Happy Easter! / France at Last

Happy Easter!

We woke up on Easter morning in a parking lot in northern Spain. It was the first Easter in our married life that we didn’t celebrate in church, but the winds on Saturday were just too strong to keep driving to our destination in southern France.  First, we had been startled by a dramatic BANG as the van’s skylight popped open in a particularly strong gust, and we had to stop to fix it. Like us, trucks and other campers crept along at half the posted speed limit, trying to keep from being blown off the road. The trip that was supposed to take six hours had already taken that long, and we were only half-way up the coast when we saw a pull-along caravan upside down on the highway, where winds had flipped it, and it seemed prudent to stop for the night and try again the next day – Easter.

As it turned out, the parking lot we found, in a corner of a stadium complex in Granollers, Spain, abutted a canal, a park and a wildlife refuge, and was within walking distance of the town’s center, largely closed for the Easter weekend. We spent the afternoon happily walking the trails and exploring the city, a textile and agricultural center just north of Barcelona, while we waited for the wind to die down.

Before we had left Gandía Saturday morning, we bought Easter bread and chocolate candy eggs (intentionally) and hard-boiled eggs (unintentionally), so Easter breakfast in the parking lot was festive, and I sang a couple verses of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today, Alleluia!”

If our Easter was a subdued affair, Good Friday had been anything but.  Spain does Holy Week big, and we were fortunate to be in a great place to see it.  When we went to the English church in Gandía on Palm Sunday, folks told us that we should stay until Friday evening for the grand procession through the town. We had seen some of the floats inside churches during the week, and heard musicians practicing, but we couldn’t have imagined the event if we’d tried.  The crowds began to assemble before noon, and chairs lined the procession route, a zig-zag that crossed the town center several times on its way to and from the central church. 

We found a great spot, on a little step, where we could see and take pictures (until it got dark and my phone battery died). For more than three hours, hundreds of hooded figures paraded by, symbolizing the events leading up to the crucifixion, interspersed by marching bands of solemn drums and horns and hand-carried floats with scenes from the crucifixion story.

The faceless, pointy hoods on the marchers were a little shocking to this Mississippi girl, but they are a centuries-old tradition, designed to mask the individual identities of the marchers so they can represent death, mourning, sin, or the people who strewed the way for Jesus with Palms on his entry into Jerusalem. (I posted some videos on Facebook, but can't seem to load them here.)

Near the end (long after dark), barefoot men and women dressed and hooded in black dragged heavy chains locked to their ankles, many of them also carrying heavy wooden crosses. In another era, they might have flagellated themselves, but their bleeding feet were disturbing enough.

Through it all, children solemnly held out their hands, and the faceless creatures handed out candy, one small piece at a time. 

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France at last!

And now, we are finally in France.  It has been too cold until now to camp this far north, but now it is really spring, and we are loving it here.  On Easter day, we took our time, stopping to discovering unknown places along the way.  Crossing the border from Spain, we decided to drive into the mountains (the Pyrenees) to see a 6^th century church in a village of 81 people. The road to L’Albère is one-laned, and switches back and forth, climbing the steep route, with dramatic (and in my case, eye-squinching) chasms without a guardrail to keep us from plummeting into the abyss. Snow-capped peaks in the distance reminded us that this was a small climb, but it was steep enough for me! At the top, a little restaurant’s parking lot was full of the cars of Easter diners, but no human was in sight. The town hall, unlocked and open but empty, was built against the old church, which shaded a small cemetery. The minutes from the most recent town council meeting (seven members) were posted on a bulletin board, noting that they had just approved a new fee schedule for burial in the cemetery, a new line of credit for infrastructure repair, and the 2018-19 budget. It felt like home!

As it turns out, L’Albère is two villages. St Jean d’Albère, where we stopped, is mostly populated by a small monastery and a herd of wild cows.  We were reminded of how easy it would be to fly over or drive past such places, and how lucky we are to have the time and means to stop and enjoy them.

We are staying now in a campground in the fishing village of Le Grau d'Agde. Agde, the town center nearby, was a Greek colonial town dating back to 600 BCE. Parts of the Greek rampart still stand, built with black volcanic stone that is common here. (There it is behind Joe and Jacob, below). Tomorrow we’ll visit the maritime archeology museum, with its wealth of remains of ancient shipwrecks off Agde’s Mediterranean coast, and Friday we'll visit the fish auction when the boats come in to Le Grau. 

Yesterday, we spent some time in Agde, as well as nearby towns of Vias and Pézenas. Here are some of the things we saw: