Iberia Idyll Imminent

At this juncture Peregrinations goes incommunicado for a time. On Sunday we depart for Barcelona and a 19-day adventure in Spain, including a week of hill-climbing in Catalonia and most of another in Granada. The hill portion features climbs of as much as 800 metres or so and distances of up to 22 km. Gulp. Let’s hope this summer’s constitutional hikes to Dalem Lake and the time we’ve recently spent slogging up some of Cape Breton’s steeper hills with Lynn and Louise has us ready for our latest European adventure.

The draw in Granada is not just the celebrated Alhambra but family ties too: nephew Michael is three weeks into a six-month sabbatical there with Alice, Ana and Rex. We’re keen to remove the rust from our ability to order cold beer in Spanish, and to look for new birds too. Maybe even one we’ve sought in vain before: the outlandish, garishly attired hoopoe.

If all goes according to plan, we should return intact to this side of the Atlantic October 4. No doubt Jan and I will think of something to write about soon thereafter.

Sixty? No Way!

Spare a thought for Jan this week. My Better Half reaches a major milestone Tuesday: half way to matching the longevity mark achieved by the famous Parisienne wit, Jeanne Calment, who towards the end of her 120-year span – or was it 121? –famously remarked, I only ever had one wrinkle, and I sat on it my entire life. Such a role model.

The rumour I hear is that the secret to some couples’ success is plenty of separation. Husband and wife do lots of stuff independently and thus avoid wearying of each other prematurely. Indeed some devotees of this recipe for marital bliss – perhaps with us in mind – have confessed to having no idea how a Fred-and-Martha who do most everything together can possibly stand it.

But there it is, in the seventeenth year of our liaison Jan and I still find ourselves toward the joined-at-the-hip end of the matrimonial spectrum. I count myself lucky that Hawkeye gets as big a kick as I do out of ogling a gang of migrant warblers through the business end of our hoary old Swarovskis, or slogging up a mountainside, or riding the bikes along a country road. How blessed we are that at a combined 126 years of age we can still do these things.

Heck, my wench even manages to share some enthusiasm for the vocational success of Steve Nash and Joey Votto while partaking in my exultation whenever the Boston Red Sox lay a beating on the despised NY Yankess. How lucky can a guy get? Another mystery that gets some folks scratching their heads is how she’s managed to stand living with me for nigh on seventeen years. While I don’t think I’m all that bad I do admit to being disinclined to ponder the question too deeply lest I scare the bejeezus out of myself.

On Tuesday a gang of her closest Cape Breton pals will mark Jan’s 60^th at one of our favourite eateries. I expect abundant affection, alacrity and amusement, and I know there are plenty more who’d wish they could be there. 

Wilkie Sugarloaf Sweetly Rewarding

Another blithe weekend day, another lifer mountain for ourselves and my constantly companionable cousins. With Lynn and Louise we gradually work our way through the remaining new-to-us mountain hikes inventoried in Michael Haynes’ 2^nd edition, Hiking Trails of Cape Breton. Saturday it was Wilkie Sugarloaf’s turn to shine in the sunny spotlight. Wilkie demands a steep 400 m ascent with nary a switchback to ease a pounding heart but rewards those who persevere with terrific vistas in every direction.

Along the way birds generously provided a regular pretext for pausing and deploying the binoculars, including one or two out of the ordinary: a boreal chickadee here, palm warbler there.

"Some say that on a very clear day you can even see Newfoundland," Haynes laments, "I have never been so lucky." On Saturday, as we approached the summit, our quartet was that lucky and we have the pictures to prove it. The rocky outcrop at the mountain top is too small a vantage point to accommodate a large assembly but sufficient to gratify a foursome hell-bent on appreciating all the visuals: south to Aspy Bay and North Harbour Beach, west to the North Mountain Range wilderness, north to Bay St Lawrence.

Three weekends in a row we have been treated to outdoor gems with L & L. All have been terrific, but I’m hard-pressed not to put the latest at the top of the heap. After descending the mountain we jettisoned footwear and took a barefoot meander along the long sandbar at North Harbour Beach. This is the place where John Cabot is imagined to have moored the Matthew in 1497 and gone for a beach walk of his own. A bust of the explorer marks the historic spot.

Our focus was less on old explorers than it was on shorebirds: we saw sanderling, least sandpiper, both of the semi-palmated species – plover and sandpiper – and most gratifying, two golden plovers on their way to the far reaches of South America, one already in winter dress, the other still molting out of breeding plumage.

One final highlight capped the day. I don’t know what provoked it, but suddenly there was a challenge: one twin threw down the gauntlet and before you can say Usain Bolt they are in a barefoot dash a hundred metres down the beach. To avoid getting myself in doo-doo I won’t disclose who won and who lost but you can take a look at my footage of the event. At the end, the one slamming her shoes into the sand is not Louise:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigadore/9709330517/