Binnacle. Part VII. Epilogue. La Corunna.

The journey was somehow over. I had arrived to Santander, from where I took a bus to my Galician hometown, where I was going to spend a few days.

I don't know how to explain it, I've seen decent places everywhere, but nothing can be compared to Galicia. Galicia is truly amazing. There is no place like home, I could live anywhere, but I will always need coming back and so on so forth.

Call it the mixture of pure air, own language and culture, best food in the whole planet; that just reduces the rest of the world to a dumb joke.

Galicia also has this wonderful particular effect on people that allows me to sleep about 16 hours a day when being there. Is the best place to rest in the universe. It relaxes your mind and keeps trouble away. The perpetual rain becomes somehow helpful as well. The sea, poor little minds that cannot understand the power of the sea, key element in my life. I was finally able to walk around freezing water and sand, temperature is not an issue when you are not sure when you will see the sea again.

Plenty of time for reading, writing, sleeping and eating. Nietzsche's Zarathustra and "The Dice Man" by Luke Reinheart were the only books I had managed to read during my journey. The last one was on my "to-read-list" since last year, and it ended up being a literary masterpiece, top quality. I must thank the person who recommend me that book, a former BIS & RM teacher from my good-old times as a Londoner, Mr. Dave Inman, such a nice lad and teacher. Cheers, professor.

I will eventually come back to Madrid, come back to reality, to the concrete jungle, pedestrian beaches, the lack of decent seafood and the heart-breaking absence of sea.

I prefer Munich as a city and Neuschwanstein and San Siro as attraction, from everything I saw on tour. I'm falling in love with the Bavaria, not with Germany, with the German Bavaria. That is truly amazing. Objectively, Vienna is a better city, but Munich just suits my preferences better, Austria lacks of football. Switzerland was a previously known country. Italy was nice as well, its cultural similarity to Spain is noticeable, is like a different Spain, I will take on Italy at a calm pace.

I start thinking about which places I would like to see now and nothing comes to my mind. I'm not missing anything except the joy of traveling, sleeping among trains and airports, hitchhike, tease my back, begging for survival and living off bread and water. If I die tomorrow, I would only regret not being able to see Athletic taking out the barge on the Bilbao Estuary to celebrate a title, plus never going on a trip to Iceland. Still, Iceland is a trip that requires calm, time, budget and vast mental and physical preparation; without mentioning that it is an only-during-the-summer seasonal trip. Thus I'm getting old and slipped discs, sciatica, renal failures, liver problems, diabetes and cholesterol issues will soon appear. I'm not in a pace of 25 kilometers a day to subsequently sleep in a bus anymore.

This binnacle was a good excuse to keep up and come back with the blog the way some good chaps asked me to, but I don't know what to write about in a near future. Publishing old material is not an option. I will think about it later.

So basically this binnacle comes to an end. The prologue was written at Barajas and the epilogue was written at "the city where nobody is a stranger". Geneva, Bavaria, Munich and Milan were in the middle of it. The sea, the sea of A Coruña is properly attached below. Write to you later, for the Summer trip binnacle.

"See You in Another Life, Brother".