Friday, August 31, 2007

La Hinojosa Day 2

We had to walk through a spectacular pine forest to get to the fuente.
There were so many sun flower fields..
Cold fresh natural water..
Some mariquitas in the fields.
Toni resting after a jog to another fuente.

Day 2 – 10th August Friday

We slept in late today and awoke to the sun shining in our room. Toni’s dad and aunt and uncle headed off to a village near by to do the shopping. This village is really small and so only really has one tiny shop and of course one pub. After breakfast at about 1pm, us youngengs wandered down the road to the one and only pub called ‘la hinajosa’ after the village. It is just a small room with chairs and tables and a bar. The only other people in there were a table of four elderly men playing cards. We ordered a drink and asked the bar tender for a pack of cards and sat at one table and Toni’s family taught me how to play a game. On the way to the bar Toni had stopped at the house of some of his family to say hello. Most of the houses in the village belong to family. We wandered home after our drink and our game, I got to see most of the village on our short stroll home. It is not big, with maybe only 40 houses in total, most of them unoccupied and in some state of decay. When we arrived home, lunch was being prepared and I helped to make a salad from some local produce, washing the lettuce in a bowl in the garden. Some cousins had made lunch of ‘corzo’ deer and hare, marinated in white wine for two days before being slow roasted with herbs and salt and pepper. It was delicious. After lunch we went for a walk through a pine forest on a mountain to find some natural spring fountains. They are called Fuentes. The walk was about 4 km, up and over hills covered in pines, down and through fields of blooming sunflowers, past barns full of sheep, until al last we arrived at the Fuente. It had just been modernised and now the water that usually came up out of the ground into a small pool, had a metal pipe and a basin made from marble, so you could easily drink the cold fresh water. Toni and I jogged part of the way back and stopped at another Fuente to see where his grandfather had planted some trees years ago, and where the family used to picnic. We saw a small deer bounding through the sunflower fields in the sunset.

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