Big Fun in a Little Pueblo

"It's a windy, stormy, sunny Sunday in Castilla-Leon, and we have no roof on our house."

So opens the first post in Big Fun in a Little Pueblo. Big Fun is written by Rebekah, an American living with her British husband in a tiny town on the Camino de Santiago in Palencia. Rebekah lives in Moratinos, near Palencia's border with León, toward the end of the Camino's long march through the "meseta" more than a few (sadly mistaken) pilgrims dread, or trade for a bus ride from Burgos to León. Flat and virtually treeless, with endless horizons and perpetually changing skies, the meseta was one of the most memorable stages of my Camino. The meseta taught me patience and filled me with huge helpings of silence and hearty food while it introduced me to an evocative form of traditional architecture I'd never known existed in Spain: mud houses. Truth is, we could easily blame my photo posting delay on my fascination with - and propensity to click in front of - the meseta's mud houses.

Rebekah lives in one of those mud houses, which she is restoring "to offer some kind of hospitality to pilgrims."

As delighted as I was to discover Rebekah and her blog, my visit's sweetest treat was the EB White quote that closes her profile. If you ask me, EB's hit the nail on the head about living anywhere you've pushed aside that pesky and "idle pursuit of making a living" to make room for something else. He's done a fine job of describing life on the Camino, too:

"E.B. White wrote, 'Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.'"

Rebekah will be showing up soon on my Webs I Wander list.