On the way back from studying abroad in Sweden, something I was already incredibly fortunate to do, I was doubly fortunate to get to make a pit-stop with two dear friends and bop around for a few days in Spain. We flew first into Madrid in the middle of the night where, after getting politely dismissed from the airport for trying to sleep off the remainder of the night there, we found some park benches in a quiet neighborhood near by. We were woken by the dawn what seemed like only a few minutes later, with morning joggers passing by and birdsong in the air. The goal was to get out of the city and make our way to Galicia to explore Spain’s more remote, mountainous region–a bit of reprieve before school started back in the states after the summer quarter.
After a few more travel-related foibles (nearly driving the rental car off a cliff en route to the wrong coordinates, following a good samaritan who commandeered a friend’s van to show us where to go as the directions were too complicated to give, them taking us to what we thought was the wrong place that ended up being the right place [or closer to it at least], etc…) we made it out to an Airbnb we had found in a tiny mountain village called Vilar de Silva (the chief confusion with the samaritan being that he thought we were saying “Villa de Sylvia,” or Sylvia’s house–turns out Sylvia lived nearby Vilar de Silva anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
There was one inn, one restaurant, and one apartment for rent owned by the same gentleman who ran the inn. We spent a few days hiking the hills, cooking simple food, exploring the gardens, falling asleep watching an ill-conceived Star Wars marathon, and drawing. Some of the favorite drawings I’ve done came out of those long, aimless days there.
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