A Jar of Olives

Here's a modest jar of olives, with a quart bottle of milk for size comparison. The jar isn't full because we've been munching on them for several days.

Traveling in Spain, as we have frequently, we've found it common that stopping for liquid refreshment, we are served a bowl of table olives along with the drinks. These olives are always amazingly tasty.

Looking for olives like these over the past couple of years in the U.S. has been frustrating. Most of the bottled ones we have bought were from Spain, but they have invariably been acidic and salty, nearly to the point of  tastelessness.

Flashback to Spain last month. Sipping on beer or wine with daughter and son-in-law, and nibbling sumptuous olives, I was no doubt heard more than once to exclaim, "why can't we get olives like these back home?"

Flash forward to Florida not long after Fathers' Day when a huge well-packed jar of incredibly tasty Spanish olives arrived on our doorstep. Thank you Pam and James. Rest assured that we are enjoying them and will continue to do so in the weeks ahead.

Hospitalero time is coming

 We have our plane tickets. We are studying our Spanish every day, but we do not feel ready for prime time conversation yet. Even in our dreams, we only see ourselves as being able to communicate basic needs, like shopping in the little tienda-- “I want those vegetables, over there on that shelf.”

 

 But we are greatly looking forward to the experience and then to walking with Pam and James for a couple of weeks and almost 200 miles.

And, we are having fun buying gear again, although we already own more than we would consider carrying. It is just such fun to find new, lighter, better versions of stuff we have. I’m bringing my same rain poncho. After my testing it thoroughly last year, we never had any rain.

Right now, we enjoying our great Golden Retriever, Jake. We do not have many days left with him. We keep him close for this last little time we have together.

 Next weekend is the Annual Meeting of the Friends of the Lower Suwannee & Cedar Keys NWRs. I will move from being president to being past president. I feel good about what we’ve accomplished in my two years, getting 12 paddling trails mapped out, with a 13^th underway; establishing 12 Initiatives for 2013, with a volunteer champion for each of them, and putting some governance changes in place to strengthen succession of leadership. 

I will be happy to hand over the gavel…well actually we don’t need a gavel at our meetings. I think I’ll hand over the coffee pot…we do need coffee.

After that…train, train, train for the hike and study, study, study our Spanish. It is almost countdown time.

 

 

Becoming Hospitaleros

Not at all sure how it got started, but it surely was sometime last Spring. We had decided to attend the Annual Gathering of the American Pilgrims on the Camino in Winter Park, FL, in March. The meeting lasts about three days, and there is an optional two-day extension; one can arrive early and be trained to be a volunteer hospitalero in a network of albergues along El Camino de Santiago. We saw the Gathering as a mini-vacation--a chance to meet up with people we knew from two years earlier and, especially, spend some time with our sister and brother-in-law, who are seasoned pilgrims and Gathering goers. Somehow a notion took hold; why not extend our little vacation and take in the hospitalero training? It should be fun, and we were curious about what it entailed.

So we took the training. It was interesting and fun, but we didn't volunteer last year, deciding to walk instead. As things turned out, we found ourselves walking a much more rugged and demanding route than expected, and that might have helped to make the idea of holding still for a couple of weeks seem more appealing. I don't know if it was then or sometime later, but the idea of volunteering gained currency, and last week we decided it was time to put our names in.

Our first choice of where to go was the famous Albergue Guacelmo in the mountain village of Rabanal. We informed the operators, the British Confraternity of Saint James, of our interest. We got an offer, but unfortunately the July dates they had available didn't fit with our plans at all. Our second choice was the municipal albergue in El Burgo Ranero (the Town of Frogs), a dusty village in the Kansas-like Meseta. We got the offer and the dates we needed, so we will be off next May. We've gotten a welcome and a few instructions, but it appears that, like most other things on the Camino, it will be an informal, cordial, and physically demanding undertaking.

El Burgo Ranero, including church with resident storks

The Albergue

The wetlands, home to the town's frogs