My sweetie found a new TV show about surviving

Hello, everyone.

I walked into the living room this evening and found my sweetie watching something I'd never seen before. It's a survival show called, ahem, "Dude You are So Screwed" and it's about some fellow being dropped off in the middle of but-noplace and he has to find his way out with what he is dropped off with. The episode I wandered into the middle of, the man was in the middle of central Iceland someplace. He walked on glaciers, he found hot hydrothermal field springs, and so on and so forth. I found myself remembering the cold, remote-looking parts of the Route Napoleon. (Thank the Lord, though, we didn't walk across any glaciers. With our spring-for-Texas clothes and no fleece in the load at all!) I felt sympathy for him, straggling up hill and down and having trouble keeping his footing in the snow. I remembered the sliding slate rocks on the downhill side of the Cruz de Ferro and how hard it was to find a sure foot place there.

I'm sure a more experienced hiker reading this will be thinking about the sticks. But I found that, after we got past the first day, the sticks didn't help me much. They made me walk slower than I would otherwise. I'm sure that descending the Alto de Perdon would have gone faster without having to find a place for each stickfall along with each footfall.

But this show made me remember all of that. And my sweetie and I remembered together about it. (Who says you have to be staring at the screen just because the TV is on?)

But, on another subject, I have progress to report on the Red Quilt. I have pinned the quilt sandwich together. (Pinning these things is a Buns of Steel moment, as it always involves leaning over while on the knees on the floor. A lot.)

Fist conceptual work: I needed to make a new square or two! and toss out the mostly-white one.

A better assortment of squares. They don't jell yet, though. More work to be done!

The sequence chosen, the index tabs pinned on, and the rows sewn together. Als0, as yo can see, sashing had joined the project.

Oops! The first pieces of batting don't work right. Back to the boxes of stuff upstairs!

The quilt top, sashed and edged, but without the batting and backing in place.

Ready to pin together.

The backing is some yardage of a neat foxgloves type design, blue and yellow bloom stalks alternating in great crowds. And this time, I don't have to piece the backing. I used up almost all of the random pieces of batting on hand for this, and I needed 3/4 of my bag of quilter's safety pins to pin-baste the layers. Next time I go at it, I will take the sewing machine to the dining room--so there is room for the fabric to move--and quilt the layers together. Then I'll add the edging and it will be done.

There is not much progress on the beading, so I won't show pictures of that yet. Suffice to say that I had to locate instructions for how to increase the peyote rows! But by the time I finish this pendant with the Cross of Santiago, I'll have that trick down. For sure. This one is planned to go with a set of graduated red beads to make a necklace. I wear colors that go with red and white a lot, so I can use it a lot. Viva Santiago Apostol!

(Sorry about the lack of an upside down exclamation point there, but I don't know how or if it can be done in this format. Suggestions are welcome.)

A Correction, and moving along

Hello, everyone.

I noticed while looking at yesterday's post (after hitting the "post" button!) that I had somehow transmuted the name of Valdeiglesias, the village where we stayed, into Santeiglesias, which as far as I know is a nonexistent village. Sorry.

Valdeiglesias, besides having a church with a noted statue of a saint, and a wonderful albergue, had lovely rose gardens. Well, a lot of the villages in northern Spain had beautiful rose gardens, as well as the wilder trail sections descending from the Pyrennees having God's rose bowers to walk through, but my sweetie was inspired to photograph flowers in gardens from time to time, and he did so in Valdeiglesias.

I admired the roses so much in the Spanish gardens! I think they're so pretty because the nights are cool--not that I know. But my roses aren't as bodaciously lush at all, and our nights in the summer are about 79 to 81 degrees F. The days are about 20 degrees F hotter, of course. But I think it's the nights that matter.

The next morning, we got to Rabanal about 9 and ate Tuna and Tomato Bocadillo for breakfast. YUM. And a nice break from the unending round of ham-and-cheese we had been on. Or course we also had Cafe Leche to go with it. And the Bar owner is a Johnny Cash fan, so as we walked in we heard "The Streets of Laredo" on the music system.

About 11 we got to Foncebadon and had a bottle of cold water and contemplated a village that had, prior to the revival of the pilgrimage in the late 20th century, been basically a ghost town. Now it has some albergues and a bar. We kept on going, climbing rocky goat tracks to the Cruz de Ferro and discovering that some Aggies had left a 12th Man towel on the huge cairn of rocks at the base of the cross. As you can see, lots of other folks have left little tokens, too. Be very careful when descending the pile of rocks, they shift.

We carried on to Acebo for a 28 kilometer day. The last 10 or so was downhill on loose, slippy shale. I hated it. But when you're halfway down you can't very well wiggle your nose like Elizabeth Montgomery's TV character and fly to better footing--you just have to grit your teeth and step carefully. I didn't use the poles, because I had noticed that using poles on this kind of trail only meant that I had three things (at least) that had to be on secure footing instead of only two. We stayed at the Meson albergue in Acebo, grateful that we'd gotten down the mountain with no sprained ankles and looking forward to reaching Ponferrada the next day.

The smooth stuff on the edges is not flat. But taking a photo gives a pause to recover nerve before continuing!