Chorizo does Dordogne
Having conquered France and Spain, Chorizo now deems us ready to return home to Vancouver. He misses the beaches that have many sticks to choose from, and the front-seat status of most car rides. My posts have been fewer and farther between than I initially anticipated. I’m blaming a variety of factors: lack of internet at most of the houses we rented, mostly fabulous weather that begged us to be out and about, but of course most of all, my inability to put nose to blogging grindstone in the face of all those sites, sounds, and tastes out there.
Chorizo continued to enjoy great popularity in Spain, though I was repeatedly told that his name ought to be ‘Salchicha’ (sausage, and the Spanish nick name for wiener dogs) rather than ‘Chorizo’. He was permitted entry to most sites and all bar and restaurant patios, though unless he was being fed pulpo (octopus, one of Santiago de Compostela’s culinary specialties) he tolerated his cafe time with ill-concealed boredom.
An unintended but enjoyable theme of many of the places we stayed was the proximity to cows of various breeds. In northern Spain’s Picos de Europa, we awoke each morning to the mellow tunes made by cow bells, as the pretty-much free-to-wander beef cows of the region grazed the steep slopes above and below our house. These were some good looking cows, too. They also seemed markedly more intelligent than the average bovine. As she made her way past our terrace one day, one of the cows stopped and surveyed the view in a way I’ve seen horses do, but never cows.
That same cow provided Chorizo with some lively entertainment on several occasions, which I managed to capture on video.
The footage above is what Chorizo would call ‘happy afraid’. Unfortunately, he was also subjected to an ‘unhappy afraid’ experience one day, when we found ourselves in a Spanish village that was in the throes of some celebration or other – one that necessitated the release of fireworks that were invisible in the mid-day sun, but highly audible. Chorizo has few real phobias, but loud bangs top that short list. We had been detoured from the main road past the village by a police woman who sent us through the centre, as the fireworks were being set off from the middle of the highway.
As we attempted to leave the village on the other side, we found ourselves blocked by Spanish drivers, angered by their arrested passage from the other side. Not content to merely scream and gesticulate in a line on their own side of the road, a number of cars had also gone into the lane in our direction so that the road was completely blocked on both sides. Just to make things a little more agitating, several women had got out from behind the wheel to stand beside their cars and loudly protest their unhappiness to each other and to the completely incompetent, suspiciously shabby looking cop whose only achievement was to keep them from proceeding. When I asked this disheveled fellow how it was he could let cars block the left side of the road, he shrugged and said in Spanish that ‘the people are like that’.
I did finally manage to honk and swear my way through the blockade, but as the fireworks continued throughout the incident, Chorizo was a trembling mess by the time we got away. Unhappy afraid. Fortunately it counts as the only really bad moment of the entire trip. The Spanish have it over the French in spades for being warmer, more outgoing and more down-to-earth, but their love of making as much noise as possible whenever the slightest excuse merits it wore a bit thin on that day.
I know some of you probably take a dim view of my gallivanting about for nearly eight weeks while I should have been burrowing into the latest news and controversies in the horse world. I’ve always been a ‘work hard play hard’ kind of girl though, and this trip was long overdue. In the coming week I’ll get some more photos of Chorizo’s European adventure up on the blog, and I will shoehorn my reluctant self back into the real world of EC, the FEI and everything in between.
Troglodog
Medieval Dog
Another bar, another chateau…where’s the beach?
Chien de Garde
