Accidental Mouseketeer

Annette Funicello and I were never close. We did have one thing in common, however: we were both on the hugely popular kids' variety TV show, The Mickey Mouse Club. Well, sort of...

The death of Annette Funicello from complications from multiple sclerosis last week---a news item sadly over-shadowed by the announcement of Maggie Thatcher's death---must have pulled quite a few heartstrings in my generation both in America and in Australia. 

These days with such a range of entertainment options for kids on many TV channels and even more on the internet it's hard to imagine one TV show having the impact The Mickey Mouse Club did. When it started in 1955 there were only three television networks in the USA and little in the way of entertainment for kids. The cast of the show, the "Mouseketeers", were a group of singing and dancing kids. Annette was one of the originals and, by the end of the show's run, the longest serving of all of them. She sang and danced but it was her winning personality that came across on television that made her the darling of girls and boys everywhere the show was broadcast.

                                          Funicello vuonna 1975

I didn't know Annette. I never met her nor was I ever at the studio where the show was produced. My appearance was entirely fortuitous and exceedingly brief. I was living in Spain in those days. There was no television and, even if there had been, I'm sure it wouldn't be broadcasting a show with American kids dancing around and singing songs about a mouse. 

In the summer of 1956 I spent a month at a summer camp in Switzerland. We spent a lot of time hiking in the most magnificent scenery. On a climb up to les Diablerets Glacier a couple of outsiders came along. Al and Jerry (dubbed by us Tom and Jerry) were a two-man film crew from The Mickey Mouse Club. It was their job to come up with footage for the "Newsreel" segment of the show and we were their story for the couple of days they were with us.. 

Happy campers, camp staff and film crew on les Diablerets Glacier.

In the photo above, Al is in the back row centre (in the hat) and Jerry to his left taking a picture of whoever took this picture. (I'm next to him with my face in shadow.) 

Me on the right with friends Michael and Danny.

I spent a part of two summers at this camp and fell in love with the mountains. On another hike (pictured below) we got a taste of rock-climbing, a sport that I took up seriously a few years later.

With Michael and another friend on the Swiss-French border.

But back to Mickey and Annette: A year or two after the les Diablerets climb I was back in America and happened to be channel surfing when I came across The Mickey Mouse Club in time to hear Annette say, "And now to some news from our Mouseketeers in Switzerland". Hardly breaking news but there we were -  a group of great friends looking happy and fit in a fantastic setting. Sad as it was to hear of the death of Annette Funicello it brought back wonderful memories.

Editing "The Yodeler", the camp newspaper, and, as always, struggling to find the words.

A digression of footnotes:

Footnote 1: I confess that I don't remember whether it was Annette who narrated the Newsreel or what whoever it was said but I think that our band of happy campers were dubbed "Mouseketeers".

Footnote: 2: I've spared you the story of the light plane that crashed on the glacier just before we got there and our watching the subsequent rescue of the injured pilot by another daredevil pilot.

Footnote 3: On the far right in the photo is Tom, the only one I had any contact with after that summer. He was a Harvard student at this time but later worked as some sort of secret agent and died in mysterious circumstances. The girl in the middle of the front row with her hands on her knees was my girlfriend, Robyn.

Arnedillo: the Perfect Writers' Retreat

Do you have a refuge, a quiet place you’d retreat to if you suddenly had an important project and wanted to avoid life’s daily distractions? I don’t mean an upstairs bedroom or a friend’s granny flat but a totally different hidey-hole, in a different country. I have a few possibilities.

In my fantasy inspiration would strike and I’d come up with a cracker idea for a novel, an idea so good that I’d auction the publication rights and pocket a huge advance. Now all I need to do is write the book away from harassing phone calls from Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson who would be after the film rights. Where would I go? High up on my list of hideaways is my own Spanish Shangri-la: Arnedillo.

Arnedillo, La Rioja, Spain

Arnedillo (arnay-DEE-yo), population 477, is nestled in a valley high up in the mountains of La Rioja in northern Spain. Arnedillo is dry, bitter cold in winter and very much off the beaten path. And it’s picturesque. Why work in an ugly and depressing place? The town doesn’t have the sort of UNESCO-listed historical attractions that would draw mobs of international tourists so it’s a quiet place. It’s also crime-free (according to the locals) and it’s a long way from a beach. In short, the perfect place to settle down for a few months to work.

Spanish tourists do go there but these are Spanish tourists, mainly from nearby Logroño. The shops aren’t filled with souvenirs: no “Arnedillo a Noche” postcards, Chinese-made castanets or even miniature bagpipes with “Requerdos de Arnedillo” printed on them. (Forget the flamenco---this is flute, drum and bagpipe country.)

In addition to being a beautiful town, Arnedillo is steeped in history. The Romans were there when Spain was a part of the Roman Empire and since then the Vandals, Visigoths and Moors came and went. There are a few remnants of these conquering peoples but it was in the High Middle Ages that the town took the shape it has today. The town is protected by heritage orders and the valley itself has been declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO.

That tower is the little that's left of the 10th C castle of the bishops of Calahorra.

Okay so while I want to get away from major distractions I will need a few things to do to break up the boredom of writing. I like to walk and there are some lovely walks along the valley and up into the surrounding hills. There’s a tiny bit left of a ruined 10^th century castle and there are three hermitages up above the town that can only be accessed on foot. These date from the 10^th to the 16^th centuries and now look more like miniature churches than the hovels or caves the hermits would have lived in. No skinny bearded men raging against the evils of the world.

Vultures nest in the peaks around the town.

A bit of bird watching helps to break up the writing routine and Arnedillo has a colony of Griffon vultures that nest in a rocky crag above the town. The population of Griffon vultures in Europe had been diminishing but has come back thanks to public awareness interest. There was a bit of a hiccup a few years ago when the European Commission banned the leaving of carcasses out for the vultures because of the danger of spreading of BCE (Mad Cow Disease) but their numbers are growing again. These are magnificent birds.

Looking back along the Cidacos River to Arnedillo.

Still struggling with Chapter One and out of ideas I need another break. I think I’ll take a walk up to the town’s nevero artificial. No, I’d never heard of one either but some friendly people took me to see this one and explained its use. A “snow well” is the best translation I’ve found. It’s a stone-lined hole in the ground that neveros filled with snow in the winter. In summer the compressed snow and ice could be taken out though a bottom entrance---a source of ice all summer long. These apparently were common in Europe and the Middle East from at least 2000 BC. Where I grew up in New England, USA, you just waited for a lake or pond to freeze, sawed it into blocks and packed it in sawdust in a shed. Needless to say, industrial ice-making factories in the 19^th century and, later, fridges put the neveros out of a job just as happened with the ice-harvesters of New England.

There’s another walk to see dinosaur footprints but I’ll save this one for when I’m really stuck.

Iglesia de San Servando y San Germán

There are a couple of churches in town, both unlocked and generally people-free when there are no services. The grander of the two is the 16^th century Iglesia de San Servando y San Germán. This is just across a tiny square from the entrance to the lovely little boutique hotel where I’ve stayed and would stay again while I work on the novel. This is the Hospedería LasPedrolas.

17th Century organ in the Iglesia de San Servando y San Germán

Jill outside our hotel, the Hospederia Las Pedrolas.

Arnedillo does have three festivals dotted around the calendar and their own peculiar customs to celebrate them. One of them, in November, is la fiesta de San Andrés in which the streets are filled with smoke of burning rosemary and he (or she) who breathes is will be immune from sickness such as colds or the flu all winter.

It is also a gathering place in autumn for mycologists. One of the restaurants, Casa Cañas, hosts the annual Jornadas Micológicas de Arnedillo. For mushroom and funghi aficionados there are lectures, guided mushroom collecting walks and the restaurant serves mushroom degustaciones for those mycologists who have a gastronomic as well as scientific interest in their subject.

photo:  Casa Cañas

photo:  Casa Cañas

Arnedillo’s main attraction is its hot springs. At one side of the normally-icy Cidacos River, which skirts the town, water comes out of the ground at 52.5 degrees Celsius. The town has built a series of pools, one flowing into the next. By the time the water reaches the lowest pool it’s not too hot to get into so the usual procedure is to work your way up from the warm pool to the almost-painfully-hot one. Once in the hottest pool it’s very hard to move a muscle, even to get out, but somehow you feel good afterwards. There is a big hotel and spa on the outskirts of town with mud baths for those who believe in the medicinal benefits of the water and have a bit of loose change.

Arnedillo's thermal springs.

Anyway, Arnedillo would be one of my perfect retreats: good restaurants, good accommodation and just enough to do to kill the boredom but not enough to not so much that I couldn’t get my work done. At least that’s my fantasy.
I didn’t just happen upon Arnedillo by taking a wrong turn between Barcelona and Bilbao. 

Many years ago as a teenager living in Madrid, a young woman came to work for for my family. Charo---diminutive of “Rosario”---was not only an excellent cook and tireless house-keeper but she soon became a well-loved member of the family. Much of what we learned of the Spanish language and Spanish customs we owed to her.

Charo on the right and another friend on a picnic in the 1950s.

Charo had grown up in Arnedillo and moved to Madrid to work. We lost track of her for years after we left Spain but eventually found her living in Logroño in the Rioja region. She'd lived in England, been married and been widowed. To make the story short, I met up with her a couple of times on trips from Australia to Spain. She was still the lovely, intelligent woman I’d known all those years ago and the two of us were as close as ever. 

Jill, Charo and me in Arnedillo a few years ago.

Later, Charo's sister, Juli, contacted me to say that Charo had had a stoke and that she was looking after her back in their pueblo, Arnedillo. We visited her there a couple of times. Charo has since passed away but Jill and I have now been adopted by Juli, her husband, Roberto, and all their relatives and friends. Spaniards being the social animals that they are, on our last visit we were almost killed with kindness. 

Some of our Arnedillo family.

Roberto and I check the wine in his bodega and declare it ready for drinking.

At this point I'm having second thoughts about whether Arnedillo really would be the ideal hideaway. Maybe I'd better start thinking about hideaway No. 2 before inspiration strikes. But more on that at another time.

Treaty of Tordesillas

Why do they speak Spanish in most of the countries of South America except Brazil where they speak Portuguese? I found the answer quite by accident in Tordesillas in Spain. We were driving from Galicia in northwestern Spain to Madrid in the centre. It was getting late when we arrived in this town so we decided to spend the night. At our hotel they told us that it was the day of the annual celebration the Treaty of Tordesillas. We hurried to the main square and watched a re-enactment of the signing of this famous treaty in 1494. 

In the late Sixteenth Century, Spanish and Portuguese explorers were sailing around the world searching for a water route to India and claiming the lands that they found in the process. Christopher Columbus had just snapped up various islands in the Caribbean and the Portuguese and the Spaniards were madly mapping the coastline of the New World.

Instead of fighting over these newly-discovered lands, King John II of Portugal and the king and queen of this part of Spain---Castile and Aragon---made a deal. They would draw a line on a map from north to south through South America. Portugal would get everything east of it that hadn't already been claimed and Spain would get everything to the west of it. This gave what is now the coast of Brazil to Portugal and almost everything else to Spain. Not a great deal for Portugal and maybe this was because the pope, who had been born in Spain, was in on the negotiations.

We got to the middle of town just ahead of the troops of the Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish king and queen.

Then along came the striped soldiers of the representatives of Pope Alexander VI.

Followed by the the troops of King John II of Portugal.

They assembled in the main square, the Plaza Mayor, while the present mayor (with her back to us in the picture below) read out the proclamation of the Treaty. We listened respectfully, not understanding much of the mediaeval Spanish.

Towns and cities around the world have their celebrations but this one was especially fun for us because we'd happened on it by accident, because it was such a friendly atmosphere and because we seemed to be the only out-of-towners. It's rare to be the only tourists at an event like this. And we actually learned something.

The one thing missing were South Americans. This was probably not surprising since this was a celebration of the carve-up of their continent by a bunch of greedy foreigners.

Picos de Europa

While hiking in the Picos de Europa National Park in northern Spain, we didn’t expect to see a Cantabrian Brown Bear, an Iberian Wolf, an Iberian Lynx or a Cantabrian Chamois and it’s a good thing we didn’t expect to because we didn’t. We also didn’t see a European Wildcat, a Genet, a Pyrenean Desman (a little mole-like mammal) or any of the seventy-odd mammals that live in these dramatic mountains. But we did see some interesting birds including Griffon Vultures circling above us.

Our plan was to walk the Cares Gorge hiking trail at a time of year when this very popular walk wouldn’t be a conga line of walkers. So we went in October when it is invariably cold, often rainy and when we’d have the trail to ourselves. As it turned out, it was sunny and hot (none of the locals had seen it this hot in October) but, thankfully, there were very few other walkers.

The young Dutch hitchhiker we picked up on the way into the park said that he spends much of his free time hiking around Europe but that the unique scenery of the Picos keeps drawing him back. Much more dramatic than the Dutch Alps apparently.

The scenery is both spectacular and unique. The Cares Gorge trail is relatively easy but probably not for people with vertigo and no parachute. Sadly, we had to turn back before getting to the end thanks to a heavy cold I’d picked up a few days earlier. One more grudge walk to add to the list but one I can't wait to do.

Even in the wilds of the Picos you're never too far from a cool drink.