Travels with my Donkey

sixty-page account of a vision experienced in a Ponferrada hotel room she describes her personal responsibility for founding the human race, budding a male Shirley in that tank of golden liquid whilst alien beings ferry crystal across the skies. Of Atlantis. 'I was completely depleted of potassium,' she explains afterwards.
    Drizzled and industrial, Ponferrada was hardly straining to exude a sense of esoteric mystery, but we liked it anyway. As well as the castle there was the bridge, albeit a disappointingly bland contemporary replacement for the one that gave the town its name: a mighty structure reinforced with iron, no inconspicuous achievement in 1082.
    We crossed the river en route to the Hotel Madrid, whose dapper, elderly proprietor had, earlier that day, apologetically drawn Birna's attention to the 'COMPLETO' notice on the reception desk. She was preparing to leave when Valdis had abruptly vomited all over his switchboard; because this was Spain he suddenly found two rooms and insisted on personally cutting up the children's veal escalopes at dinner. The largest bath I'd encountered since leaving the realm of normally proportioned Europeans, waitresses in starched and monogrammed tunics serving bread with tongs in a dining room where genteel old dears fanned themselves before a sea of glassware and linen, what may be Spain's only potable white wine, and all this for less than 30 quid a double: anyone curious enough to understand why leaving a tip can be fun should visit the Hotel Madrid. Anyone not in charge of a 200-kilo quadruped.
    Whilst Birna and the children were discovering the aforementioned attractions, I was standing between Shinto and a bellboy at the top of fifteen outdoor steps. At their conclusion lay the strip of yard that had been his intended night realm, and though I knew it was pointless, through courtesy and a lack of Spanish I allowed this enthusiastically persistent youth to try his luck. And I'm glad I did, because that first tentative rump-nudge initiated a merry sequence of events that culminated in Shinto being blindfolded by a chef whilst a chambermaid backed down the stairs holding a carrot to those mobile nostrils. Looking at the treasured photograph I don't see a stupid, stubborn jackass; I see a noble martyr proudly eschewing the firing-squad sergeant's offer of a last root vegetable.
    With the kitchen staff still filling the Sunday air with loud mirth, the bellboy led Shints and I all the way back up to the castle, down a couple of obscure alleys and at length round the side of a school and into another of those lock-up plots of wasteland. It started raining on the way back, but even though he was only wearing a shirt, and even though the whole operation had detained him for well over an hour, he proudly spurned the note I proffered upon our return. 'Peregrino,' he said, but these days I wasn't even that.
     
    It was the family's final day together on the road, and walking Shinto through the taunting schoolboy smokers gathered outside his gate I found myself beset by a tangled skein of emotions — impending solitude and rediscovered freedom; economy regained versus luxury lost. From father back to pilgrim. It would certainly be tough for both of us without the family: Shinto would lose his little friends and their daily grooming programme, and regain his full complement of car-borne baggage; I would miss Lilja's quasi-mystical powers of equine persuasion and her mother's and siblings' donk-cheering enthusiasm. Perhaps most tragically, never more would a charmed stranger pick up my dinner tab.
    By being ugly and rather dangerous, the route out of Ponferrada helped douse these bitter-sweet ruminations. With Valdis up in the saddle and Lilja clutching the back of my shirt we gingerly traversed huge roundabouts, slip roads and a memorable contraflow assault course, variously harried by impatient motorists and fêted by women of many years, running up their garden paths with bowls of cherries and prepuckered lips. Only in the afternoon, with the family back up to full strength, did the town begrudgingly peter out into vineyards and poppies.
    As we ambled across a gently undulating landscape I at last realised the sunlit, bucolic reality of the strange but appealing familial interlude I'd had in my mind's eye trooping towards León. In a week we'd gone through the whole Goldilocks routine: the meseta had been too flat and hot, the Montes de León generally too extreme, but these,