Not Speaking Spanish

The hike today was a good workout. It took us forty minutes or so to hump our way up to a local summit following an endless procession of cairns. The final fifty feet or so of elevation gain felt a bit like the rock on the North Twin Sister. We never did find the petroglyphs. As I told Kay: there are those who can find petroglyphs even when they're not looking for them, those who can find them when they are, and those who can't find them even when they look. We count ourselves in the last group.

While we were rowing the dinghy to shore, we aimed for a spot on the beach in front of a restaurant: Bertha's. Kay said we should ask the gentleman standing on the beach if it would be okay to leave our dinghy there while we hiked. There was some discussion about how to word the question in Spanish. We finally settled on "Podemos dejar nuestro dinghy aqui?"

While we pulled the dinghy up the beach I was walking backward assuming the beach was empty, but what I didn't know was that the guy had a puppy who was curious, or excited or whatever, so I accidentally walked backward over the poor puppy. It yelped and the guy scooped it up and stormed off while I tried to apologize in Spanish. I remember wondering why would he let his puppy get in our way? And: is the puppy okay? And: now who are we going to ask for permission to leave our dinghy? As it turned out, the restaurant was closed, abandoned, partially burned out, so there was no one around to care where we left our dinghy. And: later we met the guy and his puppy (who was fine) and he turned out to be an Aussi who didn't speak Spanish (at least to us).

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