GOING UP!

 What a day!  I left Villaviciosa early in the morning, and walked
through a large park on the edge of town.  As the path left the outskirts of town and went up into the farmland I came to a place where three Caminos converged; the Norte to Gijon, the link to the Primitivo, via Oviedo, and the Camino de Covadonga, which goes to the site of the famous battle where Pelayo began the process of Reconquista.  My road, the one to Oviedo, was full of village vistas, hedgerow floral fantasies, and the sound of church bells.  I had decided to take a side trail to visit the ninth century church and medieval monastery at Valdedios.  The steep climb started at San Pedro de Ambas, with its lovely ancient houses and a restored lavadero, and took me past  a host of interesting sights: sleeping cats; lords of their particular universes; chatty farmwives herding cattle;  beautiful horreos which looked almost like Japanese temples rather than mundane grain storage huts;  people out fixing fences;  and a monk, riding in the back of a car full of what looked like Mafiosi, but who were obviously some of the faithful.  The car stopped, and the monk asked me if I was planning to stay at the refugio at Valdedios.  He assured me there would be someone there to give me a tour, but that if I wanted to stay I would have to hang around until he got back.

From the moment it came into view, the church was perfect.  As the guidebook indicated, it was worth the pain of getting there.  The church, built in 893, looked to me as if it had come perfectly formed from the mind of the architect, yesterday.  It is in the process of restoration, but it still looks and feels very old.  The interior was once covered completely with painted plaster.  Little remains now, but it must have felt very fresh and vibrant at the time.  It reminded me of sixties pop art!  The whole place was wonderful, the buildings running the gamut of all sorts of architectural styles.

Alain and Jacqui, an elderly French couple I met along the road, were my companions for a tour, in Spanish, of many parts of the monastery.  We rested, refilled our water containers, and ate our bread and cheese.  Then, the hard part of the day began.  The next four kilometres were spent climbing the Sierra de Sueve.  The rise in elevation was over three hundred metres,  along the side of the valley, where I watched the red roofs of the monastery shrink at every turn.  Eventually, I could just about see the ocean several kilometres away to the north.  I was very glad to get to my coke stop in Campo at the very summit, but the views the whole way were so lovely, I hadn't really minded the climb.

 Alas....what goes up.....let's just say that it was a "fuerte decenso",  ( 100 metres in a single km)   on a hot afternoon, past the only growling dog I met on the whole journey.  I swear I thought it was a lion hiding under that piece of farm machinery!  My knees were really bugging me, and I was just starting to descend into my old grumpiness about too much carreterra, when the Universe sent a sign to make me laugh at myself.  When I say it was a sign, I mean just that,(and in English),  emblazoned on the side of a tractor-trailer parked in a farmyard far below me in the valley.  RELAX!

Somehow that took the pressure off and I enjoyed the rest of the way into Vega de Sariego.  Roses, cattle, little lizards skittering across the road like the shadows of willow leaves suspended above the ground.  Another beautiful Asturian day.