Dobleve

We left San Sebastian this morning after a fantastic meal at Akelare the night before to ride to Bilbao; we didn’t make it there today. The initial ride out of San Sebastian was not pretty or fun, we went through the industrial area and some really busy roads to leave town. Thankfully it got better after 20k or so. We’d expected a relatively flat 120k ride to Bilbao, the reality was more like 180k and a lot of climbing.

Chorizo makes any ride seem better.

While longer than expected, the ride turned out to be a gorgeous tour through the coastal mountain range and we ended the day in Guernica after riding 110k and at least 2000m of climbing.

Tomorrow we’ll head north to Bermeo and around the coast and hopefully end up in Bilbao in the afternoon.

Jake and I arrived in San Sebastian last evening and went to the old part of town for pintxos (tapas). Somewhere along the way we discovered Txakoli, an effervescent white wine local to the Basque region and unlike any other wines we’ve had. It may be our downfall on this trip.

We’re at the beginning of a two-week bike tour of northern Spain; we have an outline of the trip but we’ll see where the roads ultimately take us.

We awoke today to take a short ride to stretch our legs and sort out any travel damage to our bikes. After some scenic detours we reached the lookout at Jaizkibel, 549m up on a gorgeous bluff northeast of San Sebastian overlooking the ocean.

Instead support up and coming author Jacob Paul and an indie publisher (Ig Publishing) out of Brooklyn by buying Sarah/Sara.

I am an avid reader of contemporary literature as well as historical fiction and non-fiction, poetry, pulp fiction, the odd twinkie thriller page turner, and of course, cook books. There is one book however that I can’t WAIT to read: Sarah/Sara by Jacob Paul.

Sarah/Sara is the diary of a young Orthodox Jewish woman solo-kayaking across the Arctic Ocean from Prudhoe Bay to the mouth of the McKenzie River. She’s undertaken the journey, originally her father’s retirement dream, after her parents die….

The author, (yes! he’s a friend of mine) is wickedly intelligent and subtly, dryly hilarious and I can’t wait to read this novel.

Of his own work Jake writes:

” My characters exist in a world terrorized by violent acts, a world they can only make sense of if they believe in God. Yet they are haunted by the notion that their God has created a world not worth living in. To resolve this paradox they grapple with physical texts and the natural world. They kayak the Arctic, climb the Tetons and wander the canyon lands, the conflicted Hebrew of the Psalms or Job or Genesis as vivid as their inhospitable surroundings. My books play out the danger of wedding oneself too strongly to a single reading of a foundational text: textual readings that make personal and political change impossible to achieve without either reinventing the text or reinventing one’s identity.”

Consider supporting this up and coming author by buying a pre-order copy of Sarah/Sara. Do it because he’s my friend and I would be sooo grateful! Do it because it is such an amazing thing to have written a novel! Do it because it’s going to be a fantastic read! Do it because a small grass roots (international!!) showing tells the publishers, distributors and anyone else who’s paying attention that there is a market for these novels and their writers!

And, if you’re so inclined, think of doing it Now because as I understand it, in the publishing business the pre-sale numbers will determine much else that happens with the book going forward. (“It turns out these pre-orders go towards some special accounting in the sky that matters more than other kinds of sales. I don’t know why, but I do know that it’s true. If you’re planning to buy the book anyway, please do so now through Amazon (it’ll save you five bucks too)”.

THANKS for reading!!

Several years ago I had the privilege of hearing David Sedaris read his short story “6 to 8 Blackmen” (I don’t know its official title), Live, in Olympia, Washington. (I was with one other American, a very recent immigrant from Sweden and a Filipino man. The other American and I nearly fell out of our chairs laughing but the other two just stared at us — I think in an embarrassed kind of way. We took this to mean that humor really is cultural, but maybe we really were just embarrassing…)

In the narrative Sedaris re-tells a conversation he had with a cab driver in Holland about Christmas customs there. I cannot do it justice so just please listen to it, but among other things, the cab driver told how in Holland, traditionally, Santa has 6 – 8 helpers when giving out gifts (and doing other unique-to-Holland kinds of things. (I really don’t want to give it all away.)) Of course originally the helpers were Moorish slaves; now, however they are something like black “helpers”.

Brian and I are going to Amsterdam tomorrow and there’s a chance we’ll see the parade this weekend when Santa (Sinterklaas) arrives from Spain (yep! But as I say, I really don’t want to spoil the story) with his 6 – 8 “helpers” who now apparently parade in “blueface”, (something much like blackface) because blackface is now too controversial.

However it will go down I really hope we get to see Sinterklaas arrive in Amsterdam on a boat, then parade around town on a giant white horse with his 6 – 8 blueface helpers in tow…