no-home lifestyle. It has been some trying and searching, situations regularly and suddenly changed and having a steady base only recently, let’s see what’s in store.
Cycling Cindy