Copa Espana #1, Galicia

The Galician coast. All of the towns along the sea remind me of Maine. They have that small kind of dumpy but quaint almost subdued character about them, all fishing towns at heart. Even when it's sunny you have the impression that it has just finished raining or another rain is coming, but this is not depressing; it was a nice change from the land of sun down here in La Comunidad Valenciana. The presence of the Atlantic is different from the Mediterranean, or at least I imagined it as so. Like we were on the edge of something vast and powerful, not stagnant and tame and brakish. All of the roads are twisted and on a bike you are either descending or climbing, never at level. During the race we passed through a section of road which took to the side of a steep hill leading down to the ocean, down to a sandy beach. There was sun but also fog hanging in the highest tier of the hillside trees. The view was beautiful but was made more beautiful by our movement; a sight leaking of such vivid colors and so grounded in its depth and perspective ( I saw a dew drop on a blade of grass shimmer, and then looked out to the ocean until it met the sky) would otherwise seem impossible to really grasp from a static perspective. It's frustrating to see a landscape so rare and breathtaking that its full impact is dulled by a nagging sensation of surrealism, as if what meets the eye is too fantastic to really BE there. But on a bicycle, one of a hundred bicycles, I am a single foot of the great colored millipede that is the peloton, a social organism entirley out of my control but deeply in control of me. It is a mechanism heeding to a higher natural law greater than each one of its individual parts, thrusting us in patterned relays over great expanses of the ground in seconds where perpsective is made tangible to me. The view is no longer a flat two-dimensional experience, but something I am carving through. The inertial resitance of this crest, and its equal reimbursement of energy once passed over- I am part of this dynamic justice of forces. I can suck in the whole horizon and all the ocean and all of the earth which pushes me up and then lets me fall and I imagine I am chewing on it, yes! To chew on this big soft juicy landscape, as playdough begs to chewed on. A strange hunger is satisfied in this way, speeding through the twists and turns like I am gathering all of the sights in handfuls and mouthfuls to process and taste and I'm wondering now if this makes the landscape real in my world or if this makes me surreal in the world of the landscape. Don't stop drinking water, 164 beats per mintue 45 kmh 70 k from the finish, keep that cadence up...

Galician Cornfields.

This is a foggy morning view of the town across the bay from where we stayed.

Typical Galician homes nestled in the eucalyptus and pine covered hills.

Here is the hotel where we stayed.