Fields of Castile
On my nightstand I have a Iberian Peninsula road map . It is a 2003 edition, one of those dropdowns , the size of a sheet, which I found on the ground at the foot of the walls of Miranda do Douro, in Portugal.
Since then I have changed cities 4 times, I have suffered 6 moves and I have lost many things in them. But the map is still there, on my bedside table . In each of the tables that I have had in these 16 years.
Sometime I began to mark on it the roads I was traveling . Without a reason, I guess to entertain myself, but after a few months the mesh of lines painted in ballpoint pen began to make sense, began to darken the areas I know best and to leave large gaps in counties or provinces through which I had moved less.
It was turning into a diary , in a reminder of everything I have traveled and how much I still have to visit. And, at the same time, it put me in front of a reality: I enjoy the destination, the landscape, the city or the restaurant that motivates a trip, but I enjoy at least as much with the way , with everything you find unexpectedly along the way.
I realized, looking at that map, that those lines were actually the journey . And that each centimeter of blue line drawn in an area that was previously blank brings to mind, years later, more memories than a photo in front of a cathedral.
We have become accustomed to airport queues, train stations, to screens with timetables and boarding gates ; to motorways that we take in our city and they spit us out at our destination, avoiding everything that is out there and we have convinced ourselves that this is just going on a trip.
By the CM 4202 on the way to Brazatortas
Moving from one city to another, without more, is not traveling, it is meeting a need; is to visit a place . Traveling is something that requires time and preparation, that tires and that dirty . Traveling is eating in a restaurant that is in all the international rankings, but it is also each coffee in the service areas , the sales, the roadside menus in places you don't even know the name of. If you know a country only through its renowned restaurants or its five-star hotels, you don't know it.
It is something that I have had very clear for years, since that time when, as a teenager, my uncle suggested that I accompany him on a lightning visit that he had to make to Salamanca and that was my baptism on the road : six hours by car, a day there and back, by car again, to get home early in the morning.
Path of the Sierra de la Umbría of Alcudia
That day dawned when we were already in the port of Padornelo I saw a fallow deer running among the rocks next to the Ricobayo reservoir and I spent seven hours touring the city. We watched the sunset, on the way home, behind the mountains of Sanabria.
I discovered Salamanca, to which I have returned much later and where I always want to return. But I remember most of all the trip, the road, the coffee somewhere near Mombuey and the smell of rockrose in the sun on the sides of the road.
I have longed for many things in these past months. I have been missing loved ones, talks about anything on a terrace . I have missed friends, clients and work routines, visits to restaurants, new dishes. I have gained weight, I have had insomnia and It has broken my head thinking about what would be out there when we return to the streets . But one of the worst things I've had was not going out on the road.
Ricobayo Reservoir
There have been times in the last decade when I've woken up in hotel rooms with no idea where I was . After two weeks on the road, changing towns daily, you wake up at night and don't even know which side of the bed the light switch is on. They are seconds sometimes not even that . I will not say that it is a pleasant feeling. However you get used to it, for all that it implies. And you miss her. I had not imagined how much.
It was at the end of March or the beginning of April, when I understood that this strange situation was going to drag on, that I was going to be a while without moving. I spent the next few weeks think about past trips I guess like almost all of us did; to remember hotels and towns, to collect data; to fill notebooks, to create maps with restaurants, bars, viewpoints, landscapes and villages.
I decided that the first thing I would do as soon as possible would be to get back on the back roads. . Not to go to a specific place but for the pleasure of going through them , to stop somewhere I don't know just to stop. And that I did.
Vultures perched on the road through the Pedroches Valley
A reunion of 2,200 kilometers that has been like seeing a friend again with whom you know you still have many talks pending . The return to a rhythm marked by gas stations, by a sign with the name of a town that you do not know very well what it sounds like, by the doubt of whether the car will be able to handle that unpaved track.
The first trip of the rest of our life , the first route of this new normality , it has been a declaration of love to backroads , to its potholes, to the stops on the shoulder to take a photo; to that endless Iberian Peninsula that we insist on not seeing so many times ; that Spain that is out there full of landscapes, fleeting talks and hotels; of tapas, ruins and dust.
It has been a return to the road, to the journey as a route and not as a destination. I have returned to high school, to the kilometers without seeing anyone, to ask myself from the top of a hill what town is that down there.
And when you get home, I have repainted lines on the map : those of this route, in pen, and next to them, in pencil, those of the following. Life, in the end, is that: enjoy the road, fall in love with what comes your way and decide which will be the next road.
Wedding Knoll