Spain/France continued
SUNDAY, 9/14/08: 1:15AM: Wake FREEZING in air conditioning and put coverlet on bed, and in error type dream in file 3 to 1:27AM. 4:40AM: Wake with a sweaty undershirt, smelling my breath as foul, so I get my dop kit, use a spray to help my breath, and pee and type my dream to 4:47AM. Wake at 8:02AM to find Ken in the john. With the French-style shutters totally closed outside, there's no external indication of the time of day. I turn on my bed-light as Ken comes out of the john and looks at me frowningly. "Where are we?" I ask. "What do you mean?" "Where are we in today's schedule?" "I'm going back to BED," he says, annoyed. I shut out the light and come into the bathroom to type. I don't like the way we've been treating each other: like annoyances to be avoided. But Ken's the type that I don't think would feel like talking about the roots or solutions to this situation, so I'll just continue as usual, trying to please him, and see how it'll work out. Determine not to take my "night" pills tonight, so I'll then only be lacking ONE set of them for the rest of the trip, annoyed that I clearly counted to the next prescription-refill date, rather than to the amount needed for the trip, with one or two extra in case of delay in returning home, as I do with the regular pills. Always something wrong! Annoyed with my right heel still being so sore after any little use, but can see no solution, though it might have been better had I determined to find SOME kind of arch support at the start, in Barcelona. My foul breath makes me think that I'll have to see the dentist AGAIN about something going wrong with my teeth. This packing and unpacking, moving every day, is becoming a pain, but there's no way around it. Now I'm just looking forward to more spectacular scenery, no rain, and the end of the trip with relatively clean clothing, taking care never to put the eyemask strings over the boil-point, which feels slightly rough to the touch and only slightly enlarged at this point, so I hope it's passed beyond concern. Also, this trip, as I always knew, was just planned to be too LONG! And EXPENSIVE! Stop typing at 8:18, not even beginning to feel like shitting. Will be happy to get away from THIS toilet, which erupts in the center when flushed and can send water to the floor in front of it; not to mention that it grumbles to itself for about five minutes after being flushed; as Ken says, "It doesn't want us to forget it." 8:25AM: I get set to get back into bed when Ken says, "It's a bit earlier than I'd planned, but we might as well get up now." "OK," I say. He starts shaving and I pull the shades aside and pull up the blind: sky is cloudy but partly blue. Hurt two right fingernails opening the outer of two windows to see how cold it is out, and the outer window isn't firmly closed. Cool and moist, probably jacket weather, and I may start wishing I'd brought a flannel long-sleeved shirt. At least rain doesn't seem imminent. Feel slightly low now at 8:30, ready to wash and dress and get down to breakfast. Decide to make a "permanent temporary" bag out of the plastic bag the Vic Episcopal Museum put its guidebook into: with pills and slippers and dop kit and fish oil and passport and sudoku and reading-book and driver's license, so that I can just get to it without fuss, and also leave more room in my increasingly paper-stuffed black bag. 8:50AM: Ken's incessant throat-clearing implies it's time for breakfast: at least he doesn't do it so much in public. Take off undershirt and stuff it into black bag as a last thought, taking jacket down to breakfast in case the dining room requires it by being cold. It was certainly better when it was always predictably too hot. Breakfast 8:55-9:25AM: decent fruit, poor cheeses, OK charcuterie, two cups of cocoa, a glass of peach juice and a glass of water. Up to try to shit. Do so satisfactorily; now only my teeth feel fuzzy; should leave out my tooth stuff. 9:38: On final packing, Ken finds he CAN bring the car around the block the SHORT way and park in front of the door for luggage loading. Leave room about 9:45AM. 9:54AM: Bill includes 11.50€ parking, SHE says; Ken says it's his PANTS, and he may be billed later on his card, as he's signed an agreement that states this may be possible. Cars are blocking HOTEL entrance, but then he comes in the OTHER way. Leave, and get to Ripoll at 10:54, getting lost in the tiny town streets, following circles the wrong way, and at last driving WAY down the main street to FINALLY find a parking place. Ken SCREAMS at me that I should have taken the PREVIOUS parking place, which was much bigger, which I didn't see, and then he starts screaming about how I'm parking in the SMALLER space, so I simply get out of the car and hand the key to him, saying, "It's your job to do the parking." He looks at me as if I've gone mad, but finally sighs and takes the key and moves back to the larger spot, in which he starts to park WAY into the street, and for some reason (I asked him TWICE why he didn't take the larger space, and he REFUSED to say ANYTHING about it) goes back to the SMALLER space and parks WAY into the street, then tries fixing it, and ends up JUST BARELY legal. We walk back to the church to find people going through the door to Mass. I ask Ken to hold open the door so I can take a picture, and he refuses. An older woman comes from the ticket agency to say we need to buy a ticket. I take pictures of the old facade inside the new facade, and then look around to find he's IN the church of the Monestir de Santa Maria de Ripoll. I go around to the right and find him in the Capella de Sant Eudald, #413 at 11:05. Go up the aisle, doing some live recording of the music (as I'd done an earlier recording of the bells just before 11AM), and look at the chart to see I can take the Tomba del Bisbe Morgades i Gili, #416 at 11:08. Then out, down to the Cloister, #417 at 11:10, Ken not there, and outside to find him gone. He finally comes out of the church, asking where I was. I want to go into the information office next door, in the Palau something, and he grumbles and follows me in, ignores the many exhibits there, and goes back to the car. We get OFF at 11:15. Leave Monastir, mostly unseen due to Mass, at 11:30, having taken pictures anyway. We finally get to the town that contains Sant Joan de les Abadesses to find the main parking lot closed, and though I tell him to move the barricade, which he does, a passerby warns us that we could be getting a ticket by parking here, though there are no OTHER parking lots available, and a local festival has the town square full of people. We just catch the end of a parade led by a band that's followed by two enormous (twelve feet tall?) walking statues, which I later take a picture of in the square after the band stops and we've managed to park. We drive a long way away from Sant Joan, after numerous parking DISASTERS, and at one point he says, "Since you're driving, you have control," and I INSIST that we've gone too FAR from Sant Joan, and if I go BACK toward town we'll find a parking place. He's furious but remains silent. I round another IMPOSSIBLE corner and find two cars that are ready to leave! Park in ONE spot, but then the OTHER spot is at the end of the row of cars, and is much better. 12:20 into Sant Joan de les Abadesses. Come in through a side door, pass the entry to the Museum, which Ken says isn't the entrance, but I glance in and see a cute guy at a cash register and say, "Here it is." Go in, paying half-price because it's Sunday, Ken 1.5€, me 1€. I go in first without the guide, just taking pictures: #425 at 12:25 of Altarpiece of Sant Augustine, #429-437 at 12:30 tries at Sacred Mystery from the 13th Century, Descent from the Cross and "in the forehead of Christ, a sacred wafer was saved intact for seven centuries." #436 at 12:30 of Saint Mary the White, Gothic altarpiece from 14th Century, #440-444 of various items in the Museum, such as the 18th Century Baroque altarpiece, the altarpiece of Saint Sebastian, lots of the Choir Stall Arm Rests, from the Renaissance, a closeup of the Rain Cape, and other things. Then look through the brochure and decide to go BACK into the Monastery, taking #447 at 12:46 of Sepulcher of Devout Miro, "14th Century Gothic sculpture of exceptional quality." Then decide I need at least ONE of the Cloister, in Catalan Gothic style (all with VERY thin columns) #448 at 12:54. THEN #449 AFTER Abadesses 12:56. #450 Palau de L'Abadia 12:57. Then an absolute series of TORTURES to Camprodon: find the way back to the car, since the way we entered the cloister is now closed. Get to the main street after a number of terrible turns, and ask some guy, "Which way to Camprodon?" He goes around corner and comes back to point to the left. We go down that street, but come to a sign marked "dead end." Obviously, we have to turn right. But THAT is the dead end! Try to turn around, AGONIES from Ken and me, and at LAST manage to BACK out after Ken is SCREAMING at me to stop, I'm about to hit this or that wall. We FINALLY get out and go down (having seen a car come OUT of the "dead end") the "dead end" road to come to ANOTHER T-intersection. Go to the left to find a circular dead end! We're HYSTERICAL: I'm laughing madly as we swing around the circle, and Ken asks a group how to get to Camprodon. I hear "Straight ahead," though I DO hear, "You have to go back to the Monastery." So I go down the OTHER arm of the T, which IS straight ahead---and it's another dead end, this one too narrow to swing around in! I bump car up onto curb, with an AWFUL scrape on the front as we back off (Ken assures me it's OK; I think it sounds like a DISASTER, but I look at it later to find it's NOT damaged, though the front "bumper" is VERY low and dirty), and go down the ONLY road left, the road we CAME IN ON. FINALLY find the right way to Camprodon, go around a few false circles, and at LAST Ken asks someone how to get to Hotel Maristany, and this adorable young man starts talking to Ken, says many streets are closed due to the fair, and then decides to GET IN AND LEAD US THERE, while Ken adoringly calls him "Our Saviour." We go here and there and through a tunnel, and finally drive through the gate of the hotel! We thank him effusively, he smiles VERY kindly and gets out, and then I try to go AROUND building but a Jeep is blocking the BACK. Try to BACK out, and get into a HORRIBLE mess: Ken alternately screaming, "Stop, you're going to hit the WALL." "Stop, don't you see the POST?" "WAIT, you're running over the FLOWERS!" Finally, again, I just get out and tell him HE has to do it. First we go check in, find the parking lot is just up the block, and we'd gotten to Hotel at 1:55, but took to 2:02 to get to room 101. Ken parks in lot, and we immediately walk (with the Patron coming out to show us EXACTLY which way to walk to "town," since her waving her hands at the desk didn't satisfy Ken) to town, passing many closed places, and I fear we may have to end up in some touristy tacky central plaza place, but we see a woman with an apron standing before her establishment, and I pass to read the magical word "Pizzeria" over the doorway. Ken asks if I want to go in, and I say I certainly DO! We're in to find one other English-speaking couple at a table, and get a lovely menu of pizzas at 9€ each, and I take the "ou" of a Caprizio with "pernil(ham)-ou-chapagnon(mushrooms)-fromatge" to mean "OR," as in French, and ask if I can have a Caprizio CON pernil and mushrooms and cheese, and it turns out that OU is EGG in Catalan, and I'd CERTAINLY like a pizza with ham and egg and mushrooms and cheese! Ken finds sangria with cava, and we get that, too. Well, it's just heaven! The pizza has a thin, crisp crust, the ingredients are wonderful and copious, but it needs just a TOUCH of salt and, in heaven, garlic. I ask for garlic, they don't have dried, but she volunteers to chop up some FRESH garlic for us. ABSOLUTELY, after we establish that it won't be TOO much trouble. It's just perfection (which I make clear, through Ken, to her, that it only INCREASES the basic perfection of the pizza to START with). The bill is 9€ for each pizza, 10€ for the sangria, and 2€ IVA, or whatever, so it's a perfect 30€, which I pay with my credit card. Feel just marvelous as we leave at 3PM and make our way back to the hotel at 3:10, for Ken to be ASSURED that we can get to Beget and EASILY find our way back to Avenue Maristany for the hotel. To car at 3:30, easily find the road to Beget, and take off in PERFECT weather: sapphire-blue sky, white-gray and dark-gray clouds, grass-green fields, pine-green forests, butterscotch tiles on isolated casas in the woods, no one behind me, no one ahead of me, cruising along at 30 kph, nothing to worry about except swinging from side to side on the curves and occasionally making sure I'm on the side when someone passes: more often they pull over and let us have the road to pass. We both agree that this is absolutely marvelous, and aren't we just as lucky as can be. I remarked at lunch that I've already had TWO wonderful things today: 1) taking charge of finding a parking place and FINDING one close to where we wanted to be, and 2) having pizza for lunch. Take #458 on getting to Beget at 4:20, great view of old church and tile-roofed houses, despite the fact that most of the PEOPLE visible are tourists. #466 "waterfall" in Beget 4:42. Leave 4:55 after walking a few of the VERY rough-rocky streets. He doesn't want to go toward Oix because none of the books recommend it, but he agrees to Mollo, which we do go to, but it's not that great to #468 at 5:36. Sun is beginning to lower to the point where it affects my eyes while driving. Km 4751 to hotel 5:58PM. To room 101, Ken agreeing to elevator, at 6:06PM. I lie down, just exhausted, taking off shoes and socks and pants, and doze off; jerking awake at 6:50 at what I think is a call from Ken for dinner, saying, "OK," and he says he didn't say anything, and "do you often have auditory hallucinations?", and I admit that I do: it may be someone knocking at the door, it may be the phone ringing, it may be someone (even someone dead, like Mom) calling my name. I lie, thinking, with a slight headache, that it would probably be best NOT to go back into a doze, but to get up and DO something. So I'm up at 7:05, pee, start typing at 7:12, coordinating notes I'd taken on maps, and at 7:56 Ken says that it's five minutes to dinner. I stop typing and dress in exactly what I wore all day, and get down for a lengthy (and misunderstood) request from Ken for the weather for tomorrow, and we get across the cold patio into the warm-enough dining room, to be the only diners for at least an hour, before two other couples join us, and get served an ENORMOUS salad of lettuce, tomato, tuna, unripe avocado, carrot strips, delicious melon, apple, walnuts, olives, and pimiento, which we eat about half of. She doesn't have the 22€ wine that Ken wants, extols the virtues of "more expensive wines," having insisted that we want a red with her special chicken preparation, and finally he gets one for 32€ that's pretty awful, and I just swallow anything like pride and insist that I like COLD wine and could I please have ice cubes with my wine. She brings them, just after my second request for the mantiquilla for the good rolls. The ice definitely improves the wine, which I have a lot of, and the cepes and chicken are actually quite good, though Ken is amused when I ask, "I wonder who gets the GOOD parts (like the legs and thighs and breast)?" But the combination of dark and light (including the "oyster") meat and rich cepe sauce is quite good, and we end with an enormous flan that neither of us can finish. Back to room at 9:20, COLD enough that I put my jacket on. Start typing right away at this RICH-in-detail day, and finish at 10:04PM, as Ken has finished surfing through the TV channels (having gotten a printout of tomorrow's weather at the dinner table), some of them at a VERY loud volume, and he says snottily, "Well, I'm not going to change the volume just because the stations' volumes change." Again, if I would do this, he'd have a cat (of which there are a LOT of: in town, on the road, in Beget, in Molle). Warm now in my jacket, my flashlight comforting Ken because the electricity will go out "for the entire area" from 3-7AM this morning, and he KNOWS he'll be wanting to pee at least once during these hours. He's in bed, seemingly ready for sleep much before his usual hour after dinner. I'm feeling VERY full, slightly headachy, but glad that we don't have breakfast until 9AM tomorrow, for which I've already ordered a hot chocolate and Ken "French" breakfasts for the two of us, included in the rate. Tired now, and sore of back from sitting on the side of my bed typing, because my chair is occupied by my bag while Ken uses HIS chair as a place to read and to go through his innumerable e-mails to solidify the schedule for tomorrow, already changed from taking the 9:30AM rack railway to taking the 11:10AM one, meaning we can leave here at our leisure after breakfast and take time to get to our last one-star in Spain in Le Seu tomorrow. I'm totally written out (this MUST be a record-long day!) now at 10:09PM, wishing I could have brushed my teeth while the TV blared. At least I'll have LOTS of time for my dream-transcription tonight. DID brush my teeth, hang up my clothes, pee, and type these final notes until 10:24AM, ready for a cool, comfortable night's sleep. 11:55PM: Think I hear Ken say, "Second!" And AGAIN I jump to get up, to find that it's just my imagination.
MONDAY, 9/15/08: 3:55AM: Wake to find that all the apartment's lights are off, but street lights outside shine in brightly. Take the flashlight into the john, pee, and type dream. Finish typing, flashlight in mouth, at 4:02AM. Wake, probably sometime after 5AM, with a second dream, which I don't bother to get up to record, and then again at 7:53AM, with a third dream. Ken is also awake, saying he's going to get up and take a shower, and I say I'm going to pee. Actually have a decent shit, a relief, also, and start typing my dreams at 8:01AM. Type to 8:17AM, bed cover draped over my shoulders to ward off the coolth of the room, sky blue above; warm enough in the bathroom to sit on the john without any clothing at all, but cooler in the bedroom with the surrounding windows. Ken finishes his shower and I think about washing my face and dressing for the day---he insists we have to be packed before breakfast at 9AM. I feel slightly woozy, this time from OVERsleeping, having gotten surely over nine hours' sleep for the first time in weeks. Monday, in exactly seven days (some of them very long) I'll be back in lovely home, doing what I want to do when I want to do it: TRUE luxury. 8:36AM: Wash face and glasses, and dress in ONLY short-sleeved shirt and blue jacket, hoping that I won't be freezing on the rack railway later, but I'm depending on the sunlight to warm the air enough so that I'll be warm enough. Ken reads from his book that this hotel, including dinner and breakfast, is only 75€ for the two of us, saying it's the best hotel in this whole area, so things are clearly cheaper up here out of the urbanized area. He adds that, per the rack-rail prices, we are now considered to be off-season, which might help with the rates of everything. Finish typing at 8:39AM, ready for breakfast, which isn't ready until 9AM, so I'll have to listen to Ken's clearing his throat five hundred and fifty-seven times. And remind myself that I can spend some "down time" proofreading all this! In fact, why not start file 1 now. Proofread up to 9/1/08 (for FIND) to 8:55AM. Breakfast 8:58-9:20, check out 9:30, leave 9:40, after Ken's "I prefer to put my bags in the CAR." Back to Ripoll (after two turnarounds) and there's seemingly NO way past the town. Stop at gas station at 10:10. To railway at 10:35, parking FIRST in "disabled" section, then deciding to move it. MY ticket is 13.85€, too expensive for what I later described as a "4 out of 10" in rankings of cog railway spectacularities. I sit on bench at 10:44 and look at guides of area. Huge crowds of groups press onto train at 11:01, one guide trying to reserve the entire car for HIS group, getting a grand telling-off by ANOTHER guide, who insists SHE takes more groups up than HE does and KNOWS you can't reserve a car for a group. Everyone laughs. Up EXACTLY 11:05-11:45, with stops at two intervening stations even leaving some standing in aisle. Don't get off at top, but almost everyone else does, so I can bounce from side to side on the way down, taking whatever pictures of mountaintops, rolling streams, stands of pines, piles of rocks, villages, and scenic vistas I can. (Too bad I couldn't capture the bald eagle that swooped down directly over the car on the way toward La Seu.) Pictures in station, still in valley, to #484. Down 11:56-12:38, having been up to 1900 meters at maximum. #496 includes helicopter at top right at 12:23. Try Queralts pictures to #502. Stop for lunch 1:23 at Hotel Gran Termes La Collada right at the top of the road, when we thought we weren't going to find a reasonable place for lunch early enough to digest before our 8:30 last Spanish one-star restaurant tonight. We have (Ken's inspired choice) Santa Claus Beer, "The strongest lager in the world," very like Guinness, and I have a hamburger and Ken sausages with assorted vegetables, ketchup, and fries under a fried egg, to 2:15, watching all the motorcyclists coming out of their steel helmets and leather headgear to blonde women and crew-cut men. Along a wonderful road with VERY little traffic (after I managed to pass the Alicante bus that cut off the views ahead for a number of kilometers), and rather dull views of farmland, except for a few peaks in the distance with frills of snow under southeast ridges, and another with distinct snow covering its peak. We decide it would be a kick to go north from Puigcerda to Llivia, a Spanish enclave separated from Spain, surrounded by France (which seemed to mark its border with a bunch of flags, but they may have been flown by the campground right at the border), but there was really nothing there, and I drove up road after higher road to get to a cul-de-sac and had to turn around and come back. AGAIN, blessedly, the day warmed and remained clear. Trouble getting into La Seu, going around a circle twice to make sure we were going in the right direction, and he kept trying to find the names of the streets, and I glanced ahead and said, with a perfect ENGLISH accent, "Oh, there's a nice (not 'niece') restaurant," and Ken shouts: "That's the hotel!" I park right in front at 4PM, we check in, he finds where the garage is and insists I come along to help him park. We go around three blocks, find the closed door, he inserts the room key, the door S-L-O-W-L-Y opens, and we're informed by sign that we go down a floor, going around the entire building before finding a SECOND door (Ken moaning and groaning at every turn) that goes down AGAIN, this time to a perfectly EMPTY set of spaces, at which point he demands I get out of the car and guide him to backing into a space right at the door for easy exit tomorrow. Go back to room at 4:19, unpack only a slight bit before Ken and I go down to ask directions to the Cathedral and Museum, connected, and go across the streets, where he doesn't want the Audioguide but I do, and start in the Museum with some good pieces, but the best ones were in the basement rooms, where I started taking pictures even though they were forbidden. Ah, also they had one of only twenty-five copies of the Beatus of some monk from the 8th Century, copied in the 10th Century, for which they had an illuminating (HA!) video presentation. Ken went through fast, later saying he was just tired, but I got engrossed by hearing ALL the Audioguide numbers, including those that said "Press the green button for more information on this piece." Much, much information, many pieces like the silver sarcophagus and the 26 shoe-boxed bishops unlike anything I've seen before. Then to St. Michael's, where they started talking about a laser show that clearly wasn't present, then to the Cathedral (all this for 3€) to take lots of pictures, with lots of explanations that I was frankly too tired to follow. Out to the cloister to slavishly listen to ALL 35, or however many, Audiotape recordings on the machine, return it, retracing my steps with some trepidation, since MANY more shops were now open than when we had come across during siesta hour, and ALSO fearing I may shit my pants! Get to the elevator, thankfully there, and to the room at 6:17, Ken answering quickly, and I throw my stuff on the bed and dash to the bathroom to blast out a lot of gas and not much matter, leading Ken to suggest I might want to take Imodium, but I countered, almost in jest, that I could take another acetaminophen with codeine, since my foot was STILL hurting. Even now as I type, my stomach doesn't feel QUITE right, but I won't take anything before dinner for fear of REALLY messing it up, and I CERTAINLY don't want to be constipated again. Lie down, Ken talking a mile a minute after showing off our closed balcony on the main street, and get up at 6:50 to start typing, catching up to date at 7:25PM, still an hour to dinner. So I'll go back to proofreading, deciding to keep my progress on the expense sheet so I'll have it there at all times. Proof to 8:08 to 9/9; hearing on TV that Lehman goes bankrupt! Do I have it??! Dress and leave 8:20PM, trying NOT to think I may have lost $50,000 in Lehman Brothers! Taxi in plain car to El Castel de Ciutat, where we have (for Ken, good; for me, mediocre) a one-star meal with wine for 225€. Starts with a glass of champagne-like cava that Ken fusses about (whether we want a half-glass or a full glass), and I just say, "I'm willing to go with whatever happens." Two "apperitivos" (amuse bouches): first a beetroot square that Ken refuses, very beety in taste, with monkfish slices on top, and then a "soup" of tomato puree with some seafood sting to make it not that great. The cherry atop the foie paté (though it said "foie GRAS") was almost as good as the paté, from which I extracted some kind of rind, and then a tendon, which shouldn't have been inside at all. Another listed appetizer I forget, then we had a John Dory in a "gelled bouillabaisse," rather strange fishy taste again, with two tubular boiled potatoes that Ken just RAVED about: "Possibly the best potatoes I ever ate," that leave me absolutely cold. Then (they wouldn't substitute the sweetbreads for my meat because "the serving is so big," reminding me unfavorably of L'Auberge de l'Ill's serving of the entire GLAND on the plate, so maybe I'm lucky, Ken suggests, that I DON'T get it. The lamb chop is very tasty, though the steak is a bit tough, and the surroundings don't do very much, nor do the paired wines, though I liked the Tokai with the foie. Then the cheese course, a few relatively tasteless starts for my six and Ken's five, but the blue, though dry, is tasty with a moderating bit of butter on a roll, and the special "hot" cheese is nice with the jelly near it. No wine with this, since we still have a bit of the red, which gets tastier and tastier as my drunken evening goes on: the full moon and my need to forget about the Lehman bankruptcy (?) inclines me to "remember and tell" Ken about Carl S., Jack V., and a few other fond memories from a now-past sexuality. He really doesn't appreciate any of it, more interested in the accents of the Swiss-German couple. Desserts aren't memorable: a martini glass with some sweet at the bottom and a variation of peach (the preparation was good, but the peach ITSELF, sadly, was relatively tasteless) on top. The second, well, I just forget. Oh, the FIRST apperitivo came with a fishy FOAM on top, which I didn't think went with ANYTHING, and Ken was inclined to agree. Only we four shared the favored tables looking down at La Seu, and much later a trio had drinks or some food outside, Ken could see, but then they vanished, so I described it as "Melba crowds," meaning FEW people, and Ken ended up wondering how they could stay open. I suggested they were empty because it was Monday, when most people think restaurants are closed, which Ken said would bring more people here, but I, contrarily, thought it would keep people away because they weren't in "the habit" of dining out on Mondays. Again emphasis on the wonderful full moon that rose through the dinner, and the THICK thumbs on the otherwise forgettable waiter, and the unbelievably perky English of the darker-haired of the two waitresses, who did NOT delay our desserts, as Ken feared Claudia (the Swiss-German waitress), talking with the couple, may have been the cause of the delay in our desserts, but she wasn't, as the other had the responsibility for them. The Swiss-German couple at next table intrigue Ken (though he doesn't seem to intrigue them), and the meal isn't that great, AND we forgot to get our menus from the meal (and I tell Ken SHE will bring them down and leave them at the desk, and Ken says, "In your dreams," and I say, "Yes!"). When we ask for a taxi, she says it's difficult here, and SHE will drive us down to the hotel. We can hardly believe it (also since it tears her away from her fellow-countrymen from Switzerland) (though she can STILL rush back and give them their bill), but she brings us back by 11:11PM, me happy that my credit card still works (I'm roughly 400€ ahead of Ken, but it's still EARLY if something goes wrong with my card). Type this to 11:20, and I still have to face my stuff-loaded BED! 11:54PM: I've brushed my teeth thoroughly, part of the time watching Ken flick through TV, partly showing a "suffer/body/sex" Pina Bausch-type "ballet," and then he shuts it off, and then he shuts the door to the bathroom in which I'm finishing my teeth. He puts the air conditioning on, which makes it FAR too cold in the room, and when I pee the toilet doesn't quite flush, but it stops and we hope it cures itself. Full and wined from dinner, no idea when breakfast will be, and I might as well say it's tomorrow as I get to bed around midnight.
TUESDAY, 9/16/08: 5:28AM: Up to pee. Think I MUST have had a dream, but can't remember any. Wonder if I could have done anything to protect any Lehman investment had I not been on a trip. Maybe bonds are insured by the FDIC and I'll get my money back anyway? Only seven days left on the trip: by this time next week I'll have been HOME for maybe four hours! What a RELIEF it will be! Only SIX more hotel rooms to move into. 7:32AM: Finally have a dream I remember, and raise facemask to see Ken coming out of the bathroom. I'm in to pee and type dream. Type dream to 7:37AM. Pee; toilet now working somewhat. 8:26AM: Do BRIEF Actualism session and figure I want to summarize more of last night's dinner, absent the menu we requested (which still, "in my dreams," will be waiting for us at the desk downstairs). Try to remember some of Ken's crazinesses: insisting on skimming through TV channels with the volume on too loud, incessantly clearing his throat and farting loudly, yet closing the bathroom door on my tooth-cleaning noises. I probably should take a shower, but I don't think I smell, and I don't have the energy, so I'll try to leave it for tonight. It's now 8:43AM, and I've given Ken the chance (leaving the bathroom door slightly ajar) to say that he's awake, but he hasn't come around yet. His three pillows act as a bulwark against anything I do. Even against his leaving the bathroom door open so that the entire bedroom is essentially bathed in the bathroom light. Now he's moving? 8:49AM: Wash my face and comb my hair; still no Ken. I'm happy to report that, though there's still a red spot and a SLIGHT swelling, my boil seems in abeyance; AND, maybe at last?, my right heel is actually OK for some small moments coming to and from the bathroom. Oh, forgot night pills AGAIN! I do sudoku until Ken gets me out of the bathroom at 9:03, saying he "should" get up. Check itinerary: next days nicely only sightseeing in mountains, with a few specific vistas on side routes. Good time to relax before final two days of Eugenie Les Bains and return flight hassle. To full breakfast 9:30-10: hard-boiled egg, half undercooked sausage link, bowl of cereal, two cups tepid chocolate, an apple, three-quarters of an enormous croissant with butter and a square of cheese, and a glass of orange juice with my pills. AH, another Ken-ism: he INSISTS on complaining in ALMOST EVERY restaurant, no matter how high- or low-class, that they should play more SPANISH, particularly CATALONIAN, music, totally ignoring any wait-staff's obvious impossibility of changing it. But he keeps ON saying it, insisting that this will NOT be the case in France: they'll play FRENCH music. I doubt it. Finish my apple up here, per Ken's suggestion: "While I sit on the john," as he puts it. Type this to 10:03AM, having scoped out a place he can park the car while we load the luggage, which he will undoubtedly find fault with. It ends up that a guy from the HOTEL takes him over at 10:19 and DRIVES him out and to a parking place three doors from the hotel. We load up and leave at 10:30. I take videos of MAYBE a bald eagle and what I'd HOPED to be cowbells and moos at 11:40. Stop in Tremp 12:49, but can't get into the church to see the famous statue. Lunch at Restaurant Raco del Mos 1:05-2PM, poor open-face-sandwich-type "pizza" with reasonably decent red sangria. #534 Tremp fountain. Outside Raco del Mos 2:01PM. In L'Espui for bar for key, as directed by helpful lady, and take 3-4 pictures, last of outside to 3:49 and #541, and BACK (INSISTS Ken) to La Poble de Segus at 3:40, to Sert to Hotel Pesset (outside, but, I thought, Passet somewhere, but I couldn't find it again) at 4:15. Lie DOWN 4:30, but get out of bed at 5:30 to drive 5:32-7:15 to #554. On the road to La Seu, which we could have taken had we not chosen the more picturesque circuitous route. End with taking pictures of grasses glowing golden in sun. Back to hotel and Ken wants a drink, so I look at the bar list and choose the cheapest gin, Giro, at 2€, at which the waitress rolls up her eyes, with, I ask for, Schweppes, which is ON the menu, but it ends up as Fanta Limon, at 1.5€. Well, who am I to complain. Ken falls in love with the back muscles of one of the British motorcyclists who may not even be staying in this hotel, but who are drinking beer and taking up three-quarters of the space in the bar. I get lots of ice in my drink, Ken ends up with some semblance of what he wanted, and we don't even have to sign for it because, as Ken says, "We're these two old Americans," and no one denies it. He checks the menu just before 8PM to find his Spaghetti Bolognese on the menu, and the bartendress assures him that he WILL be able to order his conejo (rabbit) that was on the lunch menu. I say I'm going to take a shower, which I do in a wonderful facility 7:50-8:15. Change underwear and actually get out my JEANS, since he keeps reading that the MAXIMUM temperature, at altitude tomorrow, will be 9 degrees! Hope I keep warm enough, what with the car heater, and hotel heating, and not much need to be outside either. NOW Ken calls me into the bathroom to realize that what I thought were just decorative, maybe, scallion leaves, were actually "incense" sticks. AND he turns on TV to say that it looks like rain the day after tomorrow, but nothing other than that. I'm hit with a mysterious barrage of sneezes that drives Ken MAD, and I VERY pointedly ask if there were ANY of his natural noises (in which I include burps, farts, sneezes, throat-clearings, and wheezes) that I EVER complained about, so what RIGHT has he to complain about MY natural noises, DAMN him! Down to dinner in my new jeans, Ken in his jacket, of course the only one, and he orders his rabbit and spaghetti to start, and I have what I THOUGHT was going to be cream of zucchini, and turned into some conch-shaped pasta in a chicken broth, not BAD, but not exactly what I was expecting. He, to indulge his taste, asks for a glass of red with his spaghetti, and a glass of white with his rabbit, and the poor secondary waitress happens to bring RED, which she thinks is rosé. She finally brings my bottle, which even KEN admits is better than either his red or his white. We ALMOST finish the bottle. I have lots with my reasonably good pork under Tupi cheese, which I THOUGHT was the strong cheese from last night, but is simply some version of a milder Roquefort. He actually HAS some of my rosé, we joke about the poor trainee waitress and he's absolutely CRUEL about the plainness of our first waitress, whom I think looks a little like---Carmela [Edie Falco] from The Sopranos. Which he has never seen. Back up at 9:42PM, me quite soused: half a sangria at lunch, a gin and lemon at the bar, and surely more than a half-bottle of 14% rosé at dinner. Anyway, I type this to 10:07PM, quite ready for bed, Ken panting in the background for whatever reason, and my typing degenerating by the second. Decide just to undress and get into bed: what else is there to do? Our hotel tomorrow is 1267 meters, "which is significantly higher than here, for example, which is 720 meters." My heel is feeling blessedly better, almost not entering into my consideration until I SORT of feel it as I'm pressing on the accelerator. But on off periods I don't even bother to put the "arch support" of the quadrupled Odor-Eater into my walking shoes. Let's just hope that they SURVIVE! Finish now at 10:10PM, careful not to stand up under my corner of the dormer, which could cause serious damage to my HEAD! 10:20PM: I remember the word PUNK (which, of course, Ken doesn't believe) for the sticks, and he brings an ashtray into the bathroom, where I light one, and he puts it into a slot in the hairdryer, where it works perfectly. Feel great about that. Sort things around, take my night pills, organize my morning pills, and have everything on my night table; close the tiny shutters over our dormer windows for perfect darkness, and really prepare for bed, though dinner only ended at 9:45PM and it's only 10:22PM NOW! So WHAT! Well, at 10:25PM, since Ken's obviously not going to bed soon, decide to start another Times puzzle. Work on old 8/16 Times puzzle, making real progress, to 11:11PM, and Ken's asleep, so I decide to get to bed, shutting out most lights. He then gets up and shuts off his own light at 11:15PM. I get to sleep quite fast.
WEDNESDAY, 9/17/08: 12:37AM: Wake somewhat shakily, bump my head a bit anyway, and pee. The punk melted part of the hairdryer head. MY head aches slightly from too much wine. No remembered dreams, but I think I had them. 2:45AM: Wake with a fearful headache and a detailed, multi-episode dream. Finish typing at 2:55AM, ready to take two aspirin to get rid of my awful headache from the terrible three-quarter bottle of rosé with dinner last night, as well as the gin and lemon before dinner, and the sangria at lunch, just too much for one day. Still counting down on the hotels left in Spain: two, and the hotels left in France, three. I'll be home on Monday and this is Wednesday! My nose is slightly bloody from picking around its very dry interior. Drink two glasses of water and pee a second time by 2:58. 6:29AM: Pee and type second dream to 6:40AM, head feeling better from the aspirins; nose still dry. 8:21AM: Up, feeling actually reasonably decent. Lie for a while thinking of all kinds of dreary possibilities for today, the rest of the trip, and the return home, so I decide to get up. Shit a competent shit, wash my face, comb my hair, and get out at 8:28 to put on my socks and shorts, and Ken asks if I've been in the bathroom yet, and I say I've finished. Wispy clouds in the sky, but lots of blue, also. Cool, but not cold. Type to 8:33 and start dressing for breakfast. 9AM: Essentially finish 9/18 puzzle: need to get the name of an actor from my movie book when I get home. FILE the damn thing so I won't obsess over it more than usual. Ken is clearing his THROAT more than usual, surely!! Breakfast 9:15-9:40, decent enough, the homely waitress REALLY working ALL the time. Up to brush teeth and do final packing to 10AM, ready to leave: have to get lip ice out of the bottom of my bag and CHARGE BATTERIES tonight. Check out at 10:05. Drive through the small town of Sort, not much there, and over quiet roads to #555 of Lladros at 10:45 down one of Ken's "in-and-out" scenic roads. To #561 of Tavascan at 11AM. 12:35PM into Alos D'Isil. Get turned around by construction, having to retrace part of some route that we followed in the wrong direction until Ken found that out, and I had to turn around---at one point he shouted that we'd passed a sign on the highway that he MUST see, shouting, "BACK UP, BACK UP," and even though the road isn't busy, I'm so concerned with showing him the sign that I don't look where the rear is going and crash VERY lightly into the road-guard iron. When Ken and I looked at it later, there it was: a seven- or eight-inch-long crease of white in the black bumper. A THIRD: the crushed side, the "dagger mark" on the front bumper, and now this, all on the right. He has a hotel restaurant selected in some town, but when we drive in, about 12:15, we find they don't open until 1PM. Finally get to the top of the Puerto de la Bonaigua, at 2072 meters, and there's the Cap del Port Restaurant at 1:53, so we stop, look through the limited, expensive menu, and Ken has a salad and sausage platter and beer, and I have "habitas," which turn out to be mushy little green-white lima-bean-shaped beans, with greasy bits of ham and a fried egg on top, with such grease that I fear I might become sick from it, and a poor San Miguel beer and a tasty Frigga, or something, vanilla ice cream with tiny bits of macadamia nut, all for an astounding 39.50€, over $56 for a truly mediocre lunch! Leave at 2:50PM. Straight down hill to Hotel Lacreu, right on the road in Salardu at 3:15. Unpack a bit, and Ken wants to see the only church of three that are still open (the Arties church had been open, but had then been robbed, so it was now closed), and he INSISTS on walking, though I feared reactivating the pain in my right heel, which it did, DAMN! Look through the church, take pictures and video, look at the charming fist-sized faces at the ends of the eaves on the 11th Century church, then at the modern graveyard and mausoleum. He'd like to watch the town "come to life" at 5PM, so we look for a hotel with a bar in which to have a drink, but the only hotel IN the town is closed, so at 4:30 we walk back down the highway to our hotel to buy a bottle of Cordoniu cava and have the amiable waiter take us up to the 3rd-floor "upper room," open windows, open the cava, and talk with Ken about the Aranes (from the Aran Valley) dialect-language, which exists only here and in nearby France. We look again at the hummingbirds that LOVE the red flowers on the windowsills. He wants to drive to Arties, so we leave hotel at 5:25, HE driving, and go up the wrong road, circle back through a pedestrian walkway, park in the main plaza, look at various buildings, and find nothing open here (in fact, back at the hotel, when Ken asks about shops, he's told he'd have to go to Vilha for those). He's happy, in his walk, at least to have found the road to the highway, so we don't have to retrace any of the microscopic streets we used to GET here. [Forgot to note that yesterday, on drive, we filled tank with diesel for 50.74€/$71.95!] Back to hotel at 6PM, and I'm so worn out I take off all my clothes, after putting the batteries in to charge, and finding my lip ice and nose-Vicks, which I use, and lie down in my shorts looking at the perfectly conical tree-filled hill out my window. At 7:02 I'm chilly, even to an inner chill, so I pull back the covers and stay under them until 8:02, when I make it clear I'm awake and Ken starts talking, then searches through TV for the CNN that the list says is there, but it isn't. I'm then up to dress and find spare note cards and start typing at 8:32 and finish now at 8:55PM, ready for Ken to hector me into dressing for dinner at 9PM, while I was SURE I heard the clerk say that, no, the 8:30PM start was now in effect. Put on my undershirt to keep warm, my long-sleeved shirt, and my jeans and "good" black shoes just for the comfort. Astoundingly, the desk chair has RUBBER on the bottom of its legs, as revolutionary as last night's toilet paper in FRONT of one seated on the toilet. Down to dinner first at 9:02PM: vegetable soup, chicken leg, butter on cold boiled potatoes and tasteless fries, Ken's abysmal broccoli. I feel no need for the burger, but their melon is lovely: ripe, sweet, juicy, tastier than a honeydew. Good watermelon, and an assortment of local-cheese-based desserts, but the newest and best was yogurt mousse: VERY nice. A few tarts were good for a few bites; a nice selection of cashews and almonds and raisins, and we finished our cava, which I fear makes me feel overly drunk again, though we shared just over half a bottle. About a dozen others fill the room maybe a quarter full, the waitresses pulling the used dishes off the table with admirable swiftness. I really like the vanilla and chocolate ice creams, but Ken didn't care for them: he preferred the strawberry, [start file 4 at 9:52PM 9/17/08---I think this would be the equivalent of about file SEVEN on the AlphaSmart, so I'm glad I have THIS] which was OK. Up to undress and type this by 9:53PM. Add up the expenses, and without adding in Ken's $68 (+ taxi from JFK) advantage, I get a total of 3173.52€ spent by Ken and 3275.34€ spent by me, so we're PRETTY close to even at this point, except of course for Ken's frozen Visa card because of the automobile damage. Finish 8/17 Times puzzle by 10:58PM. Vicks up nose and take night pills and get to bed at 11:05PM. Fairly long time to get to sleep.
THURSDAY, 9/18/08: 1:04AM: Wake to pee and type dream to 1:13AM. Drink some water. 6:20AM: Had a dream before, but didn't bother to transcribe it. Now type dream 2 to 6:26AM. Wonder when file 8 will exceed its capacity and I'll have to start typing dreams in file 7. 7:59AM: Wake after a phalanx of dreams. To bathroom to type at 8:02AM. Amazed at the rush of images recorded: seemingly I'm anticipating my return to NYC with more anxiety than I'd thought. Finish typing at 8:12AM, expecting Ken to get up any minute and the day to start. Don't seem to need to shit. 8:20AM: But DO shit, almost adequately, and wash my face and comb my hair and decide to take a Valium (I have at least 6 left if I need more for the return trip) in case my dreams portend any anxiety feelings today, the last complete day in Spain before going into France tomorrow, having a two-star meal the next day, Eugenie-Les-Bains's three stars the following, and the return to NYC the next day. 8:25AM: #595 sunrise over Aran Valley. Ken wakes, asks, "How is it?" I say, "No sign of rain." Ken looks out and, perversely, says, "Well, I wouldn't say NO sign of rain." I say, "There may be signs of CLOUDS, but I see NO sign of RAIN." He goes into the bathroom and starts making his obscene sounds from both ends. Sun actually RISES at 8:27AM, shining directly in one window of our wonderful corner room with TWO windows. 8:40AM: #596 Unhola river sign for Ken. Pack neatly, well into being ready for day to start. 8:45AM: Having slept well over eight hours the previous two nights, I feel quite good, though obviously the two-hours' bed rest after each day's drive would contribute to a feeling of relaxation. Decide to wear my slippers to breakfast, taking my jacket (since I'm only wearing a short-sleeved shirt), confident as always that a day predicted to be cool and rainy won't turn out as indicated, and the car and buildings for lunch and dinner will be sufficiently warm. Always have an undershirt, a short-sleeved shirt under my long-sleeved shirt, and my jacket as an ultimate bulwark against cold. Happy to be in the "one hand" number of days to the end of the trip. Thumb is already-started today; first finger is Friday's move from Spain to France; second finger is Saturday's two-star restaurant; third finger is Sunday's three-star restaurant, and last finger is Monday's arduous transfer back to NYC, actually getting in on TUESDAY, European time, though still hours left before midnight in NYC on Monday. Then starts the post-vacation series of emergencies, piles of stuff to be handled, Times to be read and puzzles extracted for the NEXT trip (blissfully, the LAST trip planned for 2008; with 2009 still VERY much up in the air: 1) a possible spring Costa boat to the Persian Gulf with Shelley, depending on the itinerary, 2) SOMETHING, India most likely, with Ken in the fall, 3) Steve almost certainly with some far-north proposals, 4) Fred and Dale still in the running, but with absolutely no predisposing talk about any possible trip. But those four would make up the "required" four trips for 2009, a blessed relief from the "constant" trip-pressure of 2007 and 2008. And maybe my Valium has kicked in already and I'm feeling the floating feeling that "everything's OK, and going to BE OK, and all's well with the world"---particularly since it isn't raining and the sun's beaming in the window and the temperature outside isn't that bad at all. Ken's dressing, snuffling, clearing his throat, and still pantsless at 8:53AM, ready for the "Carolina-tourist-touted-yesterday" breakfast buffet waiting for us downstairs. GOOD breakfast 9-9:45: muesli, THICK new hot-chocolate mix, juice, fried egg, bacon, cheese, a taste of chocolaty nocella, lots of sweet melon, called frog-skin melon on a local shopping sheet, and a decent kiwi. Chatted with a Virginia couple about our trips, and the little clerk ran across the road to get a trio of maps and guides to museums in the vicinity. Type this to 9:49, preparing for another shit, maybe. 10AM: Good breakfast, tiny shit, brush teeth, pack lip ice and Vicks in shoulder bag, get umbrella out, put slippers in black bag, ready for shoes and final put-aways at 10:01AM. Check out at 10:10. At 10:30 we find that the good museum in Vielha is CLOSED 9/16-19! Poor Ken. #597-604 Vielha, with #601 the 12th Century Head of Christ de Mijaran. #607 Taull 12:04PM. First church there is St. Clement (with the tower, with two more flights of stairs, one ABOVE the bells, that Ken refused to climb), later #625-26 St. Joan, smaller, to 12:40. At 12:30, parking IN Taull, I drive into a space, taking up a space and a half, and intend to back up and repark, and I THINK I shift into reverse to back up, but I DON'T, and RAM into the wall, Ken ejaculating, me dumbfounded. I back up sheepishly, Ken gets out, and then I get out, to look at the damage, and see no real STRUCTURAL damage, but though the pointed [Ken points out St. Boil in the Michelin guide.] front to which the license plate was attached by two screws is still pointed, the license plate lying on the ground is decidedly FLAT: the impact must have BENT the point INWARD enough to pop the screws and release the plate. Ken says we've GOT to get to a garage to get it reattached. I guess so. Stop in a garage on the way out of Vielha when we drive back from Taull, but they have no screwdriver, though the attendant helpfully comes to the door and points down the road to a construction tractor with accompanying truck, and suggests that the truck driver might have a screwdriver. We drive down to the truck, Ken goes across to ask, I head into the bushes to pee, the driver DOES have a screwdriver, and even comes over to make sure it works. He puts in the first one, I'm on the other side and pry the screw that's misdirected because of a bend in the plate, and he reattaches it, flips it back and forth to show that it'll hold, and we thank him very much: Ken said he never would have THOUGHT of asking a truck driver for a screwdriver! He can't find any place for lunch, but as we approach Castellon de Sos, ONE enormous Freuhoff truck comes off a side road just in front of me, and I fall in behind him, and then ANOTHER enormous truck comes out of the side road, and at least for MOST of the following ten kilometers or so has the courtesy to stay WELL back, so that I didn't feel, nervously, like an American sandwich between two German trucks! I say we're getting off at Sos for lunch no MATTER where we eat, and at 2:05 we pull into the road next to Hostel Sositana, which turns out to have been one of the places Ken had WANTED to stop (only two places listed for the town, and one was a hotel without a restaurant), but the guide said it was CLOSED for a couple of weeks before 9/19, yet it was now OPEN. Get to the door to find a guy outside talking on a cell phone, and get inside to find a very attractive man with a black ponytail and perfect eyebrows eating alone at a table that I face. The paunchy waiter can only read us the menu from a Spanish list in his notebook, and I decide, from the choices, to have the moussaka, but then it turns out that it's a MENU, and we have to choose TWO courses! I just take a stab at "lomo," pork, and hope to survive. Ken gets a glass of wine but I just don't feel like more alcohol, so just have a bottle of agua con gaz. He serves two enormous portions of moussaka, and we get about halfway through and both of us just don't feel like eating any more. During this time, the guy outside, talking on ONE cell phone, dashes back inside to answer his SECOND cell phone on the table with his companion, the ponytail. THEN the ponytail talks THROUGH his entire meal on HIS cell phone, though Ken notes that this is one of the FEW cases in which he didn't CARE that he used the cell phone constantly. They both, later, drove off in a white truck from which the words "Solar Energy" had been whited out. The manager comes out to find that we've not even finished half our appetizer and has the mercy to say that we will NOT be obliged to eat the rest of the menu. Ken has some coffee while I pee and then pay the bill of 15€, maybe a bargain. At 2:40, leaving, Ken remarks about how slippery the rock-paved road is, and I look back and observe, "Particularly when you've just stepped in dog shit." He raises the bottom of his deeply corrugated shoes and sees all the crap embedded in the furrows and tries to get some out with a straw I find in a plant patch, but goes into the restaurant's john to do a better job. Comes out to slosh in some of the deeper puddles to wash the rest of it off. Then he says, as we're driving, "I could finish this off with some wet grass," but when I stop next to some wet grass, he tries to DENY he ever said it, then reluctantly gets out of the car to scrape around in the grass like a dog who's done his duty, and gets back in to say the grass is OK for scraping off dog shit provided you don't step in the dog shit that's in the grass already. 16.5 degrees on the car's temperature gauge at 2:45PM, I think the lowest I've ever seen it, yet I'm still perfectly comfortable in my single-layer short-sleeved shirt. Finally get to Gran Hotel Benasque at 3:20 (me seeing the sign, not him), where he ALSO insists that we're not going in the front, but I say that the entrance is obscured by trees. We punch the button for the entry gate and get a ticket, and there's a large empty parking lot, which makes me very happy. We check in, he unpacks while I wait for the drive to Ansiles just a kilometer down our road, and we park and walk through the town, which reminds me of a bastide: all walls on the outside, with house entrances on the inside, with one ENORMOUS house, with a tower, facing outward to one side, enclosing a huge garden on another, going across the road with another wing, and seeming to have included the church, whose entrance appears to have been at the foot of the Carrer de Egliese. I walk up a number of rocky roads just to see what the view would be, and it's almost a surreal setting, like Portmerion. We pass a few other tourists, but there's no sign of the 72 inhabitants, though some windows are partly open, many times in houses whose ADJACENT windows have obviously been boarded up. There from 3:54-4:20, at which time I suggest we TRY the road to Ainsa. It rains, and we come back to the hotel at 4:50. I sit on the balcony, then decide to start Insert D: 5:14PM: SO typical. I start typing this, then Ken answers the door to get his two spare pillows (sometimes three). I go toward the bathroom, but HE goes toward the bathroom. "Can I pee?" I ask. "Can I wash my hands?" he responds. I look at him aghast: does he think washing his hands takes priority over a pee? He answers my look with harshness: "It's TWO different ROOMS!" I'm astounded. "Then WHY did you ASK?" I beg. Pee. Come outside to find it starting to rain around the edges of our neat little balcony, so I move my chair toward the center, but the rain somewhat follows. I find it totally ironic that, MOST afternoons, we get to the hotel about 5PM and I'm totally wiped out: don't want to do anything but lie down for an hour or so. But TODAY, when I TRIED to get him to take the side trip to Ainsa, he made me promise we'd turn around if it started raining. I was rather depressed to see it raining in the hills toward which we were driving, but I hope against hope we can continue, but we can't. So the only day I FEEL like doing something, we CAN'T. He now interrupts my typing to tell me the hotel rates for the next three days: 49€ in Saint Bertrand, 81€ in Pau, and 170€ in Eugenie-Les-Bains, after I make the idiot mistake of saying I don't know the conversion factor, and of course he bats back that it's ALL in euros. I look into the sky and see dark silks of clouds drifting slowly leftward, revealing a background of stark white clouds. For most of the day, lowering clouds obscured some of the faces of the mountains; otherwise, we've had perfectly clear views of every mountain in sight. Construction sites and noises in the near distance mar the idyllic quality of the view from our first-floor balcony, but the sound of an overhead crane moaning back and forth made the emptiness of the streets of Ansiles, population 72, all the eerier. Ken said it was the sound, not the look, that made him call it "the alien." Maybe the Valium I took this morning has deadened my senses, but I'm not THAT excited that this is our last hotel in Spain. Not that I didn't get excited when Ken INSISTED I was using the outdated magnetic card when I tried to open the car-parking gate with it; I kept shouting that the OUTDATED card had a sticker with "102" on it, which was why I asked what our room number HERE was, and then saw the coincidence. But he KEPT insisting, and I almost stopped the car to pull out my wallet to SHOW him the old card, with the "102" tag on it, to PROVE that I was using the second card given us at the desk this afternoon. BUT, when I gave the card in to be "fixed," saying that it didn't work for the gate, she hastened to tell me that only the FIRST card worked for the room AND the gate, the SECOND card only worked for the ROOM. Ken, of course, said nothing to ease his insistence that I was wrong and HE was right. Well, now at 5:30PM (with roosters crowing in the distance and the SUN coming out from behind dark clouds) I figure to catch up with my notes for the day before I put MORE of them HERE. 6:18PM: Caught up with my notes (and WHY does the "end" button NOW send me to the PROPER end, when for the previous few days it would send me three lines [but only two backspaces] BELOW the last word, wherever on the line it was?) and think, at least, to mention here what has NOT happened: my stomach has remained true to me; my shits may not be perfect, but at least they suffice. NO more nausea, thank goodness. Ken said he felt tired a few days ago, but, having slept more than eight hours the last few nights, he's no longer complaining. I still feel it SOMEWHAT of a drag getting out of bed as many as three times a night to type out dreams, but just think of the QUANTITY of material it gives for someone to sort through after I've put EVERYTHING onto the website. Which reminds me I wanted to keep a list of visitors (which I think I actually DID, somewhere, didn't I?), starting with some guy from my previous trip, Piri, Tris's son-in-law, maybe Rita for a bit, maybe Fred, maybe someone I wrote the address to in a Christmas letter who hasn't mentioned it to me---though, sadly, I'm AGAIN reminded that I can't be hearing from Susan McMahon again. But now it's shifted again: the last line doesn't go to the bottom, and when I correct something above and go to "end" I again get it hanging below. Oh, well. Except for ONE brief tingle, there's been NO pressure to get back to NYC so I can jerk off at my leisure, which is really pretty sad after 22 days! I'm surely counting the number of days left, though when last night I calculated 96 hours left I figured it was a bit early to start going by hours. With all the bad luck with planes we had GETTING here, let's hope that our Pau-Paris-JFK flights will be easier. Now it's 6:26PM and I'm about written out. Will be a LOT of pages to type if every file is 12 pages: 48 (max) from files 1-4, 12 from file 8, maybe 4 from here, totaling 64! But it IS a 26-day trip. Though I'm heartened, even though we've both spent 3200€, or maybe $5000, with maybe $2000 spent earlier on plane and car, that's still "only" $7000, which for a 26-day trip averages only $269/day, probably something like fifth- or sixth-most expensive! Let's hope. Type this to 6:26PM while Ken sits next to me and reads phantasmic astronomical prognostications from "Marvin, the Dwarf" in the local tour newspaper. Recalculate our expenses to 6:50, glad I did, for I found minor mistakes, but double-checked the final figures, so I can put away the ORIGINAL charges card and go with my SUMMARY. Chat and wash face and partly dress by putting on undershirt and long-sleeved shirt, then at 7:25 start 8/23 puzzle, solving it by 7:55. Then start 8/24 cryptic crossword and get some done by 8:25, when we go down to dinner by 8:32PM to find the dining room still dark. We stand in the hall, not knowing what to do, when the lights inside go on. The chef's at the main desk, and then comes over and urges us to go in. We don't see any table settings until he ushers us to one of three tables set with pairs of silverware. We sit, look at the menu, think of what to order, and then a couple comes in with a baby in a stroller who try to sit at a distant table, but the chef insists they sit right behind us. Ken goes ballistic and insists we move our table. The father looks at us as if we're crazy, and I'm sure glad I have Ken around to do the dirty work. He, truthfully, says, "How could ANYONE question the fact that we don't want to sit next to a screaming baby?" I suggest a rosato, since it was the best of the three wines he had last night, and he agrees if I'll accept the most expensive, at 13€. It turns out to be an Evite, rather good, which he likes. My crepes with ham and mushrooms and remoulade sauce are very good, and he likes his mushroom and pasta starter, but then my veal "della Vall" isn't very good, so he shares some of his good breaded chicken breast with me. Waitress goes through a verbal list of desserts and I settle immediately on "fraises con nata," which I assume is whipped cream, but Ken thinks is some kind of multi-flavored ice cream. I'm right, and it's wonderful, even with little crunchy chocolate balls. We have no trouble drinking all the wine, two other couples are seated next to the baby without complaint, and a table of six old men fill out the crowd. We don't even have to sign anything. Get upstairs at 9:52. I put out pills for tomorrow, go to the balcony to find that daddy comes out on the balcony next to us, who, Ken says, is slightly frosty. Catch up on these notes by 10:07PM while Ken tunes TV to CNN. 10:15PM: Ken REFUSES to lower volume on TV, so I simply put in earplugs, take night pills, and prepare for more cryptic puzzle before going to bed. Ken finally says something about going to bed, I reply "Yes," and he puts out his lights. I get to bed at 10:56PM. Go rapidly to sleep.
FRIDAY, 9/19/08: 12:03AM: Wake and pee, typing to 12:11, actually surprised that I slept more than an hour already. Still feel as if I've just eaten. 4:56AM: Wake and pee, typing a dream to 5AM. Coolish in bathroom, and I burp mightily from the remnants of dinner. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday: only four more days to go! 6:32AM: Fragments of three dreams bounce around in my head. Type to 6:40AM. Barely feel like peeing. Finish typing at 8AM, ready to try to shit and take a shower now, in a warm comfortable bathroom, rather than waiting for tomorrow's el cheapo hotel in France. Takes about four minutes to figure how to divert the bathwater from the tub to the shower: I pull and push on the proper little knob and nothing happens. I try to twist it but it's so small it slips out of my grip. There's a wet washcloth on the towel rack, so I use that to twist---and twist---and twist, until the knob comes off! I try pressing the little tang revealed, and still nothing happens. I twist the knob back on and it goes on, and on, and down, and down, until it starts coming back up, which I can't figure at ALL. At one point I do SOMETHING in my twisting and suddenly water spurts out of the showerhead lying in the bottom of the tub! So it DOES work---somehow. Twist some more, and finally get enough purchase, with the knob at some unidentified point, and it pulls UP, which sends the water (logically) up into the showerhead. Hope that Ken doesn't ask me how to turn the shower on! Take a nice shower, easily controllable, and wipe off, expecting an anxious knock on the door to use the toilet, but I dry off and pee again and apply crotch talc, and Ken's still in bed! The morbid thought occurs to me, of course: What happens if he's DIED? Do I have to get rid of his body? After that, do I have to root through his belongings to get the future itinerary and vouchers and timings and reservations and do it all by myself? Where and when do I turn the car in, and how does HIS credit-card car-coverage work if he's DEAD? Pick up my Neo again to go inside to type until he wakes up, and his voice comes from his bed: "Are you up?" "Yes, can I put the light on?" "Yes." Put the light on to see that it's 8:30, and type on my bed while he brushes his teeth and shaves in the room outside the bathroom. I type till 8:37 and start hunting for my clean underwear and socks. 8:43AM: Sit on the VERY soft end of the bed and almost fall onto the floor! Ken's still in the sink area---but he's now in the john, so I can put on deodorant and button my shirt and tuck it into my pants, finishing dressing, having already opened the drapes and the balcony door to see that it's cloudy but not that cold out. 8:54AM: Fill in last two words in 8/24 Times cryptic puzzle and can throw THAT away. Ken's still packing; I've closed the black bag with increasing ease: I suppose things just get more and more compacted as I lug it around and don't unpack to the bottom. Only one nearly finished puzzle left; have to get out the Times book of puzzles. Breakfast 9-9:30 exactly, getting Ken to help me move the "breakfast cloth" from a center table near the squeaky baby to a FAR distant table, and at first he spurns my suggestion, then follows it. He observes that after he talks to the waitress, she goes over and coos at the baby. The same six old men chatter at a nearby table. Good breakfast when I put the cold fried egg and bacon on a napkin to absorb the excess, very excess, grease, and take the prominent gristle out of the bacon. The frog-skin melon isn't quite as sweet, but it's still quite good, though the watermelon is sadly mostly overripe. Chocolate and juice and TWO, by mistake, little yellow gelcaps, Vitamin E, I think. Up for Ken to report on a rain likelihood of 35%, but he says it looks greater. I think I'll try to shit after brushing my teeth. 9:45AM: Shower knob works transparently well when I try it; I just know how it works now. A fairly surprising quantity for a second shit, but at least I'm vaguely cleared out. Can last in ANY state, practically, until the end of the trip. Ken goes in for a last dump, too. Balcony door admits caws of crows and the sound of running water, either from the pool across the way or from a river nearby. Sure hope any rain today doesn't cut into our sightseeing possibilities. Leave around 9:55AM. Through a NARROW canyon and GREAT three-lane road to Ainsa at 11:09. To #649 to 11:30, taking all the facades, avoiding the museum, and marveling at the gray-haired THIRD guy of young travelers. Ken in a hurry to leave to see the church that closes at 2 (that happens to be open all day). Leave Ainsa at 11:40. Park in Bissost at 2:11 and get told by charming English husband and Welsh wife that the church is open ALL day: they've been coming here every month for YEARS, and it's always been open. That makes up for their laughing at us when I drove up the road, directed by Ken, and then had to turn around in front of them to go back down and park on the side part of the main street. Then back up to Bar Urtau 2:15-3PM. Three tapas and LOTS (thanks to them) of sangria. To #670 in Bissost to 3:10PM. #675 "Main Street" in Bissost at 3:18. Into France 3:33, and on customs line 3:35 to coast right through two minutes later. At 4:02 start BACK on the wrong HALF-LANE road, on which we started up and up, meeting a solitary car here and there, LUDICROUS passages past homes and garages and trucks that Ken has to get out to guide me around, and then to the end to a DEAD end and have to fight our way back to 4:21 (so it took 19 minutes each way, totally wasted, but totally memorable with a number of pictures). Pace [how to spell "pachey"?] Melles. To Valcabrere at 5:04, #684 Valcabrere Basilica St. Just at 5:08. In to 5:17, and buy a great book for 2€. Park at Hotel Oppidum in St. Bertrand de Comminges at 5:35, to cathedral at 5:45 and get a GREAT Audioguide that I listen to LOTS and take pictures of LOTS to CLOSING time at 7PM. To hotel for muscatel and a kir. Up at 7:41 to lie for a bit, to Ken's throat-clearing, then at 7:50 try for a TINY shit, wash my face, get my pills, and type from 8 to 8:13, ready to go BACK down the two flights of winding stairs between ground floor and our room 201, key substituted because some (damn) Canadian took the original key. NO space in our room at ALL, but for 49€, what the hell. BOTH have to stoop, share towels in bathroom, noisy between rooms, but I'm exhausted and will sleep VERY well, thank you, as well as take a Valium tomorrow morning. Ready for dinner now at 8:15PM, having typed all I can think to type of a VERY eventful day, and maybe I can expand details when I transfer this to WP51 and proofread it. Ken's already been pointed to our table, at the foot of a table for a party of nineteen that rather overwhelms the room. We get a vegetable-beef soup to start with, which bread improves. Ken orders a Nantais white although he later realizes he should have chosen a rosé. We have a choice between maigret and confit of duck, so we both take confit, very salty, with salty small green beans and salty spiced fried potatoes. Then, surprisingly, we get two pieces of cheese, like a very dry Muenster, which we don't finish, and the maitre QUITE seriously INSISTS that we finish, mollified ONLY when Ken suggests we'll finish them with BREAKFAST, and I'm quite sure we WILL get them with breakfast. Then I ask for the dessert with chantilly on top, and Ken wants to see them, and in the course of the descriptions the dessert above, with not only chocolate and chantilly, but caramel and a pastry base, which I take and Ken says we'll share, and then proceeds to do a BUTCHER'S job on the two desserts, so much so that the waitress and maitre stand to one side practically doubled over with laughter, and even the CHEF comes out to smilingly reprove Ken for WRECKING his wonderful creations. Both are good, but I think mine has the edge. We finish at 9:30 and Ken wants his two extra pillows, which he insists that I carry up because I'm going first, since I'm not at all interested in his conversation with the people behind me, who happen to be, not from the US, but from Texas. He's up quickly, discovers as I already have that both the skylight window and the little "porthole" window in the side of our room will NOT be covered against daylight at 7:30AM. Breakfast, Ken says, is at 8AM. I finish this at 9:40, REALLY ready for bed. Ken says, "You're not going to bed ALREADY?" And I say I am, but after putting Vicks in my nose and attending to the state of my stomach, I decide to do a sudoku at 9:51PM before going to bed, with Ken sitting up reading with his three pillows. Do sudoku to 10:21, and go to bed at 10:24PM, a few minutes after Ken shuts off his light and goes to bed. I fall asleep pretty quickly.
SATURDAY, 9/20/08: 1:48AM: Wake with dream and limp into the bathroom: the heel of my right foot hurts more than usual, and the tops of both thighs hurt worse than they did at times yesterday. I seem to be getting more and more crippled as the trip draws to a close. This is the next to the last day! 1:52AM: Forget the details of the dream! My body is breaking down and my mind is breaking down. What a depressing thought! My neck aches on the right side, and I feel as if I badly---ah, there it is---need to burp. And I'm thirsty. 4:19AM: Wake with a dream, but Ken gets up right then and goes to the john, and I'm frankly amazed at the intermittent quality of his urination, and his frequent grunts of forced breathing and straining, and I'm glad I don't have THAT problem, and think of the penalty he pays for NOT wanting something like Proscar that would ease his bladder problems but somewhat inhibit his sexual performance. Pee just a bit and finish typing at 4:26, again having succeeded in transcribing only a small fraction of the content of the dream, but I feel somewhat better, having fallen asleep in the middle of an Actualism session, and having resolved to ask Ken for a Toridol for pain in the morning, as well as taking another Valium to ease me through this next-to-last day's pain and anxiety. Take Valium at 4:29AM. 7:51AM: Wake at 7:46, think AWFUL thoughts about this ENDLESS end of the trip, then just get UP to stop the thoughts and go into the bathroom and type this and try to shit. Actually DO shit, some: ANOTHER problem bypassed for another day. WHERE are the blissful effects of the Valium I took? Should I take another? Decide NOT to ask Ken for Toridol today: let's just SURVIVE today and see what TOMORROW will bring, because the DAY AFTER TOMORROW I'll be home: roughly 66 hours from now. Wash face, get morning pills, and Ken gets up and uses a REMOTE to roll back the shade on the skylight: clouds, but bright nevertheless. 8:20AM: Dress, put on shoes, even for breakfast, pack the umbrella in the black bag, look at the schedule for the day, pack while Ken's still in the bathroom running water. Just MAYBE I hurt my thighs carrying my bag up the narrow two-flight spiral staircase yesterday; which of course will make them worse when I carry the bags DOWN this morning. I tell Ken, "You can actually see the Cathedral if you look out the window." "Which window?" asks Ken. I resist saying, "Well, certainly not the little porthole looking into the STREET," and simply reply, "The skylight." Ken then answers, "The top of it." And coughs, and coughs, and COUGHS. I type this to 8:25AM; can't WAIT to get into the day. Do a few squares of sudoku, then down to breakfast 8:35-9:05, getting NEW pieces of cheese, since he threw out our partially eaten pieces last night. Good local toast, which Ken doesn't touch, as he didn't at Montseny, with butter and apricot jam and a cup of cocoa and two glasses of frozen orange juice. Maitre tells Ken the place to buy CDs is open at 9AM, but after we go around the corner, we find that it opens only at 10. Back to climb the perilous stairs. I pee, Ken shits, I write this to 9:18AM and prepare to leave. 9:21AM: Ken STAYS in bathroom doing heaven knows WHAT, while I sit and type this on my bed with used toothpaste dribbling out of the side of my mouth, waiting to get into the bathroom to rinse. He's FINALLY out at 9:24, and I rinse and pack my last items and type this at 9:26, Ken asking MAITRE to take his bag down for him! My bags I take down in two loads, still heavy on narrow stairs. Ken's down at 9:31, "wrenching his back" is his excuse for not carrying his bag. 5702 km at 9:47 leaving St. Bertrand. Good road to top of Col d'Aspin at 11AM, taking to #733. To Bigorre 12:03PM, being charged 42€ for the cable car for two rather than 60€ because it's "Patrimony Day," she says with a smile. I think it will take at least an hour or two in line to get into the gondola, but am amazed that we get RIGHT on at 12:15, with no wait! To top at 2877 meters at 12:29. #765 is TOWN far below at 12:41. Sit at 12:48AM "for two minutes," per a VERY busy but VERY scattered waitress, for a table inside for lunch, Ken making sure we don't have to have a full menu, and she finally seats us at 1:15 next to a KID, who at least remains fairly silent. Three more babies threaten to sit nearby at 1:31, but they move away for some reason. Ken's salad and rosé, and my charcuterie and kir, finally arrive at 1:37PM. Finish at 2:01, Ken not wanting to pay bill with yellow slip until I finish, at least five more minutes, and then I have to stand at desk as he pays bill, first with a card which doesn't work, then with a card that's OK, and then he bitches ENDLESSLY about my wanting to see the Astronomy Space from all of 2:10-2:19, rather ordinary stuff that didn't take that much time, and then I get to the "going-down" room to find Ken NOT there, and trace my way back and he's waiting for me somewhere in the MIDDLE, and we can't figure out how I could have passed him. THEN he says we have a lot of driving before us! The first lap down is 2:25-2:32, endlessly fascinating with the clouds BELOW the mountains, and the second lap down is 2:36-2:42, obviously pleasing both of us, since I saw a sign from where we were eating lunch that said "Waiting time for descent from this point is one hour." SO happy we didn't have to wait for THAT. #781-2 from Col du Tourmalet, 1880 meters, at 2:58. Then drive on a LONG road, feeling quite tired at 3:41. Ken pees. 4:25PM I take about FIVE tries at 4:50 for some spectacular Col d'Aubisque (1709-meter) scenery of incredible receding layers of gray peaks in increasing clouds, just like that magical valley from the top in Morocco with Jean-Jacques so long, yet so memorably, ago. But the camera just can't capture that mystical magic of looming peaks OVER clouds, THROUGH clouds, LAYERED with clouds, layered behind each OTHER. Try to #795. Down to a main road at 5:22 to meet an ENORMOUS parade of about FORTY cars and trucks that pass before we can join the end of it (though four or five turn off where we're coming from), a GREAT mystery that I fear will HUGELY impair our progress, but it seems to evaporate as quickly as it appeared. We finally get in to Pau, after making two or three false turns, with Ken screaming about here or there, and then not knowing what to do when there are no signs. By sheerest chance we find ourselves on Avenue Louis IV, which is where he wanted to be, and then the next few turns seem OK until we turn down some small street with the main traffic coming UP, which we go down unopposed, turn left, which seems OK, but then we go into narrower and narrower streets, with cul-de-sacs where people park, the buildings now only foundations around us, and some of the old stonework makes it feel as if we're driving in old Morocco. To make it more Moroccan, two kids sit on one curb while another squats in the middle of the street! As our car slowly approaches, he effortlessly gets up from his squat without using his hands and moves to the side. We go beyond, narrower and narrower, until finally we come to a TOTAL dead end at 6:20PM, albeit next to a two-story flight of stairs up to a street on which sits the rather elegant Hotel Ibis. I see a last parking space and say, "I'm going to park HERE, we're going up to the street to find the Hotel Continental, and that's THAT." He agrees. We go up, ask a woman where the hotel is, and she knows it's just a block or so away, and we go to Marechal Foch Boulevard and down a block to the Hotel Continental (Best Western chain), where there's ONLY ONE girl behind the desk (so she can't possibly send anyone with Ken to drive the car out of the cul-de-sac and into the hotel garage), who draws an elaborate sketch on Ken's map of how to get out of where we are (mysteriously, she seems to KNOW where we are!) and back to the hotel garage on the same street as the hotel. We go back to the car, glad that the Moroccans haven't broken into the car, get Ken to make sure I don't hit anything getting out of the parking space, and drive 6:25-7PM OUT and lost AGAIN, having to put on my emergency lights THREE times while cars behind me frantically honk their horns and Ken tries even more frantically to figure out where the hell we are and where we go from here. FINALLY I drive the WRONG WAY into a set of bus lanes so that Ken can go into the hotel to find again where the garage is, and he comes out to say it's behind me, and he says, "You have to back up," and I say, "NO, I don't," and blithely make a U-turn to turn around, this time in the RIGHT direction---however I'm still not a bus---and stop in front of the door that Ken opens with a code and I get out to let him drive. He panics because he fears the door may close with the car crushed by it, so he gets in and I get out to direct him into the tight entrance, then straight down to a thankfully almost empty lower level where he can pull into a parking space. We take our stuff out of the car, and he gets to the desk to call the restaurant (actually, this was our FIRST time there) to delay our 7:30 dining time to 8:30. Then into room 353, which I get to at 7:05, to drink TWO glasses of water, unpack, shit a TINY turd, and try to hang my pants on a pants' hanger that doesn't work. That goes to 7:28 when I start typing, and Ken FINDS his two pillows in the armoire, which has two closets on either side, and makes an Air France call to find we don't have to reconfirm flight tickets, and I finish this to 8:02, ready to dress for the 8:15 taxi, and Ken has ANOTHER question to ask: the weather forecast, AFTER phoning Avis to say we're coming with a damaged car and want to get out FAST, so have all the proper forms ready to sign. Let's hope THAT works. At 8:08PM I'm fully dressed, slightly hungry, vaguely relaxed from the day's traumatic driving, and Ken has ENDLESS energy phoning people, looking at maps, trying to plan scenic tours between Pau and Eugenie-Les-Bains, deciding to request a late-departure time of 1PM tomorrow so that we won't be rushed seeing what little there is to see of Pau, and again LOCKS his bag, as he does EVERY time we leave the room. AND he wants a weather forecast, too. ENDLESS. Off to Chez Ruffet in Juracon for a Michelin two-star dinner, now at 8:13PM. Down to taxi to Ruffet for 11€ from Ken, and a wedding party and another party put us ALONE in the reception area, with a WONDERFUL menu of MULTIPLE ingredients in EACH dish (see menu!). Dine to 11:20, and taxi back for 15€ by 11:35, and get good weather report for next two days, and up to room at 11:38 to type this. 11:46PM: Hang up clothes to air, pee, tear the bedclothes off, and really get ready for bed BEFORE Sunday, but it MAY AS WELL be Sunday, the NEXT-TO-LAST day of TRIP!!! Bed at 11:55PM, Ken still fussing around with the lights on, but I fall almost immediately to sleep.
SUNDAY, 9/21/08: 5:33AM: Wake with dream, walk on very sore right heel to bathroom and type to 5:38AM. Can hardly believe this is the NEXT-TO-LAST bathroom I'll be typing my dreams in on this trip. TOMORROW, at some terribly late hour, I'll be HOME! 5:46AM: Take a glass and a half of water after finding one of my broken pill carrier-bottoms WAY away from my dop kit on the bathroom floor. Put it back and search for my Valium, but find, to my surprise, that my AMBIEN bottle is at the top, though I didn't take an Ambien last night. Is this random? Did KEN take one of my Ambien last night by mistake or design? Well, enough of both drugs are left me, so I really don't care. Take a Valium with a little more water. Back to bed now at 5:49AM, maybe 42 hours to go on trip. 8:55AM: Wake, lie thinking, Ken still snoring; decide to get up, surprised to find it's SO late: nine hours in bed; preparing for tomorrow's SHORT sleep after best meal and most frantic morning getting to flight to Paris. Sit on john and type penultimate morning! Finish a fairly competent shit at 9:01AM. 9:18AM: Ken's still sleeping. Look for a spare pill carrier-top and can't find one; and my deodorant is WAY at the bottom of the kit. Really think to ask Ken, as innocently and unthreateningly as possible, if he DID take an Ambien from my kit last night, since it seems impossible that my kit looks the way it does without his having done it. The only OTHER, frightening, possible alternative is that, drunk (though not with that much wine, and not with a hangover this morning) last night, I, UNREMEMBERING, rooted through my dop kit to take an Ambien just on the CHANCE that I wouldn't sleep, though that seems EXCEEDINGLY unlikely, since I've had NO problem sleeping on the trip in recent weeks. Type now at 9:22, wondering when Ken's going to wake up. Last night he said that any scenic drive today was quite distant, and probably not worth the trouble, so that the only real itinerary was to slowly make our way to Eugenie-Les-Bains and enjoy what sights there were to see around there, after, of course, sightseeing in Pau to our delayed departure time of 1PM. Can't really think of anything more to type, except that, now at 9:23AM, a pessimistic estimate of being HOME is forty-one hours! Go into the bedroom for a sudoku? Well, let's PROOFREAD more, starting at 9/9 in file 1. 9:56AM: Ken asks if I'm typing; he comes into the bathroom, I ask him if he took an Ambien, he says he usually does, I tentatively ask if he took MINE, and he says NO, and then confesses to having knocked my dop kit off the shelf when he turned the light on, and had to put everything back, which explains the disorder. He worries that we may have missed the time for breakfast, now at 10AM. I proof to SOMEWHERE in file 2, hoping cursor REMAINS where I stopped. 10:06: Ken is still naked in bathroom. I suggest going down to breakfast to show we're going to be there, and he insists he'll "be ready in two minutes." And I thought, yeah, like the two minutes from the waitress at the Pic du Midi du Bigorre's two minutes. Well, 10:11 isn't bad, and the breakfast room has maybe four other couples still eating, and another pair comes in right behind us. Eggs, good cooked sausages, a nice thick slice of ham, cherry yogurt, hot cocoa, a croissant, and a glass of 100% orange juice make up for the absence of any cheeses or other cold cuts. At precisely 10:30AM a younger woman leading an older blind woman enter, have some discussion with the maid, who rather reluctantly permits them to sit at a table and enjoy what's still being served, as the maid bustles about clearing off the eaten-at places. We're out at 10:32, Ken immediately into the john to finish his toilette, and we've so far had NO sight of what it might be like outside. I was actually HUNGRY for breakfast, and Ken repeats for perhaps the third time that he wants to do NOTHING to interfere with his appreciation of dinner tonight at Eugenie-Les-Bains. I hope over-anticipation doesn't lead to disappointment! At 10:39 back to proofread file 2. Take a Toridol at 10:46AM. Leave hotel 10:48. #800 at 11:12, table for ONE HUNDRED in the Pau Chateau, on a guided tour that started at 11 with a GREAT personality for a guide, and ended at 11:30 with MANY pictures: I don't think I was INSIDE before. #802 Henri IV. #808 and others, ALL Gobelins---this is of La Barbe au Queue: BBQ. #831 tortoise-shell cradle of Henri IV, part of his legend as King of France, married to Marie de Medici? #851 Hotel de Ville interior, after NICE walk along elevated pathway along river after Ken looked for MINUTES at a map, trying to justify his DEMAND to return (west) to the Castle to find his way to the hotel (east), in which direction I was CLEARLY going, thanks to the hot sun. Up and down paths, taking pictures of gardens along the stream, and through courts and meet him on Avenue Foch, returning to hotel at 12:22PM for him to take a pee and me to catch this up by 12:28, ready to pack. The single woman behind the desk is usually on the phone with someone, and has no time for anyone else until she hangs up. Ken sits patiently while I pack, we leave room at 12:38, and then he has to present his Continental card to try to get points against his frequent-flyer card, though the first woman behind the desk never heard of Continental AIRLINES, only of the hotel. He now asks for "explicit, clear, foolproof directions for getting out of town." And the girl smiles and says, "Here they are." I sit and type at a comfortable sofa in the lobby and type this (across from an attractive goo-haired fellow all in black except for a pure-white tie, and a handy hand computer, and [sadly] a wedding ring, who keeps glancing at me as I chat in English across to Ken at the desk). Finish this at 12:50PM while the woman speaks of traffic lights, and turning left, and going toward Juracon, while Ken thinks we should be going in the other direction, and we're going in the direction of the airport, which will make him very happy. And Ken uses one of his usual circumlocutions, "And now I have to ask you, whether you may know or not---" and then, at length, comes up with his question. The handsome guy's friend is at the hotel's computer, looking at sports, and he looks back at me with disdain as I look around to see what he looks like. NOW Ken clarifies the directions even more, while someone older, in shorts and sockless loafers, waits for some of the girl's precious time. Now it's as late as 12:52. Into car 12:55, at km 5900, messed up in city AGAIN, finally heading in the direction of Bordeaux. Stop at station for gas AND car-wash at 1:35, car looking almost presentable afterwards. Wash to 1:41, then fairly directly to Aire sur l'Ardour at km 5965, then TOTAL mess as we PASS a sign I think leads to Michel Guerard, but there's no TURN there. Try ANOTHER turn to Eugenie-Les-Bains, but it doesn't seem to give any directions to the Pres et Sources. Go around the same streets again, and, Ken insists, we're on the right road but I "feel" that it's not right, so I turn around and we make a number of other circles before deciding that my "feel" was wrong, so we CONTINUE down that road for an indecently long distance, it seems, and finally see a sign for the village of Eugenie-Les-Bains, and pass an enormous fairground-like compound filled with people, and at LAST the narrow gates for Michel Guerard, and a helpful guard in green tells us how to get to the Maison Rose at 3:02 at km 5987. To room 29 at 3:06. Ken gets parking directions, and we leave room at 3:13 to start walking grounds. #856 the entrance to the restaurant at 3:25. There's no food at the place the woman in the Maison Rose said there would be: no cheese, nothing really solid, only a Kir Royale and a "madeleine," which turns out to be two pieces of pound cake, two different "madeleines," one with cherries, the other shaped vaguely like a shoe-form, with three kinds of jam. The kirs, we find later, cost 15€ each, so the rest of the 42€, 12€, is the cost of my madeleines. Feel that I've had enough for lunch. We feel UNDERDRESSED relative to some posh types in suits and almost-dinner dresses, but OVERDRESSED compared with urchins and poor families who seem to have the privilege of wandering the grounds to see how the rich people live, without having to dress like rich people dress. I want to go to the john at 1:57, so I enter the restaurant, where a waiter shows me through one hall, steps over a low-slung velvet rope through a dining area, and points to the rear, where the toilets are. I pee and wash my face and look out the back, trying to recognize the fields that I remember from the view from my hotel room so long ago (the place was taken over by the Guerards in 1974, and they were famous for their Cuisine Minceur for at LEAST four or five years before I wanted to go there). Nothing about the place looks familiar: not the new, expansive, conference and meeting wing, not the spread-out restaurant, where I remember a rather large square room seating everyone, and what WAS our hotel now seems to form the core of the conference area. We walk the village starting at 4PM, the market area jammed with junk, the "Arenes" being a large open field with an elaborate fountain falling down the far side, which Ken absolutely doesn't want to get close to. We see the "attic sale" in the Town Hall, then walk to the village streets, which turn mainly into parking lots. To the open church, which Ken inexplicably likes, and then I ask if the Curé's garden is open and the same guard says it is: just go right up the road labeled "Livraisons," so we're being delivered. The garden is right there, mostly roses at the entrance, and I'm attracted to the open door of a nearby house, and go up on a porch to see that it's a kitchen, when the same guard comes up behind me and said that this is a private house, and I mutter a small "Pardon" and continue to look at the sage and chervil and SOMETHING (I forget what) of the peppery variety, and many other herbs growing in neat patches. Out of that to trees and lizards and more hummingbirds around flowers, and to a corner of the grounds that only leads back to the restaurant, and then across to a lily pond, which flows across a path to a fish pond, and then past three or four other accommodations that Ken, having looked through the booklet that he later gave me, said made our place look like the outhouse by comparison, if valued by price. Ken wants to go back to the room, but I continue at 4:50 past a sign that says that Guerard took over (from a LONG past history under a name like Labourdon) in 1974 with Cuisine Minceur, and in 1996 many hotels were redone on the grounds. Back to room at 5:05. It's hot enough, and I thought she said the pool was heated, so on the way back I checked to see that the gate to the pool was locked, with no one in the clean blue water. Phoned from the room and was told she'd open the gate, so I change into my bathing suit for the only time in the trip and put on a bathrobe and take my watch and towel and go out the back to find the gate indeed open. IN the pool 5:12-5:42, swimming some, floating under the willow tree looking up into the fronds that shade a corner of the pool from the direct, somewhat setting, sun. Paddle back and forth, delighted at the clear patterns of the ripples reflecting the sun, reflected off the bottom of the pool. Then out to lie in the sun to 6:12PM, taking care to expose only my feet and legs, which feel good drying in the sun, and then return to the room to get Ken to smell me and say that I do NOT smell like chlorine. Look for melatonin instructions and find I should have taken one this morning, which doesn't quite make sense, so I record that I take one TOMORROW morning, then three grams tomorrow night, then repeat until adjusted. I put up my bathing suit to dry, then Ken reminds me (hardly, since I'd never realized it at the start) that we could go to the restaurant for a drink as early as 7PM. So I dress and we leave for dinner at 7:05 (to 10:15), still passing urchin children with blue-jeaned parents wandering through the sacred precincts. Ken does his number with the desk about directions on the way out, paying our bill this evening, having breakfast early at 7AM (usual start: 8AM) so that we can leave for our plane, which they take in stride, and I just sit in a lovely chair in the yellow-gold room with a bisque-white Eugenie looking down from her place on the mantel. FANTASTIC meal, with gracious service, and I have the impression that all four of our servers (two waitresses, the junior sommelier, and the head fellow of whom Ken wants to ask for the French term for "Miss Thing," in light yellow-green suit) keep LOOKING to see if we NEED anything. Very gradually some of the tables nearby fill up. All of the courses are spectacular, and after even the first one (after a few amuse bouches) he's willing to say this is the best meal he's ever had, and repeats to a few people that I had said this was the best restaurant in the world, and now he believes me. As I believe he DIDN'T when I was here before, both a jolly MR. Guerard, looking like an aged Edgardo, and a rotund MRS. Guerard, monumental in a pink skirt that shifts enough to suggest that her abdominal and buttock fat has perfect freedom to oscillate around her body as she starts and stops walking on her black-booted feet, sticking down like two stems under a very overblown upside-down rose. They make two or three appearances, at one of which Ken oozes to him and I try to say the mushroom soup, in particular, was a complete success, for which he seemed very pleased. They know the couple behind Ken, who said they've been coming here for twenty years, and HE looks rather like Richard Harris. Ken insists the waiter looks like some actor (and actually ASKS the waiter if he knows what actor he looks like!; of COURSE he wouldn't), and I think it's Tony LoBianco before he aged. The young woman who seems to be in charge of our table (NOT one of our wait-staff) has only been working here since March, and the girl I was quite sure was from America assured me she was from Provence. A few more tables are filled, many leave, and two tables right in our view aren't occupied at all during the entire evening. We ask for the check, and then are told to go to the desk to pay the bill, and Ken launches into an INCREDIBLE series of questions (after I pay the major bill of 695.76€, well over $1000) about our route out of here tomorrow, and the weather in Paris and NYC for tomorrow! I sit in lounge at 10:20 while he fumes about not getting across WHAT information he wants. HOWEVER, with a wake-up call at 6:30, we can STILL hope for something like eight hours' sleep. Ken gets louder about the route out. I STILL sit at 10:26. At 10:28 Ken is STILL talking about the route. To room at 10:41, windows OPEN and room COLD. CLOSE windows and curtains, take night pills (the last) and three grams of melatonin at 10:55PM. Discard LAST duvet innards, pee, and get earplugs and facemask ready, with my stuff ALL over waiting for 6:30AM wake-up phone call and ensuing breakfast. Bed at 10:58, totally full and VERY wined-up, worried about how I'll feel in the morning. TWENTY-SIX hours left in trip!
MONDAY, 9/22/08: Type stuff from last night in file 5, because I know file 4 hasn't been filled with Sunday yet. [Start file 5 1:04AM 9/22/08]: Wake suddenly with the clear aftertaste of a horrible reflux. Lie for a few minutes trying to clear the acid residue from my throat, and then move into the bathroom to start a new file, since I still have so much of Sunday to type into file 4. The reflux totally filled the upper part of my throat, needing endless swallows and up-sniffs to clear. Blow my nose of the same substance, and still the back of my throat feels violated with the bad taste of three hours' old food. Clear and clear with Ken-like persistence, hoping to bring up enough so that a drink of water will clear my throat of the vile taste. By 1:11AM, now, the major part is cleared, my head doesn't feel THAT bad, but the day has started on a SOUR (ha!) note! Can barely manage to start to pee. Feelings of pain return to my right lower leg, so the throat-concentration is no longer the center of my existence. Clear up still more bilious substance, clear throat again and it's still not nearly free of the sour remnants. My watch slips off my thigh at 1:14AM. Snuffle up mucus, fresh-formed, rather than sour with food remnants. Another Ken-like throat-clear proves that upchuck still remains in corners of my windpipe. Brush my hair off my sweaty forehead. Here it is now, the last 24-hour period of the trip, and I burp once, twice, three, four times, clear an almost-clear throat, and hope that this, too, shall pass. Head begins to ache. Got to get off the pot and drink some water and take some aspirin, now at 1:18AM. 5:56AM: Wake with dream. Type to 6:01AM, knowing we have to be up in half an hour. I feel on the EDGE of being OK and ready for the day, but I'm not sure how I'm going to hold out---yet this IS the day that ends with my being at HOME, something greatly looked forward to. Manage to shit just a tiny bit, blow my nose a lot, burp once, and figure to take two more aspirin to prepare for the rest of the day now at 6:07AM. Also take a half-gram of melatonin, just to have done it. Lie down and think things are going well, or as well as can be expected. Ken's alarm starts ringing at 6:28AM, and I call "Ken" three times before he wakes and says, "Thank you," and gets up to pee and shave and brush his teeth. At 6:30 exactly the phone rings with a wake-up call, which I answer. Then I get up and put on my shorts and type this to 6:33, ready to search for my house keys and my luggage lock SOMEWHERE in my suitcase. 6:45AM: STILL not found my house keys and luggage lock! 6:50AM: Find my baggage lock in my CLOTHES bag and my house keys in some bag of PAPERS that are supposedly only souvenirs! Keep my jacket out for my shoulder bag because Ken says it's cold out. He CONSTANTLY, with EVERY breath for the past fifteen minutes, LOUDLY CLEARS HIS THROAT. It's positively PATHOLOGICAL!!! 7AM: Down for breakfast; door's LOCKED. Ken comes up and phones: they'll unlock the door. We go back down as one girl opens the door and the other serves us an ENORMOUS breakfast. I forget my pills and come back upstairs to get them and type this to 7:07AM. 7:24AM: My stomach did not REALLY appreciate the cup of hot chocolate, diluted with more hot milk; the sour-tasting glass of orange juice; the thin slice of ham from which the fat had to be removed; the VERY thin slice of cheese; the croissant with butter (ignoring all the jellies that I already had yesterday for lunch), and though Ken said the pastries were very good, I had to agree that this was hardly worth $30 apiece. I come upstairs to brush my teeth at 7:23 and type this to 7:26, feeling vaguely nauseous, and hope it will pass as the day brightens (JUST the slightest hint of blue out the window). 7:30: Everything ready, but I've got to SHIT! Leave room at 7:40, Ken having gone down at 7:30 without bothering to ask me if I was ready, and I take an ENORMOUS shit that seems comprised mostly of CHOCOLATE from its color and consistency, and so is VERY hard to wipe clean, and I feel the need to insert a protective few sheets to protect the planes today from any "leaks." He actually comes back UP to find why I'm so "late" coming down, deciding that since the road in front of the Maison Rose is DIVIDED, and we don't want to block traffic while we load luggage, we have to take our luggage to the car, which turned out to be easier than I'd feared it would be: mostly on paved road, rather than on crumbly gravel, though I'm sure the windows around the courtyard didn't appreciate our wheel-noise so early in the morning. Start car at 7:48 at km 5988. VERY foggy road, SURPRISING amount of traffic, and it takes a look at the instruction guide to figure out how to turn off the BRIGHTS that Ken somehow turned on last night and I can't figure how to turn OFF this morning. Use the windshield wipers front and back to get rid of morning fog, sometimes leaving visibility of only a few car-lengths ahead. I'm REALLY driving like an automaton, fearing to make Ken scream about something, gratified that the airport is BEFORE Pau and Pau is only 40 km away. NUMBERS of cars pull up RIGHT behind me, so close I can't even see their headlights in the rearview mirror, so I pull aside to let them pass. Can't STAND that. Fog doesn't lessen much, but Ken hasn't even extended his paranoia to the possibility that our plane doesn't ARRIVE on time to leave Pau on time, but he then mentions that we DO have four hours in Paris to fritter away. Stop for gas at 8:31, after stopping the first time at a closed station that had no diesel, getting 15.57 liters for 21.64€. Stop at km 6045 at 8:58 at Avis, after going around ariport roads twice trying to FIND it. To Avis desk 9:05. Nothing to sign, they hadn't gotten his message about damages, and she ends up saying something like "It's not OUR contract," implying she didn't care about ANYTHING. Ken tells her we parked in Avis spot 113, the gas tank is filled, and marks the three places where there's damage to the car. She duplicates something when he insists on a copy. I pee, my stomach feeling tight, as if I ate too much, or too fast, or ate something wrong. Away from Avis desk 9:05. My bag is 14.6 kg at 9:13, checked through to JFK. Check in at 9:15 and on line for security. 9:24 THROUGH security and wait at CLOSED gate 1 for 10:25 boarding. Start typing 9:27-10:25, Ken reading me news items from his paper. Boarding exactly at 10:25. 8A is over the wing, so I go back to pee and use LOTS of toilet paper for my brown derriere. Tell cute attendant that I'm in 8A and would like to move back. He said he'd come for me (OH?). KEN is told to move from an exit row because he doesn't want to give up his bag, so he could then switch to MY seat, which he sillily says needn't be above the wing just because HIS seat is above the wing. Sure. I type this to 10:44AM, having filled file 4 and started at the start here of file 5, BEFORE the other start. Much moving of files coming up! At 10:45 the fellow comes up to say there are windows available in the back, so I move back (where someone immediately starts pummeling the back of my seat) and I finish this at 10:47AM, ready to go to the END of what I'd typed before in file 5. 10:48AM: Plane backs out at Pau to fly to Paris. Off at 10:55AM, no flight-time announced, but Ken's schedule says it's 90 minutes. I look down over patterned farmlands and small towns, which get larger as we near Paris. SO glad I have a window seat here. At 11:37 they announce they're beginning descent, and we land at 12:02, just a 67-minute flight. #872 Charles de Gaulle airport at 12:03PM. Off plane at 12:20 and onto bus to terminal at 12:35: the ride seems to go on forever. I'm not feeling well, standing beside a sitting Ken who remarks, "We're going to another town." I ignore him. My stomach's gone from uncomfortable to BAD. Onto SECOND bus at 12:42 to transfer to another terminal for our flight to JFK. Through MORE security at 12:57. Through at 1:02. 1:05 to pee and sit. I discover that my water bottle has been taken from the side of my bag. Sit on the toilet a LONG time and finally shit at 1:18. Ken is trying very hard to be helpful, saying that if he is going to search for medical help it would be better to do it NOW, hours before we're due to leave, than later. I agree, but fear a repeat of Yellowstone: a visit to a doctor sends me across state lines for an overnight in a hospital for essentially NOTHING. But I do accept his offer of pink Pepto-Bismol tablets. He hands me a packet of four, saying that he usually takes two, and I take two, then decide to take the other two. He warns me that it'll turn my shit black. Later, I'm very thankful that he thought to tell me that. At 1:50 I go into the disabled-men's room just next to our gate, flush down the junk in the clogged toilet, deciding not to vomit there but into the sink, but I really don't want the agony of vomiting. Finally I'm feeling so bad that I get up the courage to try to vomit. Stick my finger down my throat and convulse slightly, but it doesn't really start. Try again and gag and a few bits of pink Pepto-Bismol tablets come up with what might be a few drops of blood, redder than the Pepto-Bismol, but maybe just a darker state when mixed with gastric juices. Get a sharp pain way low in my groin that doesn't feel good, so I stop trying to vomit. Outside to tell Ken I'll just try waiting it out. But then I feel worse, so at 2:20PM I ask him to try to find a doctor. I try to go back to the john, but it's closed for cleaning. At least, I hope, they'll make the toilet operable again. Sit and wait uncomfortably, wondering when Ken's going to come back, and if I'll have to travel a great distance to some doctor's office, or, worse, they'll send a stretcher to carry me there! Then two space-suited men, with armbands that say they're airport security, come up just as I'm standing up to go back into the toilet with an urge to shit. The taller, cuter one says that he'll stand outside to help me if I need it. I close, but not lock, the door, and a few seconds later he asks if I've left it open, tries it and sees that it's open as I report "Yes." I have a first GREAT spurt of diarrhea, which makes me feel better. Again he asks from outside if I'm OK and I say I'm fine. Sit a bit longer and there's a SECOND flood of diarrhea, which I wipe off with great care, happy that the toilet's working, and go outside to find them looking very concerned. I report my diarrhea and they nod and connect my left index finger to a pulse meter and put a blood-pressure cuff on my right wrist. They don't like the numbers from either device, and I quickly add that I've been diagnosed in the recent past with palpitations, arrhythmias, and intermittent VERY rapid beats that, in my case, are completely normal. They accept this, but when the shorter one makes a report on me, he seems to add undue stress to the fact that I'm 72 years old. Ken tries to explain away the high blood-pressure readings by saying that I've been under stress and am feeling anxious about my current condition, so that readings that may be higher than 138/90 (I never found out what they were) are understandable at this point and not a great cause for concern. I keep assuring them that, since my diarrhea, I feel much better, and they leave at 2:50, having completed their report with FIVE attempts at spelling my name, making the mistake of saying "Zebra, Otel, Lima---" and they keep getting the reply that it seems quite impossible, so they keep trying, and afterwards I remark that in using "Otel," they were saying my name started ZHL---which is quite impossible---and he confesses that he often makes that mistake. At 3:06 I return to the john (which, thankfully, no one else seems to want to use, though a woman goes into the adjoining woman's room though she's clearly not disabled) and sit for an almost WATERY shit, and when I bend over to wipe myself I suddenly get an urge to vomit, so I dash to the sink, pants around my ankles, and lean over to retch, but nothing comes out, except that I have a ferocious urge to shit AGAIN and go BACK to the john for ANOTHER stream of watery excrement. Try wiping, and AGAIN have a spate of diarrhea. That awful cycle happens twice again, until I feel quite empty of stomach, which is a relief, and I wipe finally and get out to Ken to give SOME report of what just happened, saying that I think I'm finally rid of it, and he's less inclined to think it was something I ate at breakfast, since he had the same food, but that I have some kind of viral intestinal infection that's working its way through my system. He suggests my taking a Lomotil to stop the shits, now that I feel I'm empty, and I say that I will, and in fact want to take TWO, which he agrees might be a good idea. Take the two with the last of the first bottle of water he bought me, complaining that the water in the john's taps was all HOT, and the only water fountain he found was out of order, and cursed the airport for FORCING passengers to buy BOTTLED water. He then went to buy me a SECOND bottle of water, seeing as how that would probably be the only input I'd want in the next number of hours. At about this time I develop HORRIBLE chills, which I manage to hide well enough from Ken that, in the taxi home, he said he really hadn't noticed. But they bother me GREATLY. He says I don't have a fever, and that my color is better than it was before, and I joke it's because I have a fiery fever that brings back a rosy color. Try to convince myself that the past diarrhea and current Lomotil has cured me, and eventually the chills stop by 3:30. I end up feeling ALMOST comfortable, but look forward to the coming 8.5-hour flight with total dread! What if I get ill on the plane and they have to turn around to bring me back! In the first john I overheard the young men at the urinals (after joking about "clashing swords" and other rather homocentric comments) talk about SARS for some reason, and then back at the gate one of the televisions shows possible signs for Avian flu! Maybe I'll be infecting the entire plane with one or the other of these that I'd managed to pick up! Finally board at 4PM, feeling strong enough to stand in a long-time line in the channel to the plane, as someone has an INTERMINABLE problem with their seat, or ticket, or something. Then it's blessedly announced as a 7:45 flight, which makes me feel even better. I lay my head back and try to feel better, happy that the Lomotil has stopped any pressure to shit, and we FINALLY back out at 4:52, the pilot saying the airport is very busy at this time. We're off at 5:15PM, which means we'll land at 1AM Paris time at JFK, or 7PM NYC time. Will I survive? I try to get the map on the TV screen, but it won't come on. Try watching the Colin Farrell movie set in Bruges, but it goes off after a few minutes and I can't quite understand the accents, and don't like the way the earphones cut into my ears. Put on music and lower my seatback and try to sleep, but THAT doesn't work AT ALL. Have a glass of water, tentatively, fearing it may make me race to the john, at 5:56PM. At 6:16 I'm watching the fourth Indiana Jones movie and THAT freezes, and when I go back to it I have to fast-forward to where it cut off, and I've lost continuity anyway. And then it cuts off AGAIN as ALL the screens seem to go off. What a LOUSY TV system! I put on the good facemask they passed out, after using their cold wet-wipe for my sweaty face and neck, since I'm still wearing my jacket, which I put on to try to assuage my chills back in the waiting room. Try Actualism, but it doesn't put me to sleep. Nothing but clouds below anyway, so it really doesn't matter that I'm right over the wing, a request before had the clerk reply that there WERE no free window seats ANYWHERE on the plane. Try counting backward from a hundred three or four times, but it was clear THAT wasn't going to work. My neighbor, a German priest who clutched his Bible during takeoff and landing, keeps going from TV channel to TV channel, maybe because HE gets no continuity, either. I decide to drag out the book of Times puzzles at 7:03 to pass the time, sorry that we're not even two hours into the flight, with about six more hours to go, hoping it won't make me feel nauseous. Finish a hard puzzle by 8:34, pleased at the passing time. Not halfway yet, but getting there. Raise my window shade every so often to clouds below, except when the seatbelt sign goes on and we're IN a shelf of clouds that bounces us around a bit. Finish another puzzle at 9:53, time going! Another puzzle done by 10:31, still feeling good. Another by 11:24, another by 12:02, another by 12:42, as they announce we'll be starting down soon. Somewhat darker outside, and when I raise the shade we even seem to pass through a raincloud briefly, even though it wasn't supposed to be raining in NYC. I put puzzle book away and stare out behind the wing to whitecapped waves and some few ships in the water, and then what appears to be lights on the coast of New Jersey, since the winds have apparently directed that we come in from the south, rather than from the east. We fly and fly, past the 1AM estimated landing time, and finally the landing field comes into view and we land at 1:10AM. I'm too numb to even feel much relief. The minister to my right bowed his head in prayer, clutching his Bible and his knees with white-knuckled fingers. We wait way out on the periphery of the airport for two spectacular takeoffs right over us, and a number of landings a distance away, and lots of planes shuttling back and forth while we just sit, idling. Then we move what seems like miles and finally dock at 1:33. What seems like an interminable wait for the walkway to be attached gets us off the plane at 1:42. Through immigration FAST, thank goodness, NO line at all, by 1:47, and down to the carousels to find we're at number 2, which starts rolling at 1:49, and the luggage handlers grab EACH bag as it comes down the chute and orients it sort of right side up, something neither Ken nor I remember seeing before, and we both get our bags quickly at 1:53. Dash, with Ken leading, out to the taxi stand at the curb on the NEAR side of the street for a change, for a cab IMMEDIATELY at 1:56, Ken laughing that the driver's playing Edith Piaf, and he tells the driver of his impatience with all the European restaurants playing AMERICAN music, and here he gets into a cab with PIAF! The driver's from Haiti and very personable. Not much traffic, stop right in front of 101 Clark, lug my stuff though the doors that someone leaving has opened, and ask Joshua for a cart, into which I load my two bags, two rubber-banded packs of old mail, and a clump of mail stuffing my mailbox, and get to my room at 2:37AM to unload, take the cart back down, see that I have 16 phone messages, weigh my shoulder bag before I take it apart for my dinner pills, which I take with two pieces of buttered toast and lots of water, and then get out my two NIGHT pills, which I have with a three-gram melatonin at 3AM. Bed at 3:09AM by my watch: 9:09PM New York time.
TUESDAY, 9/23/08: 2:50AM: Wake at 2:33AM and lie in luxury, then type dream and go to pee. Take a half-gram of melatonin, as suggested by melatonin regimen. Wake at 4:17AM, feeling vaguely sexy, and decide to get up and jerk off. Vaguely wonder about mucus under my cockhead rim on the left, and still-fresh talcum on the right. Put in a DVD and cum rather easily, with almost NO ejaculate after about 26 days, about 4:48, and then get caught up watching a Discovery Channel program about "melting away fat in three days," which turns into a VERY interesting program about sonaring the bottom of the Titanic to find that it was NOT one huge gash that sent it to the bottom, but a series of five or six small "pinpricks," adding up to perhaps twelve square feet, "approximately the size of a human being," that still filled the bilges with so much water that the ship HAD to sink, though one of the early, scoffed-at, investigators postulated that that was EXACTLY what sent her to the bottom. That ends at 5:45. I put on the new blue eyemask from the flight and get to bed at 5:48AM. 6:57AM: Getting light out; I type dream. 7:12: Feel like I want to shit. Had done a fairly decent Actualism session before and after previous dream, and now guess it's time enough to get up: my first priority will be to have oatmeal, and then finish transcribing my notes to my Neo. Finish breakfast at 7:55AM, reading a very interesting Scientific American article about the "Big Bounce" replacing the "Big Bang" as the origin of THIS universe, taking morning pills and a half-gram of melatonin. Shit a fairly decent amount of very soft, very black, excrement: I'm glad Ken told me to expect that after taking Pepto-Bismol. He said he'd phone this morning with the cost of the cab ride, but he hasn't phoned yet as I finish typing all these notes at 9:14, time to start calling about seeing Chin and getting my orthotics. END OF SPANFRAN TRIP NOTES.
SPANFRAN SUMMARY PAGE - Aug. 28 - Sep 22, 2008
THU,8/28: Change planes at JFK after 5:06-8:50PM wait. Burger King dinner. On plane 2 at 10:28. Take off 11:25PM. I try to sleep, but can't.
FRI,8/29: Land Barcelona 1:03PM, 7:38 flight. Casa Mila. Hotel Gravina Dinner. SAT,8/30: Old town: Underground Rome, Cathedral, Call, Irati Basque $91.12 lunch, 4 Cats beer, Ken ill: no dinner. I dine at Stein d'Or $17.47 across street.
SUN,8/31: Moka $17.82 breakfast. MACBA for Freak Orlando, then "Action" museum. Sick 2PM-8:10. Dinner at Actual (a Bib Gourmand) in Grand Hotel Central for $130.65.
MON,9/1: Cafe Zurich breakfast. Try for tours: no luck. Sit on Ramblas. American Soda $20.90 lunch poor. Hotel 3:55PM-7:55. Drolma* dinner $207.20: Ken: *, no more.
TUE,9/2: Cafe Zurich breakfast. Music tour 10:56-11:25. Miro Museum 19€, good $55.85 lunch. Hotel 6:35-8:10. Abac** $252.91, some awful tastes, empty restaurant.
WED,9/3: Bed 12:40AM; wake 10AM! Starbucks breakfast $8. Bed 10:50-1:35. Viena $8.70 lunch. Bed 2:30-6:50PM. Dinner at Taller Tapas $46.10. Walk Ramblas. Bed 10:10. THU,9/4: Shower 8:05AM. Starbucks breakfast $8. Santa Maria del Mar. Aquarium and $9.14 lunch. Rest 2:46-8:15PM. Restaurant Lasarte* $183.53; Ken: Alex Garas worth **!
FRI,9/5: Bed 12:10-8:34AM. Viena breakfast $7.86. Monastery, Ceramics, Decorative Arts museums. D'Or lunch $11.43. Rest 3:52-7:45PM. Tapas24 dinner $36.78. Bed 11PM. SAT,9/6: Up 8:40AM, take Toridol, Viena breakfast $9.28. Liceu tour 10:50-11:20. Palau Guell tour, Cal Pep lunch $62.01! Pre-Columbian Museum. Liceu box ticket $54.27: Ballet de Sao Paulo: DASH to hotel 7:48. To Moo*, leave sick, bed 10:10PM. SUN,9/7: Bed all day. Shower to 5:15. Finish Holleran Grief. Origens 99.9 OK $34.10 dinner, great peach in red wine for dessert. Bed 10:30PM.
MON,9/8: Fever-dream: "correcting blood vessels." Up 7:54. Viena breakfast. $6.94. To Avis 10:28. Figueras Meson Asador Castell lunch $56.36. Theater-Museum Dali-Gala and Jewelry Museum and book. Awful Hotel Duran dinner $30.36, good fruit.
TUE,9/9: Hotel Paris breakfast $9.29. Monasterio de San Pere de Rodes 11-12. To Port de la Selva and good Ca L'Herminda balcony lunch $33.02. To Hotel Coral Platja in Roses, walk beach. Taxi to El Bulli*** 7:07-12:01, dine $455.10(with taxi)/$412.85(no taxi).
WED,9/10: Bed 12:40-9:20AM. Boil under ear. Castillo (and Ruinas) D'Empurias and lunch $7.75 on grounds. Castle Gala-Dali. Rest 4:44-8:30. El Celler de Can Roca** OK+: very good, $208.24. Back at midnight. Bed at 1AM, sleep to 9:02AM.
THU,9/11: Bright Restaurant Blanc breakfast. Great Girona Museum and audio. St. Phillip Feliu and lots of scenic roads. Rest 5:14-8:21. Carme Ruscalleda-Sant Pau*** great dinner and food-graphics and garden for $251.98.Good-smelling rain; bed 1:24AM.
FRI,9/12: Ken wakes me 9:20AM! Gas and many, many roads. Chrome strip off. To Sant Celoni. OK La Parra lunch $14.18. Rest 2:40-6:30; walk town; disappointing Can Fabes***, many complaints and problems for $282.18. Bed at 12:05AM.
SAT,9/13: Write "In Case of Death." Good Hotel Suis breakfast. Many, many roads, some one-way, to Vic. Weekly market; lunch at so-so Brasserie Gaudi $17.01. Great Botiga Museu and $35.45 book. Cathedral, Roman temple. Dine Melba alone $61.07. SUN,9/14: Good Hotel Ciutat de Vic breakfast. To Monestir de Santa Maria de Ripoll, and Sant Joan de les Abadesses: museum after HORRIBLE parking. Camprodon road is AWFUL, but great Pizzeria da Giorgio lunch $21.27. Hotel Maristany dinner poor. MON,9/15: Rack railway at Ribes de Freser. Hotel Gran Termes La Collada lunch. Llivia. La Seu Museum and Cathedral. El Castel de Ciutat* dinner OK $160.16.
TUE,9/16: Tremp lunch at Raco del Mos $18.96. Roads. Hotel Possets dinner $40.41.
WED,9/17: Sort; Lladros; Tavascan. Puerto de la Bonaigua lunch $28.01. Salardu Hotel Lacreu dinner included, after cava in "upper room" looking at Val d'Aran.
THU,9/18: Vielha; Taull churches. Sos Hotel Sositana lunch $11.05. Benasque and Ansiles. Gran Hotel Benasque dinner (with screaming baby) $67.23, some good.
FRI,9/19: Ainsa; Bissost church. Bar Urtau $13.04 lunch. France: Valcabrere Basilica St. Just. St. Bertrand de Comminges Hotel Oppidum dinner $41.25 good.
SAT,9/20: Col d'Aspin, Bigorre gondola. Good lunch $19.89. Col du Tourmalet; LONG road to Col d'Aubisque. Lost in Pau. Chez Ruffet** in Jurancon $180.48FAB!
SUN,9/21: Pau Hotel Continental good breakfast. $13.26. Pau Chateau; incredible road mess to Eugenie-Les-Bains. Lunch $30.94! Dinner*** ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS $380.86.
MON,9/22: Breakfast $29.47. Fly Pau-Paris 10:55-12:06(0:67). SICK! Paris-JFK 5:15-1:10(7:55).