Apart from shortage of time, I find it has been quite hard to assemble my thoughts about the last 3 days, and I wonder if this is a delayed result of the car smash last week - my brush with death.  In fact we have had rich and stimulating times, travelling through the most spectacularly beautiful mountains, camping and wandering around in Huesca, and then coming back into France for a day or so. Visually it has been entrancing. So many thoughts and ideas have been flooding through my mind, I knew I couldn't record much of it... so there's this sense of ideas lost, and opportunities missed.  Something sad as well as uplifted, dark and light, down and up.
(Each time we have been up in the mountains we have seen eagles - huge and solitary - and flocks of great vultures.....)
One powerful thread was thinking of Katherine of Aragon, that extraordinary redhead who was married into the Tudors as a child because she brought more lineage and credibility than they had without her, having two direct lines of legitimate ancestry from John of Gaunt whereas they were basically illegitimate. If she could produce a male heir for them, that young man would have a claim to the throne of England which would be completely upheld by all the other crowns of Europe, and the Pope.
She came from this kingdom of Aragon, whose beauties we have been dazzled by in the last few days - great mountain passes and folds, rivers, cities, estates, castles, and pride. She was born in Madrid, educated, dedicated and and intelligent.
What she thought when she arrived in the lowlands of southern England one can only imagine - how low, dark and cold it must have seemed compared to the grandeur and brilliance of her own lands.

Among her courtiers was one John Blanke, a trumpeter - thought to be the first African black man to arrive in England in those days.
She was married by proxy, and then in reality to Arthur, Prince of Wales - but he was overtaken by a fever and died within a few months and she was left widowed. In order to keep her all-important lineage in the family, Arthur's father considered marrying her himself but her father objected, so she was then paired with Arthur's brother, Henry - five years younger than she, and destined to become the Donald Trump of his age - Henry VIII.  She bore numerous children, but only one survived - Mary, a girl.  As we know Henry took matters into his own hands when he became infatuated with young Anne Boleyn... and Katherine was dumped, never ceasing to protest, and never accepting her divorce.  She commissioned a book about the education of women..... 
As we passed through some of her lands here, we thought about her, and saluted her, and her country.
The new roadworks are a wonder - there is no shortage of space so they can spread out and do what they want - it is a paradise for spaghetti-junction lovers. The roadworks are also adorned with striking and attractive works of art. They are proud of their roads and rightly so.

Iron Horse in Aragon

From Torla we went west through the mountains to Biescas (where a squall of wind demolished some of the market stalls in front of our eyes), and then down to Huesca - to camp for a couple of nights in what turned out to be an urban campsite - something out of Celesteville, next to the football stadium and the swimming pool - but now surrounded by blocks of apartments. As we have seen before, the population of Spain no longer wants to live on the plain, but to flood into the cities for the fun, the footie, the schools, shops and amusements. Every town has its new forest of accommodation, tall suburbs, blocks and blocks of flats.
That mighty wind came rushing past us, day and night, bringing sporadic rain but a lot of roaring and flapping. The small plane trees planted through the campsite offering shade and privacy were bashed and battered and the wind spanked through the leaves and gave us a non-stop orchestral howling.....

We spent Sunday wandering round the sleepy city, having the place almost to ourselves.

The cathedral has a very good alabaster altar-piece,

but is mostly unusual in being rather late in date. That's because the Christians (in a practical spirit) just used the mosque for two hundred years longer than anyone else did, until some king or other protested and thought a purpose-built church would be a good idea. The only bit of the original mosque thought to survive is a part of a doorway, but not open to the public on Sundays.
The museum (near the university, and housed in a lovely octagonal building) is described on TripAdvisor as ' not very interesting' but we beg to differ. It is exemplary as to its displays and quality, offering a warm story of the history of humans in the province of Huesca - Old Stone Age, Upper Paleolithic, Meso, Neo, Bronze, Roman, and the rest.... lovely stone and pottery and then into the modern age.

A hand from a Roman statue - and my own....

Half way round, you get diverted into a suite of rooms once part of the royal palace - beautifully cleaned up, and partly used for a modern art display. Since one of the lower rooms is said to have been where a monk called Ramiro II chopped off the heads of some rebellious gentlemen, the present art installation of ghoulish heads and ghastly noises is absolutely appropriate.

The chapel above this charnel house is very lovely with carved capitals and when an Aragonese princess called Petronilla was given as a child-bride to the Count of Barcelona......    Ah, the child brides.

The museum has some stunningly beautiful madonnas - two carved effigies with the holy child, and one particularly lovely painting showing musicians around her, playing heavenly music.

We fled the wind and the roaring plane trees and came back up to the Pyrenees.

It was fun to stop at Canfranc - the railway station where the two national rail-gauges have to meet and make friends, and which since an extraordinary 170mph accident in 1970, has been closed. They are planning to open the whole thing again, to link France and Spain again, by 2020, costing 57bn Euros..... and that will be fun. A beautiful line, if they can run passenger trains as well as freight.
Escaping the wind, we booked the next two nights in the Spanish border town of Irun.
This has proved to be a confusing place, not only because of the Basque signage, but the layout and arrangement of roads - even the satnav has led us to flights of steps impassable for a car.  But today we went up along the coast back into France, to look for Ravel's birthplace - passing the surfing beach of Hendaye (OMG),

and to Ciboure to see his house, and on the bustling and pretty fishing port of St Jean de Luz.  The church of St John the Baptist is deceptive. Outside, it is modest enough, stone, plain, quiet. 

Inside, it has three tiers of dark wooden balconies with balusters each side of the nave, and round the organ at the west end. It has a massive altar-piece of course, but the whole thing is more or less exactly contemporary with St Paul's Cathedral in London and (like the buildings in Tenerife made at the same time) filled with details which late seventeenth century people would have welcomed as bang up to date. It is marvellous, worth coming for all on its own. It is theatrical, democratic, accommodating, wooden, huge and memorable.

This account is probably long enough - though I have missed out so much - the waterfalls, the castles, the massive mountain cliffs, the distant views, the delicious meals. It is very intense. Exhausting actually. I think this is my reaction to the crash... things are exhausting, because I am grabbing on everything. Apart from my wonderful pink hat, which I have only had for a week, and which I lost today. We went back to try to find it, in vain. It is gone and I am very sad.