Percebes are still on the list

"I'm king of the world!" he tends to say at moments like this. Some teenagers cringe.

Yesterday Jaime took us on a tour of the Galician coast, which he loves with such ardor it made everything more beautiful, and it is very beautiful to begin with.

I'll try to describe the Galician coast without using the word "rugged," which of course I just did while pretending I'm above such an adjective. Ok, I can't. It's very rugged. At various times it reminded me of Point Reyes, California and Maine, but with old stone houses, horreos, and lots of small lots planted with what I think are grelos. I love the way every house seems to have a little garden and fruit trees, sometimes chickens, sometimes a couple of sheep. It's exactly the way I like a neighborhood to look, obviously.

Owen, future outsider artist, does his best work in restaurant toothpicks.

We saw a 14th century church with lots of old tombstones just lying around for anyone to write grafiti on, though no one had. We saw another very old church. And another very old church. I could spend all day going into very old churches. For lunch we stopped in the dreamy town of Muros. We wanted to eat percebes, a very small local barnacle, but couldn't find a restaurant that was serving them.

We ate everything but a few pieces of the pulpo.

Instead, we ate razor clams and regular clams, shrimps, crab, fish, pulpo and fried calamari and, to use an irritating term, the ingredients really did speak for themselves. In American restaurants, it's like the chefs aren't confident of the flavor of the seafood, or they aren't confident that the diners will appreciate fish without breading or heavy sauce. There was some kind of light sauce on the clams, but it was very, very light. Everything was delicious.

We are, including our excellent hosts, a party of nine. In addition to the adults, there are two teenaged girls, one teenaged boy (cousin Matthew from Seattle), Owen, who is 11, and his cousin Javier, who is 10.  You would think. . . well, what would you think?

All I know is that my husband and I are having a great time, and so are Owen and Javier. Owen and Javi enjoy air swordfights and long, loud conversations about video special effects and even louder made-up song cycles. You should have seen Matthew's face when he got out of the car after driving around coastal Galicia with them all day.  Had Isabel been riding in that car, she would have jumped out the window.