As we do most days, El and I took a walk this morning. Since she is able to work, making sure she is home for the beginning of the US workday is the priority. However, that means she doesn't start working until about 2:00pm most days. To keep as much of a schedule as we can, we still set an alarm start our day knowing that if we didn't, the days would get away from us and we would be passing most of her non-working time in bed. The routine has become such that we wake around 6:30am and El takes her morning run. There is a nice promenade along the seafront at the end of our street. She will make her way through the traffic and then be able to run uninterrupted for as long as she wants before coming back to meet me for breakfast. Afterwards, we usually take a walk in some new direction with a destination in mind. Whether it is a new store we wanted to check out, a bakery that was recommended, or our multiple-times-a-week stop at the farmers market, our walks are part exploring, part errand. But, no matter why we are out, we try to choose at least some part of the journey to be new to us. This allows us to see new shops or eateries, recognize places that someone told us about, or might just be a change in scenery. The thing is that if you go in enough different directions, you will eventually start to recognize landmarks that you saw on previous walks. I like to think of this time as the city “coming together” for us. It happens on many of our trips to new cities where everyday is something new, until there are enough familiarities that you can now get to a new place using your own knowledge instead of maps. For example, last week El wanted to visit a knitting shop on the south side of the city and we used our maps to navigate to the new neighborhood. A few days later El needed a part for her computer and since she was working, I volunteered to walk to the computer shop next to the knitting shop. This time, I took a different, faster route to get there. So, now I knew two ways to get to the street with the knitting shop. Today, we wanted to find a covered market in the same general area, but today, we walked along the promenade she runs on all the way down to the beach, cutting into the city streets once we got there. We were now further than El had ever been on the promenade as she would turn around here if on her morning run. We eventually found the market where we agreed there didn't seem to be much better stuff here than what we get at our local market. We walked home. Instead of backtracking we kept going straight in a northbound direction. Along the way, we found a wine shop that we thought we would like to come back to, but rather quickly dismissed the notion as we had been walking for a few miles this morning and certainly didn't think is was good enough to walk the same few miles to get back here...on the other hand, if it was closer to our apartment, we could see ourselves coming back at least on a weekly basis. We continued towards home. About two blocks later, I realize I know exactly where we are! Even though our walk had taken us 4 miles today, we weren’t 4 miles away from home, we had walked two miles out and another 1 1/2 back, making this wine shop only a half mile from our place. Close enough to add it into the semi-weekly rotation of morning destinations for our walks. It was an old familiar feeling to turn around, and say “I know where we are!” It seems that after two weeks this city is finally “coming together”.
I feel like I'm walking along with you sometimes
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