Pandemic

Just as I was thinking, “I have nothing to write about because I have been walking around in circles for three or four years I find that at least virtually I have almost achieved a big project. Walking 819 kilometres on the Camino De Santiago. I am now four kilometres from the end. By the end of tomorrow morning I will have completed this goal.

In reality nothing special, as I haven’t had to change my routine, suffer or anything else. What does surprise me is how quickly I completed the challenge. I could have accomplished the goal in more time. I have more than 100 days left to complete the challenge. Now we know how long it would take me to complete, in the physical world.

Over the last three or four days I have marked two books as finished despite not finishing for a simple reason. I have plenty of books on Kindle, Audible and Kobo that I need to read, but that to read all these books, would take time. I started to read one book and I stopped within pages, every time for the same reason.

In today’s context my disgust with one book is rational. For decades the web and social media have been treated as addictions, and because they have been stigmatised and seen as illnesses it becomes morally acceptable to abuse users. Look at Meta Facebook and Meta Instagram, and how they are being discussed in the news. The attitude, that social media is a drug enabled marketers, and social media owners to abuse of their addicted users, because they’re addicts, and it is their fault for becoming addicted.

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. Usually for divers they are not so visible.

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. During the pandemic I did not swim or climb so my arms are not as strong as they were.

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. I filmed it a few days ago but did not get around to editing the sequence.

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. I know that they can be tiring, either due to traffic, or because of the entire day. The Leukerbad Via Ferrata drives were tiring because I woke at 3am to get to the destination at 8am for the first ride up, and then climb for five to seven hours, before driving home. That is a demanding day. Eventually I booked hotel nights. That changed the experience. Spa and meal with people after sports is nicer.

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.