A rusty cow bell bell
Tomorrow I will be driving for twelve hours and I hope that I find it as relaxing as the last drive but I doubt that I will be that lucky. We will see how traffic and other conditions are.
I hope that I have a good two or three audiobooks to listen to, so that I may be entertained and focused. We will see.
We can’t all head to the mountains and the slopes that lack snow. Some of us head south to the coast. The weather is good and the air is warm enough. It is warm enough for me, not just to consider swimming but to actually do it.
A rocky outcrop
The sea is blue and green as usual with waves breaking. I saw a few orange buoys but I am unsure about whether they are for diving boats or swimmers.
For most people over 20 degrees air temperature and twenty one degree water is okay. I struggle. I like water to be warm. I like to be warm before I go in. I like to know that when I get out I will still be warm.
Today with a little effort I managed to convince myself to swim. I didn’t swim much. I swam three hundred meters. Usually I would swim further.
Have you walked by the Mediterranean recently? I walked by it today. It was blue and Green, turquoise and red. The sea was calm and a sailing boat or two set off to sail from one place to another.
Today I saw a queue of tractors without drivers. Tractors with trailers full of beat were parked by the on loading dock at the railway siding. There is a machine. The tractors come up to the machine, back, and then start to pour the sugar beet into it. The machine then transports the beets from the receptacle along conveyor belts before they are dumped into a train wagon, ready for transport by rail to where they are needed.
The most I drove was 3600 kilometres in four days. I went to Western France, Barcelona, back to Western France, and then back to Switzerland. It was an average of 800 kilometres a day. About two or three hours from home I was so tired of driving that I stopped at an empty motorway stop and just zoned out for ten minutes or so before continuing to drive.
Sports and Driving I like driving, and I like long journeys by car.
Today I looked at two of the masks I used over summer and they are both bleached by the sun. So is my hat. I normally expect things in Spain to be sun bleached, not Switzerland. The reason is simple. First, it never ever rains, and even clouds are rare today, and second, I spend an hour and a half outdoors a day walking. Plenty of time for my things to get sun bleached.
One day I prepared Raclette and whtin a few days I prepared Goulash. I find the contrast between the two recipes amusing. One takes 15-20 minutes to prepare because of the need to cook potatoes for that long, and the other takes half an hour to prepare and then another hour or two to cook. One is just cheese, pepper and bread, the other is bread, pepper, tomatoes, potatoes, meat, paprika and more.
This morning I found that I did have trip desire after all. As I drove out of a village towards the East I found that I had this desire. I did want to go for a long drive, and go on a trip. It has been January 2019 that I haven’t traveled. My reason, before, was that we need to stay locally, to stop the spread of the pandemic. I had the old fashioned notion that a pandemic should be neutralised as soon as possible.
I thought that when I bought two cycling water bottles and two normal day bottles I would be done, but then I found a nalgene bottle for a reasonable price, and then someone mentioned drinking from a steel container, rather than aluminium so I was distracted and tempted. I did tell myself that this would replace my habit of drinking other types of drinks. I thought “Stop with these drinks for three weeks per bottle and you amortise the cost”.