A Day Alone

I'm on a bus all day today, from 10am to 4pm, across the top of Spain. I've got water, food, a book, maybe half a dozen words in Spanish.

Then I'll catch a train over the border, get to Biarritz airport, collect my husband off the plane, after he's finished a run of night shifts, and drive: in a hire car, on the wrong side of the road, in the dark, all the way back to Celorio, near Llanes, and our holiday will really start!

The boys meanwhile, are at our house, overlooking the Atlantic, a Spanish holiday house. The house has a lovely garden, parking, two bedrooms upstairs, two down, a kitchen fitted out with all sorts of stuff including an electric spaghetti fork, a fireplace, and the view over the sea! Lovely, very glad to have it. The boys will have a whole day with my cousin and her family, a beach day. I was going to take Alex on the bus because, at 7, he's a big step up for her, with her 2 kiddos, who are a) more peaceful and b) younger, almost 3 and 5. But they talked it over, and I'm off alone. What a treat, even though I fret.

I think of Race Around the World, and this is not it. But I'd love that degree of adventure, race, with one other person. And settle on the bus. So I look out at the summer orchards of fruit trees, sparkling coastline with hills rising straight off the coast, one timber Spanish house after another, one town after another. And read.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville. I brought it, to read about the Hawkesbury River - where I celebrated my 40th, spent a week on the same river. A book with a new perspective on Aboriginal history in Australia, but a writer who knows her words! I could see the gum trees there, as I looked over the gum trees by the side of the road in Spain - they're more spindly, smaller here. I could see the river, feel the anguish of early Australia, the endless journeys. Feel the heat, the sense of others gone before, feel a deep understanding of this book and its country. Not a strange book to me at all. Which it might be to others in Europe reading it.

And I was glad to be here, right side up, this side, not that remote, harsh, mysterious far side of our globe. Odd. I thought I'd get homesick reading the book. Instead, I grew calmer, didn't fret so much about this big day on the bus, needing to find a connecting bus in Bilbao and then the train at Irun to France. This, I can do.