Barcelona: Camping 1

I was practically born into camping. My first camping holiday was when I was about six months old, and the few times I spent in hotels didn’t exactly warm me to the idea. However, in one way, camping is exactly like staying in a hotel: the term describes a wide range of options, from very simple to very luxury. The American version of pitching your tent in the wild and shitting in the woods is unknown in most parts of Europe, probably because we don’t have many bears that can eat you up. People here go to campsites, which range from simple to holy fuck, how much does that cost?

Campsites near big cities, like the one we stayed at, have a very interesting social mix, since the residents range from students on a 20 bucks a day budget (been there, done that, it was great fun) to people with camping “cars” that cost twice as much as our house, extra car not included. Interestingly, those peple also had the cheapest, most uncomfortable folding chairs on the market, the very ones Mr and I had back in the day when we didn’t have the money or space for anything that didn’t leave you with a sore back.

Anyway, we clock somewhere in the middle, with a tendency to pack too much stuff and create utter chaos:

A caravan with a sun roof in front of it. Table and chairs under the sun roof. Lots of articles of daily life are cluttered all over.

What I personally like about this version is that you’re as protected from the elements as you need to be, but as open as possible. The campsite is on a piece of former farmland, so you live in nature, which gets me to our constant companions this holiday: ants.

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Quick Admin Note.

I may not be around on Sunday (21st), I’m in a state of pain and misery again, and can barely think. Going by previous days, I won’t get much uninterrupted sleep either, so if I end up with an opportunity to sleep Sunday away, I’m taking it. So sorry, hopefully this will be under control again soon.

Jack’s Walk

©voyager, all rights reserved

The wooden structure in the middle of the cornfield is both a landmark and a viewing platform that will become part of a corn maze in the fall. The floor of the platform is a bit over 3 meters high so you can see that the height of the corn is not far off that mark. It seems too early for the corn to be this tall, but staff at our local farmer’s market tell me that new varieties of corn mature more quickly. So quickly in fact that they already had local corn for sale. It doesn’t seem that long ago that you had to wait until late August for corn-on-the-cob. I wonder when that changed?

The signs in the field are also for fall festivities when they will be used as targets for a pumpkin cannon.

League Of The South Goes Russian.

Michael Hill speaks with a WWLTV reporter at Confederate monuments rally (Image from WWLTV May 17, 2017 broadcast). Source.

Unsurprisingly, League of the South is attempting to mate with Russia, home of, and saviour of white people. There’s a whole lot to the article, just a bit here.

Amid the controversy over President Trump’s recent summit with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, the neo-Confederate League of the South announced this week that it will soon be introducing a Russian language section to its website.“To our Russian friends,” a missive on the League’s website, is signed by Michael Hill, the group’s president. An excerpt:

We understand that the Russian people and Southerners are natural allies in blood, culture, and religion. As fellow Whites of northern European extraction, we come from the same general gene pool. As inheritors of the European cultural tradition, we share similar values, customs, and ways of life. And as Christians, we worship the same Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and our common faith binds us as brothers and sisters.

We Southerners believe in societies based on real, organic factors such as shared blood, culture, and religion, and all that stems naturally from these salient factors in the human experience. As fellow White Christians who are grounded in the sublime traditions of our common European cultural heritage, we believe that the Russian people and the Southern people are natural allies against the destructive and impersonal impulses of globalism.

Religion is organic? Huh. As for these “sublime traditions”, c’mon, let’s hear about some of them. Any of them. Provide some details on all this sublimeness. Interestingly enough, the first definition of ¹Sublime is: to cause to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state and condense back to solid form. If one uses that particular definition, yeah, I can buy the sublime tradition nonsense.

Mr. Hill teaches that the defeat of Nazi Germany was “an unmitigated disaster for Western Christian civilization.” I don’t know who taught Mr. Hill about World War II, but they should be smacked.

Alt-Right leaders and white nationalists adore Russia’s Vladimir Putin, much as American Religious Right leaders do. As Casey Michel noted in a RWW report last year, Richard Spencer has called Russia the “most powerful white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, leader of the now-disbanded white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party, called Putin “the leader of the free world.” Former KKK leader David Duke, who was a speaker at this year’s League of the South conference, has said he believes Russia holds the “key to white survival.”

Putin has supported right-wing nationalist movements across Europe. In 2015, Jared Taylor, the American proponent of “race realism,”  took part in a conference in St. Petersburg that gathered activists from Europe’s far right. There Taylor declared the United States “the greatest enemy of tradition everywhere.” Also in attendance was former KKK lawyer Sam Dickson, who praised Putin’s efforts to preserve “[the white] race and civilization.”

I can’t figure out why all these wannabe nazis don’t just run off to Russia. They’d be happy, and we’d all be better off without them.

RWW has the full story.

Barcelona

Hello everybody and welcome to my first post here on Affinity.

In case I need an introduction, I’m Giliell, I’m German, a teacher, mum, crafter, and hunter-gatherer with a camera.

As I was uploading a metric ton of pictures from my recent holiday I offered Caine to run them as a series with explanations about the sites and sights and she kindly accepted.

Disclaimer: This is a tourist’s perspective on the city and its surroundings, and while I speak Spanish and kinda understand Catalan, I cannot claim deeper insights.

Having said that, let’s start this journey like I start every trip to Barcelona:

Jack’s Walk

A fine set of pinecones, ©voyager, all rights reserved

It’s a bit warmer and a bit more humid today so Jack and I opted for a walk in our little wildflower forest, Trillium Woods. It was a good choice, too. We were shaded the whole way around and had the company of a very busy woodpecker pounding out a beat too fast to count. He was too far up to see properly so I can’t show you a photo, but he was so loud that the sound was bouncing off the trees and creating a sort of echo chamber that you could almost feel as a vibration. It was an interesting experience. Definitely physical and a bit exhilarating, but also a bit annoying and the short pauses the bird took were definitely a welcome break. Jack thought so too. I could see he was a bit anxious and every now and then he’d look up as if he was waiting for the sky to fall. All in all, an unexpected and different sort of adventure for Jack and I today.