It's been a very wet month here. In Cantabria there are floods and the news has had plenty of pictures of kids being rescued in inflatable boats. People have said that it's been a strange Spring. No rain between Christmas and Easter and then nothing but. It made the walk we did on Sunday less than spectacular. The plan was to go to Fuente De, where there's a cable car. There's not much else, Fuente De is really a meadow below an 800m wall of limestone, it's fantastically impressive and it's dotted with the odd old mine entrance. In summer, apparently, it's usually packed. Last Sunday, less so. We could see the rock, and at the top it was obvious that there was a fair bit of cloud. Once we left the upper cable car station we were in cloud for the next two hours, with people saying that there should be unforgettable views. Instead we formed a long line of umbrella carriers. The type of rain that seems so common here is the 'heavy mist' they call orbayu. That's not a Spanish word, it's Asturian (and often orbayu means that the cloud and rain will stop above 1500m so you should set out anyway and hope for the best), and the Asturian word for their own language: bable (pronounced bab-ley). So when I ask what they call this or that I often get Spanish, Bable, Galician and Catalan translations... figuring out which one you have to remember is a challenge.

When we finished the walk (in a bar, see, I like this walking group) a few of us ate our butties outside on an old dark wood chair in the porch of the bar. The chair raised some comments because it was like a church pew but with a table that swung down from above the seat back like an ancient version of a fairground ride safety bar. People said they hadn't seen one since their grandparents had one (and bear in mind lots of these folk are in their sixties). Unfortunately, the barrage of different names for it means I can't remember any of them.
  ¶ 9:19 AM