Lesbians are cool

Yesterday, walking through the suburbs of Ponferrada, I came upon Yasko, the Japanese woman I met over a week ago in Terradillos. We´ve been regularly crossing each other´s paths ever since, often staying at the same albergue (there are a number of people I keep seeing). She was sitting on a wall resting, and she said, "can I ask a question?" She held up a cookie and said, "what you call this?" I immediately understood her confusion. The Australians and British on the Camino have been saying "biscuit," which is of course silly. I explained that I would call it a cookie. A biscuit was something else all together.

Today I climbed into more mountains, and rain fell off and on. I am near the border of Galicia, where it is much wetter than Castilla y Leon, the province I´ve been crossing for the last several hundred kilometers.

I left Villafranca del Bierza this morning at six, crossed a river, and immediately began climbing steeply up a narrow road on what is called the Pradela Route. Apparently everyone else stayed down low along the highway, because I didn´t see another person for the next three hours. After walking upwards two strenuous kilometers, I leveled out and traveled along a high ridgeline. The sun finally appeared over a farther ridge to my right and shined through a gap in the clouds, lighting up the green mountaintop and me. Sweet.

Eventually, alas, I had to descend from the heights, passing through a long and lovely chestnut grove and dropping steeply, knee-crunchingly, all the way down to the valley floor. There I met Ben, the Australian, and a young British woman (more on her later--yet another good story), and fell in with them for a stretch.

Last night I went out to dinner with Mandy and a (different) British woman, Rachel. An above average meal in the Restaurante Sevilla: ensalada mixta, chuletas, and a very good natillas. But even better than the food was the company and the conversation. Rachel was a lively, smart, and fascinating woman, and by the end of the meal I was ready to commit. Earlier we had discovered that we both had twenty-year-old daughters, which was an immediate bond.

In England she´s a midwife, but she has accepted a job in Australia, in Alice Springs, at a clinic for aboriginal people. She wore a moon goddess-y wrap but sensible hiking pants, and she laughed a lot. She was nosy, with a knack for quickly eliciting personal details, though without causing any discomfort. She soon had both my and Mandy´s romantic histories. She revealed that she had once gotten married in Las Vegas, but it didn´t take. She said that she was bisexual, that she had decided more than once to be a lesbian, but there was just something about men (an aside: she knew several of the older men at the albergue, and my sense was that she had made numerous conquests on the Camino).

My own lesbian story fascinated Rachel, and she asked a barrage of questions. "I didn´t know that Minnesota was so radical," she said. Somehow my sperm donor experience entered the conversation (like I said, she invited confession), which of course inspired more curiosity. Earlier, when we were talking daughters, she had said to me, "you´re going to have another kid, I´m sure of it." She now reiterated this prediction. I myself am skeptical. On the other hand, maybe I´ll be moving to Alice Springs, though she didn´t ask me to yet.

Tonight I´m at a small albergue on the edge of a small village, La Faba, high in the mountains. It´s raining again. On the last part of the steep, muddy climb to the village I had to give way on the path to several cows, followed by several dogs, then a man holding an umbrella and riding a donkey. The albergue is run by a German couple, and while George registered me for the night, Anita brought me a cup of hot tea and a cookie. Latr a Canadian woman I met last night arrived, and we talked and talked. Or I should say I listened and listened. But more on that tomorrow.

Suddenly I have less time to write, my social life has become so demanding.