Summer, 2022
Today I woke up thinking about that cafe in Albarracin where I liked to read and charge my phone, but realized that I hadn’t ever written much about my trip to Europe this summer.
My last exam ended the morning of May 4th, I believe, and that was that. I packed my 90’s Trek mountain bike with my hammock, sleeping bag, some food, books, and I headed West towards Saxapahaw. My camp was set up on the side of the Haw river, right above the dam, where the water is calm and turtles perch on the rocks. Nobody came with me. I can’t blame them - finals are a good excuse.
UNC Chapel Hill held Spring commencement on May 8th. I skipped that one to sleep in, but I was still woken up by my roommate blasting techno at 8am while he got ready. I did attend the Computer Science graduation on May 9th. My mother, sister, and some family friends came. We filed into the stadium, grouped by the quality of our degrees (BA, BS, MS, and PhD), and walked across the stage one by one until everyone had the honor of receiving their diplomas, which we had worked so hard for. I would have loved to be anywhere else. Something about these big ritualistic ceremonies just makes me uncomfortable.
The following few days were spent packing up my room and spending time with friends. My last night in Chapel Hill was spent dancing on the top floor of a parking deck with my best friends to all our favorite songs. As I left, driving down the spiral of the parking deck, I passed a cop car, presumably there to break up any ensuing shenanigans. And the next day my family and I headed north to Maryland for Dee Dad's memorial. He died in February, so it was more of a celebration than a time to grieve. I was mentally preparing to be traveling on my own for a while, so it was good to be around literally everyone in my family for a few days.
Walker, my cousin, drove me up to New York because my flight to London was leaving from JFK. He was busy moving into his new, itty bitty apartment in the lower east side. I bummed around the city for the next few days, gathering materials that I had forgotten at home, like a jacket and socks. My 45 liter backpack held shirts, a pair of shorts, a pair of long pants, underwear, a hammock, climbing shoes, several books and a few other small camping tools. Only the necessities.
The whole time in England was spent around music. I was staying with my good friend Danny in Shepherd’s Bush, west London. He and his family are music fanatics. Gigs every night. A lot of the venues reminded me of places back home. There’s a bar up front, bands playing in another room, and a patio out back where you can smoke cigarettes and chat.
There were a handful of folks I knew in the city, including a friend from college and some others I had met traveling. One particular night I reached out to someone I had met 4 years prior in Colombia. Her name is Heka. She invited me to her gig in south London, a bar called Ivy House. I invited Audrey to come along, my friend from Chapel Hill who was studying abroad. I learned that Heka and Audrey had already met before at the same venue. Of the few people I knew in a city of millions, these two already knew each other. This was the first coincidence of this trip that shook my belief in the supernatural, but maybe I should start to expect stuff like this more often.
The second weekend in England was spent down south, in a town called Totnes. There was a music festival called Sea Changes that Danny’s family had planned on going to for his father’s birthday. Unfortunately, Danny’s brother was very ill and couldn’t go, but that also meant I could take his ticket and his bedroom in the Airbnb. Good music, beautiful coast. Danny, his girlfriend Amber and I also spent a couple nights camping in the moors after the festival.
Before I even landed in England I held this feeling of dread towards the city of London. It produced an image of misery and boredom in my head, the worst of all European cities for sure. I could only wonder why so many Brits chose to live there and why they didn’t escape while England was still a part of the EU. I would surely spend no more than 2 or 3 days visiting my friend Danny before heading to Amsterdam or Berlin. But two weeks passed and I was sad to leave. London is phenomenal. Incredible music, food, punk kids… I can’t say enough.
I had overstayed my welcome in Danny’s family’s Shepherd's Bush townhouse and it was time to leave England. However, it’s important to share a specific detail: I was quickly running out of money. I was to begin working at this company in July which had promised me a lump sum to help with the expense of moving to Austin, Texas, where I would be working. My recruiter from some months prior had told me that I would be receiving the money 45 days before my start date. I was counting on this. But the 45 day marker came and went, later finding out the money had instead been scheduled to be sent no sooner than 2 weeks before my start date. And with a few weeks to kill in Europe, I wasn’t sure what to do.
Luckily, my friends Joseph and Mitchell were traveling in Northern Spain around the same time, so they invited me to come stay with them for a few days before they headed back to the United States. They never did learn how broke I was until recently. . I flew into Bilbao, they picked me up, and we spent the weekend at the Guggenheim, eating well, and seeing the town.
On my second night in Bilbao I headed off on my own to see what I could find. I googled a music venue and generally walked in that direction until I found some cool looking folks smoking cigarettes outside a bar. I asked one of them if I could bum one and we started chatting. One of them was the lead singer in a local indie/punk band. She said there weren’t any good shows happening that night. The other was an anarchist tattoo artist. She had all sorts to say about lots of things, but mostly I couldn’t understand her Spanish because she talked so fast. They bought me drinks all night and refused to let me pay for anything.
When we finished at the bar we went to a more lively place with music and a bouncer and everything. We danced for a bit, had another drink, and just as we were about to leave someone came up to me, grabbed my arm and told me to leave. I pretended not to notice him and asked my friend what was happening. She didn’t know, so I just kept talking to her and didn’t pay him any attention. He left, got another, bigger guy and they threw me out the door. I thought they had been mistaken, I told them I didn’t do anything, they got the wrong guy, but he pointed at my shorts as if I had committed a crime and went back inside. My single pair of long pants were at home drying. Apparently I wasn’t respecting the dress code, but I think they should have gone after the guy who let me in from the start.
Goodbyes were said to my friends before going home. The next day Joseph, Mitchell, and I drove to Madrid. High plains, dry air, and castles. Madrid is a good hang. Cheap beer and lively streets. More museums, good food, and seeing the town. A couple days passed and it was time for my friends to head home.
My bank account was running dry, but I was waiting for some more excitement. So I packed my bag and headed towards the mountains. Trains were too expensive, so I took the metro to the last stop and landed in a town called Guadalajara, a suburb of Madrid. There was a big highway that headed towards Zaragoza. It was quite a busy road, maybe 3 lanes of high speed trucks and cars. I’d never hitch hiked in a setting like this, but I was so far from anything that there wasn’t any turning back.
I stuck my thumb out for a few minutes until a black sedan halted about 100 feet down the road with its blinkers on, definitely for me. He was a wine salesman going to visit his girlfriend in Zaragoza. He didn’t talk to me much, but he offered me a banana and I accepted. He took a lot of phone calls while we were driving, wine business stuff, and he called his girlfriend and told her that he had picked up a traveler. I asked him to drop me off in Alcolea del Pinar, the highway split off and I was heading east while he was continuing north.
Alcolea del Pinar was a very small town with an unusual amount of construction. I walked towards the east-bound highway and took a quick pit-stop at the rally track. I pieced together that the town’s habitants were mostly seasonal, coming together for the racing season and heading elsewhere for the rest of the year. There aren’t a lot of crops that can grow around there, it's too dry.
My next driver was an off-duty police officer in a small, sporty car. I expressed to him that I was a bit nervous around cops because I thought they would be offended by my hitchhiking, but he obviously didn’t seem to mind. He was only going to the next town over, but I still appreciated the motion.
The road was calm, but rides always come. This individual said he had never picked up a hitchhiker before, he doesn’t know why he did. I told him it was because he couldn’t resist my smile and wave. I’m told that the best way to find a ride is to look like you're having fun, be excited. Which turns out also to be the scientifically proven best way to act in a job interview. So maybe, if you’re on the side of the road looking for a ride, try to imagine yourself pitching your greatest qualities in all of a split second while motor vehicles rush past. Convince the driver that they want to pull over and spend the next hour talking to you. This guy was going home to his family in Molina de Aragon after his own interview. Hopefully he got the job.
It was late in the afternoon, time to think about sleeping. I asked my driver if he had any recommendations, but he was hesitant to give me anything concrete. He’d rather not think about me sleeping in the woods that night. So I headed up into the hills. There was a castle with a little patch of woods that sat on the ridge of the valley. I set up my hammock between a couple of trees, I was camouflaged but could still see Molina de Aragon and the top of the castle from my perch. I headed back into town, bought some supplies (water, bread, nuts) and spent the rest of the day reading Arabian Nights and watching the sunset over the flat, Spanish plains.
The night was cooler than I thought it would be. I didn’t sleep too well and wrapped myself up in every piece of clothing I had. The worst part, though, was the screaming boar that ran by my camp in the middle of the night. I couldn't rest comfortably after that. Despite the wasted sleep, the next day went well. I was so amped with excitement that I continued on my merry way just as I had the day before. I walked for a long time down the road. I was headed towards a city called Teruel because I could buy myself a blanket. From there it would be easy to get to the smaller town of Albarracin, even though it was a little closer.
A mother with a son about my age picked me up. They were Bulgarians who had immigrated to Spain several years before. They invited me back to their house for lunch and let me swim in their pond. I washed some clothes too, setting my dirty shirts and underwear on the drying rack outside their house. Lunch was meat and rice, but I just ate rice. They also offered a large bowl of fruit and packed up some extra for the road. They talked about their lives in Spain and what it means to them living there. People in Bulgaria are much colder, they said. In Spain you invite people to your home and offer them a plate of rice.
The father had messed up his shoulder in a work accident. He was a helicopter repairman and rather successful in the trade. They had one house in the very small town we were currently in, there were about 50 people who lived there in the winters, and another apartment in Molina de Aragon, where their son usually resided.
That evening the family was headed to Teruel, where I had planned on going in order to get a blanket, but they offered to take me all the way to Albarracin. It was a little bit further for them, but mostly on the way. And they gave me a sleeping bag to use as well. It was a child's size, so it only went up to my waist, but it was exactly what I needed. I sat in the front seat next to the father while he spouted about Russian politics, the land, and some other stuff that I couldn’t really understand. His wife would speak up every once in a while to add to the conversation, but would most likely be rudely corrected by her husband, even for the most trivial comments. His injured shoulder made it so that he couldn’t shift gears with his right hand, so he managed to do it with his left, leaving the wheel unattended for a moment.
The town of Albarracin opens up through a tunnel with old, orange and brown buildings hanging off the side of a cliff over a rushing river. Suspended in the air and in time as tourists went on their merry way. The Bulgarians dropped me off on the side of the road and we said goodbye.
I immediately sparked a conversation with this Italian guy who lived out of his van. I could tell he was a climber by the way he wore his shaggy clothes and, of course, by the fact that he lived in a van. He invited me for a beer and a cigarette at the bar across the street. He was incredibly arrogant, but he had good information about the area and even drove me to the climbing shop on the other side of town. That was the last time I saw him - he worked in another town on the weekends.
The climbing shop was closed during siesta, so I waited around for a bit, went and found a coffee shop where I could bum some wifi, and took a peak at the old buildings. I was a little nervous about where I should camp, there were signs on the road saying that camping is not permitted, but when I went back to the climbing store where the attendant told me “camping is illegal, so I’ll tell you where to go,” and pointed in the direction of the canyon just a few minutes walk down the road. I found a less than perfect campsite that evening on a rather steep incline, making it difficult to cook my fava beans.
The next morning I packed everything away into a little crevice, nervous someone would see my camp right next to the trail. And I hiked back towards town so I could rent a crash pad from the climbing store. On the way back, I saw someone climbing down by the creek and stumbled down to talk to her. Noticing my accent, she responded to my Spanish in English and invited me to climb with her. She was trying to climb up this little roof that began with a sit start and passed into a few crimps and a very long reach to get to the overhang. Neither one of us could solve the problem. But we did find out that not only were we both from North Carolina, but that we both went to the same university. She had moved to this town several years before in order to raise her daughter and climb all the time. She and her husband would take turns going back to California to work as nurses for a week or two at a time. We walked back into town together and she gave me her address in case I needed anything.
After lunch I rented a crash pad and started walking towards the big bouldering spot, about two miles up the road. I was hoping to hitch a ride from someone, but it was the middle of the afternoon during the off season, so there wasn’t a lot of traffic. About half way up the road I realized that I hadn’t brought enough water - it was about 100 degrees in the sun and dry as a bone. Luckily some French kids let me have some water and invited me to climb with them under this beautiful feature right on the side of the canyon. I didn’t quite solve the problem, but I came close.
The boulders were endless. I saw just a fraction of the area that day. In the afternoon I did some more exploring and came across a Spanish couple who I had met that morning. I climbed with them for a while before heading back to town. My fingers were worn by the end of the day. I walked down the hill because the couple didn’t have enough room in their car, but half way down I saw the guy driving back up to give me a ride. His girlfriend and their dog were waiting for us at the climbing shop. They invited me to climb with them again. I didn’t have any service on my phone, so we agreed to meet at 9am two days later at the same spot.
The week started off so exciting and confident. I was making friends and climbing and living in my hammock. I even found a new camp site, which was way better than my first night. I still took everything down during the day, but I could relax comfortably in my little pasture during the evenings.
On off days I would walk into town, have a coffee, and swim in the creek. It was all mountain water, so it stayed frigid year round. Even during the blisteringly hot afternoons, the water was too cold to bathe. Teenagers would get together and jump off the bridge into a particular spot where it was deep enough to dive.
Since I had left Madrid, the country had been slowly getting hotter and hotter, falling into a heat wave that would pester the Spanish citizens for the following month. It became clear what was happening after a few nights of camping. The first night was unbearably cold, but every night after that was more and more comfortable. But on the flipside, daytime was starting to become uncomfortable, even in the mornings. And I could sense that the insects knew it too.
There are these bugs in the area which I can only describe as a mix between a fly and a tic. The buzz around you in circles, too fast to observe. Making a hallucinating sound until after a moment the sound stops, which is your signal that it has landed. You can do all you want to locate this insect, you’ll probably find it too, maybe on your leg or shoulder, but a slap won't take care of them. You could hit this fly with every bit of killing strength you have only to find that it is perched on your knee, right where it was. It will start to flap its wings and circle you just as it had before, the whole process repeating itself. And if you’re unlucky enough to see it land on exposed skin, it's already too late. The insect will have torn off a piece, consuming your flesh and leaving a wide, red welt, itching and burning. The only escape is hiding away in a bug net or maybe after a few lucky strikes, killing the beast.
I’ll be honest, I can manage some heat, but the flies were the final straw. On my fourth or fifth day in the canyon I decided that I was no longer having fun. I was swearing at the mountain, walking back to town with everything I owned, knowing that the flies would come and give me one last barrage before leaving for good. A couple of old farmers with thick Spanish accents gave me a ride from Albarracin to Teruel where I bought a bus ticket back to Madrid. The old man driving stopped on the side of the road to let a bee out the window.
There were only a few days left before I flew back to the United States. I found a cheap bed on Airbnb with a guy named Alberto. He had a studio apartment with two beds and was renting out one of them for a few dollars a night. He offered me mojito as I arrived and told me about himself, a Honduran immigrant, who left his home country largely due to the fact that he was a gay man in a very conservative community. Madrid was a better place for him, but I could also tell that he still may not have found his people, even after five years of living in Spain. He worked nights, 5 days on, 3 days off. He liked to go to clubs or take trips on his days off. He showed me photos of his solo trip to Paris; I could relate to him in that way at least.
Three months later, I’m sitting in my quiet room in East Austin, passing days at my desk and nights at the bars. I have absolutely nothing to complain about. Life is simple, easy, even fulfilling at times, but it’s also missing that discomfort that makes things interesting. I do recognize that having a little bit of cash while on the road is really nice. When I was in the woods defending myself against those fucking flies, those God damn fucking flies that I wanted to kill so bad, that kept coming back over and over again, a shower and a bed would have been so nice. But now I have it all and I’m so bored.
When I ride my bike down the gravel path to the pool on warm afternoons and think about the day I quit my job in tech sales, pack up my bicycle and head South as far as the earth goes. And once I get there I move onto a boat and keep on going. I know I’m doing the right thing by being here, my 401k has never been happier! Yet I can’t help but daydream, my specialty.
Until the next adventure…