A cell phone view of the Pre-Pyrenees from our hotel, the Cal Taverner, in Monsonís. This is in the La Noguera comarca of Catalonia. It's about a 30 minute drive from Balaguer. I'll post some more texts soon. It is beautiful to get out and walk around the countryside. Coldish mornings, though!
Barcelona, October
Waking sounds in a quiet house.
We close our eyes and listen.
Murmured colors grace the window.
November voices share our embrace,
first gift in a season chanting hurry
into café life and hillside walks.
Our choices brace the turning path,
the city’s rousing seasonal song.
We spent four days in August in the Pyrenees, in the Vall Fosca region of the Pallars Jussà comarca (county). This area has been lucky to have very low rates of Covid 19 infection, which of course is one reason for our choice. One of our walks took us from Gento Lake along the old narrow gauge railway line, which leads to more lakes in the system. I’ll post more on this but for the moment these three pictures give an idea of the views—and the great sunny weather!
Gento Lake
A little farther along the trail ...
Erica and clear blue skies ... Taken from the trail, no actual climbing ...
Summer inspires travel, as I was saying in relation to our recent trip to Vilanova i La Geltrú. But I also feel I should mention rising Covid numbers again.
However, some information that might be considered indirectly related to travel is available at the link below, regarding architecture and, more specifically, floating architecture or floating building. You may already know the term, but I think this is well worth a read.
https://ecofriend.com/10-examples-sustainable-architecture-future.html
It isn’t only short trips like our recent ones between Barcelona and Vilanova i La Geltrú. Summer inspires longer trips as well, the kind that may require air travel, which obviously means adding to the world’s large carbon footprint. So thinking about ways to make travelling a part of the sustainable environment, I’ve looked around the web a bit for some ideas. An organisation called Sustainable Travel has information on this topic, including things like staying closer to home, investing in carbon offsets, generally slowing down. Their website is worth a read:
https://sustainabletravel.org/how-to-reduce-travel-carbon-footprint/
Also, on the theme of airplane travel, the Environmental Defense Fund speaks about the same themes but with a focus primarily on the aviation industry and vacationers. New information (to me, at least) includes the Carbon Offsetting Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. As much as 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions could be kept out of the atmosphere with full implementation of Corsia. The link on this is:
https://www.edf.org/climate/aviation
Finally, I looked in the direction of architecture. What I found is surprising and I’m going to save it. Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long. I hope some good poetry (in the ample sense, whatever your creative activity) comes out of this. Stretch those desires….
Another view of the sea from Vilanova. We hadn’t seen some of the friends at yesterday’s birthday celebration for a year…. And it was a beautiful reunion, masks off when possible, proper distancing and greeting—and who would have believed we’d be talking this way before the pandemic! However, mild, sunny weather. Light traffic on the highways. All in high spirits. From the restaurant we could look down and see the beach with people running and playing, and colorful parasols here and there on the sands, then the long shallows of the sea, something like in this photo taken some time back (and at a different time of day). This morning, back in the city and ready for a longer trip.
Longing to take a long walk along these shores, which is the plan for today. With the new rise in Covid figures we’re limiting activities of course. We’re permitted to be without masks in the open air inside cities now, but in Barcelona often keep the mask on out of habit. A bad sign? I hope not! In any case for today the sea awaits….
