Run, run, run

It's Sanfermines up in Pamplona at the moment. You know the thing, white clothes, red neckerchiefs, running with bulls - the Hemingway book.

I often listen to the 8 am news on the radio and, for the past few days, today was the last, they've been doing a live broadcast of the bull running. It only lasts a bit over a couple of minutes so it doesn't interfere too much with the real news.

Once upon a time I lived in Ciudad Rodrigo. There too, but at Carnaval time, they have an encierro. The bulls run through the streets, lined with very solid, railway sleeper type, fences to the town square. Encierro means locking up so, when they get to the square, they are penned up.

The bulls are led along the route by mansos, bulls but not fighting bulls. Manso means something like docile but a five to six hundred kilos of bull isn't my idea of something cuddly. The idea is that these mansos have done the route before so they lead the fighting bulls to their destination. We'd watched all 12 bulls pass by one day in Ciudad Rodrigo and as they'd gone we came out from behind the big, solid wood fence we'd sheltered behind. Two of the daft mansos changed their minds and came running back down the street towards us. We were back behind that fence in a flash.

One day in Ciudad Rodrigo there is a variation where bulls are shepherded into town by men and women on horseback. The bulls are still loose and run in the street. We'd arranged to go to the house of a friend, a house with a balcony that overlooked the route. At some point the man of the house said that we'd get a better view in the street. Having no idea what was going on he led me through a gap in the fence and that's where we stayed. On the wrong side of the fence; the side full of bulls with sharp, gut rending horns. "It's easy", said my pal, "as they pass just climb up the fence and they'll trot by without giving you a second thought". I was wearing a big overcoat. As the bulls approached people started shouting at me for being so stupid, I was the equivalent of the infamous New Zealander who ran with the bulls in Pamplona in flip flops - the idiot guiri. When the time came the fence was full of faster more agile people than me, there was nowhere to climb. The bulls passed by. I didn't die or anything.

That same year Maggie's boss at the school where she worked was on the correct side, the safe side, of the fence. He lived in the town, he'd seen the bulls pass by on any number of previous occasions. He was leaning against the fence not even watching the bulls, talking to his friends. A bull decided to stab him through the fence. He spent about six weeks in hospital but survived. 

Expect cloud cover and drizzle

I've been to Skegness and Morecambe and Rochester several times but if Star Trek's Mr Scott were to transport me to one of them without warning I don't think I'd know where I were. It's exactly the same with Spanish towns and cities. Of the 50 Spanish provinces I've been to 49 of their capitals but the only ones I know well are the local ones. The one I'm missing is Palencia. In order to be a completist though I'm also short of one of the two autonomous cities on the African coast; I've been to Ceuta but not to Melilla.

Last week we went on a bit of a jaunt, 1,979 kilometres of mainly motorway plugging passing through 15 or so provinces. The plan was simple enough. Up to a village included in the 20 prettiest villages of Spain list for the first night, a village in Huesca more or less on the French border with views to the snowy Pyrenees. Next a couple of nights in Pamplona, the place where they do the bull running with the red and white clothes a la Hemingway, before a longer stay at Zarautz on the Basque coast just outside of San Sebastián. From there we'd head south, running for home with an overnight in Zaragoza. Being that way inclined we added in a couple of stops along the route and our seaside lodgings were the base from which to sally forth. Just as I've been to Skegness I've been to Pamplona, San Sebastian, Vitoria and Zaragoza before but the bits I remembered were few and far between. The smaller stops, such as, Ainsa, Alquézar, Anso and Zarautz were all new to me.

If you want to look at the snaps they're towards the end of the September album and at the beginning of the October album. Click the link words. 

As we packed the car in Culebrón, to head off, I thought it was a bit chillier than it had been so, at the last minute, I threw a pullover and a light jacket onto the back seat of the car and a pair of trainers to accompany my sandals in the boot. Anytime any of the Northern regions of Spain feature on the TV news so do the umbrellas and snow ploughs. I know this but somehow I failed to register it. Maybe, because we live in the same country I thought it unreasonable that the weather differences would be significant. The sandals remained unused but I certainly used the trainers, pullover and the jacket. It was chilly, cold at times, and it bucketed down more than once. I knew it, the weather that is, but I hadn't really acknowledged it.

With the holiday over, as we unpacked in Culebrón, I thought maybe the Northern weather had travelled with us. It was nippy. I've often argued that Spain seems to have these quite sudden changes, often calendar linked, in weather. October has arrived and the warm weather is kicking its last for the year. I wore long legged pyjamas to bed for the first time in months, the window we leave permanently open all summer is now closed and, as we watched telly the other night, I added a bit of low level aircon to raise the temperature a tad. Today I dragged the calor gas heaters from out of the garage and even hung a couple of woollies in the wardrobe. At the moment daytime temperatures are still high but the mornings and evenings are cooler. Before long the five or six months of chilly, or downright cold, Spanish Autumn, Winter and Spring will be back to remind me why it is I really, really enjoy those months when the sun beats down relentlessly.