After the disaster

Cana growing along the river.

Sunday after the dog disaster.....

It was a long night. I could hardly get comfortable with scraped skin on the left side and a head ache from being yanked to the ground. By morning, my left arm wouldn’t lift things very far without being painful so feeding the horses was a challenge.

The dogs did not get a walk, and about 11:00 Sandy’s owner came to get her. I thought she was an old slow dog, but when she heard his car coming she was doing her best to squeeze through the bars of the gate. Then she ran up and down the road in joy when we let her out.  She was such a sweet placid dog, I’m going to miss her.

Colmenar's plaza

More Feria posters…..I went in the afternoon to Colmenar, a town higher up on the mountainside from Rio Gordo, on the road to Malaga, with some of Rachel’s friends. In the effort to take me away from the drudgery of the dogs, they took me to a dog show!  At noon it hadn’t even started. The real reason for the trip was to give out flyers and put up posters of the upcoming Feria in Rio Gordo. Colmenar’s dog show was supposed to be for hunting dogs, though some Shitzus showed up with bows in their hair. Clearly the big draw was the beer tent.

A bit later we met another woman on the plaza who agreed to put up posters. Colmenar seems to be a nice Pueblo Blanco, but there wasn’t much going on in the plaza or in the streets. It was a bit early, and I would guess the dog show was siphoning off customers. Driving back, it was obvious that I had been quite wrong in my assessment that Rio Gordo is on a hill. In fact it’s at the bottom of a large bowl surrounded by mountain ranges. The town is on a hill, relative to the bottom of the river, but not when viewed from above. I can see the appeal of Colmenar to foreigners. The views are spectacular in almost every direction, especially south towards the coast.  

Rachel is due back this evening. I will feed the dogs and horses, maybe take the little dogs out for a walk since they haven’t gotten much of one in the last couple of days. It’s been an interesting visit, meeting local people, trying to understand the very slurred dialect of the Spanish who sound almost Portuguese, and seeing daily life in a country so far from my own.

Oleanders growing in profusion along the river banks.

Distant old Arabic fortified town, named Comares,
part of our dog-walking view

More dog-walk views, pretty along the river.

Rachel's house

Rachel's house from the other side

The sweet puppy Zara

Bonnie, the Podenko who fell in love with me.