We have found winter in Spain. Tonight will be our first night sleeping inside. We were chased in by torrential downpours that had us looking for arc building materials along the trail. We could see the sheets of rain coming from a mile off and they hit us like a wall of instant soak. My "waterproof" pants didn't stand a chance. As we walk I like to imagine that the pain that has come to live in my feet and knees is just part of the process of sin digestion. The wrong doings have to work their way down the body, you know, pausing at each joint as we pause at each church. I have stopped taking pictures of churches and other majestic buildings because any photo is a disgustingly poor representation of the real thing and gives no sense of the neck-breaking grandeur of the architecture here. Pictures still to come.

I'm on day 5 of the Camino now and really feeling like a pilgrim. There has been little time or location for internet access, and the trend is likely to continue. As the walk has been done millions of times I will be documenting the one thing that makes our expedition a little different: the places we sleep. Most people stick to hostels the whole time and we are trying our best to sleep under the stars in the most epic locations possible. Thus far we have passed a night in woods populated by witches, beside a burbling waterfall, in a broken and forgotten castle, and in an olive grove. Pictures and details to come.

I am trying to sell an article written about the multitudes of forgotten ruins that are strewn across the Italian countryside. To fuel this goal I went on an expedition into a part of the nearby town of Pescosolido that was destroyed in an earthquake in 1915 and has since been ignored and forgotten. It was epic. The ruined alleys and buildings, doorways and windows, were crumbling skeletons of a narrow neighborhood built onto a vertical cliff. The odd location is the reason for its destruction as the houses had much poorer foundations than those locatated on the top of the hill. The place was totally overgrown by massive ivy vines that wound up the walls in intricate braids, some vines as thick as my arm. There was not a soul there except for one goat, the guardian of the ruins who kept a watchful eye from his station atop one of the cracked walls. Pictures to come.
On another note, some flattering quotes from Benoit about me: "Simon you've taught me two important things: First, to get after it. And second, you are the craziest person I know, but good crazy." ( excerpt from a heart to heart over beer in an empty bar)
"Simon, you look like a sexy dad." So I guess that's who I've become, a crazy, sexy dad that gets after it. Oh well.

The random souls you meet in the world are really remarkable. There are a couple new additions to the rustic farm crew, one of which is a French guy named Pierre who happens to have a car. This is a commodity that has thus far been so out of reach that we haven't even considered the things we could do with one. We decided to go on a field trip after work to go see a bear in a nearby town. The town is called Campostella and is built in a circle around this pit that looks like the caldera of a volcano. The houses are stacked up around the rim with only one road extending down to circle the pit. We were standing in one of the local hangouts, a lookout with a view of the pit and the rolling hills behind it, where old men come to drink beer and coffee and bullshit about the day. We asked one of them why all the houses were built around the edge and no one lived in the pit.
       "Would you want to live alone like a cockroach in cold dark pit?" was his response. I told him no.
In recent years they have fenced in the pit and put a walking trail around it to provide a small sanctuary for bears. There were mixed stories about the solitary bear that was the current resident. One man told us it had belonged to a guy who's house had been possessed by the police because he was crazy. No idea what he did, just that he was a crazy old man with a bear in his basement. The other story was that the bear had wandered out of the hills of the nearby Abruzzi park. Regardless of how it got there the bear is a brown hulk that looks like a black bear with the massive head of a grizzly. I was really sad that I had forgotten my camera as the bear crawled its way up the crumbly dirt bank to the fence where we were standing to smell our hands. I have seen a handful of bears in my days, and this was by far the clumsiest, slowest, and least confident ursine creature I've ever seen. There was talk about scaling the fence to race the bear, but sense won over in the end.
          We were shooting the shit over coffee and beer, watching the sun change the streaks of high clouds to royal colors over the strange circular town. The buildings, bundled together and piled atop one another as they are, took on the golden glow of the end of the day and the whole town stopped to watch. There were three old men leaning on the balcony over the hole with us, drinking beer.
      "Italian beer, the best in the world." One of them said. Italian men love to highlight certain aspects of their life and declare it "...best in the world." It's a recurring theme and spans from makes of car, pomegranates, wine, food, women...etc. We told him that we were sorry, but Peroni, the Italian beer of choice, was terrible. He thought this was the funniest thing he'd ever heard and went to tell his friends what we'd said.
      After the sun set the residents all went back to their various lives and we were left alone aside from one old man leaning against the wall. As we were walking past him to leave he waved at us and said,
   "Where are you from?" This was shocking as there is no one in this part of Italy who speaks a word of English.
   "South of San Francisco," I said, the standard way of describing the Santa Cruz area.
     "I've been there. I've been to San Jose." This was doubly shocking as no Italian that I've run into has traveled outside of Europe. He was a short man who looked as if he could have been seventy. He wore glasses on a big nose and wore a blue baseball cap, jeans, and an old beige knit sweater with black buttons.  It turns out that he was an artist who painted murals and various decorations in houses. He spent four years near Stanford painting the dome of some Villa. He had painted various buildings in San Jose and spent another four years painting another dome in Florida. He had spent his whole life traveling around the world painting for people. I promised him that when I made it back to California I would go to find his dome.

Leia, the most beautiful donkey in the world.

There are crosses on top of all high things here.

A well with no water.

I'm back from the hills. It was beautiful. The trail was seven hours of switchbacks going up steep, rocky faces and through pastures. I reached the top just before a beautiful sunset and equally gorgeous moon rise. The moon was just a day early of full. I'm reading "Of Mice and Men" in Spanish and at one point I was able to turn off my headlamp and read by moonlight alone. I decided to sleep on the summit just beside the summit marker on a limestone shelf that was a little sheltered from the wind. The night was not very windy, or cold. The weather is so confusing. I was bundled up the day before I left, coat, hat and scarf. Then while I was hiking up the mountain it was unbearably hot. This ended up causing problems as I only brought four liters of water, hoping to encounter some along the way. No such luck. The hike down was a thirsty experience. One liter for the whole way down. Terrible planning. When I woke up on the summit, it was to two hunters, rifles on shoulders, staring at me with their three birding dogs. When I explained what I was doing to them they were supremely confused and told me I was crazy. Apparently Italians don't sleep outside, and they didn't understand why I would want to or why I didn't use a tent. I tried to tell them about the charms of the moon, but they just shook their heads and smiled at the crazy American. Pictures to come.

Mustache Michelle

I swear the wine has nothing to do with Danielle's song to the bag.

Benoit thinking about love.

Random ruin in the woods with a shrine in it.

That's Jesus

Medieval town of Pescosolido that sits above us.

Twenty feet up a sixty foot dry waterfall.

Changing weather

The sanctuary on the roof of the ruin.

I'm sorry about the time passed since the last update. Times are a changing in this timeless world. The eternity of shirtless weather has passed to make way for snow covered mountains and wind so strong it has collapsed many of our tents, sending us to scurry for shelter within the ruin. Our people are leaving too, the family falling apart to hit the road. Some are going back to the real world, others to continue the adventure. Now there just us three boys left living around our ruin. I'm off to wander the mountains alone for a few days. I promise to post more when I'm back, but it's too cold to type right now and my fingers are rebelling. Thank you Roberta for the Marmot downy as I think it has probably saved my life.