Santo Domingo de Calzadas to Villambistia

Hello, everyone.  This is a second post for today to catch up.

The Cathedral chickens of Santo Domingo, sadly Blogger turns this photo sideways.

We left Santo Domingo at 7, as we have been doing. It's actually a little later than in previous caminos, but the sun is almost up when we leave and the walking is good. We walked along through various little villages and grabbed a bite of breakfast along the way. (Stopped at the first food we found, then later discovered that there was an actual inside bar by the church that we could have eaten at. 😒 But live and learn.) We arrived in Belorado, the "stage end" town in several guides, about 1:00 and found long lines in front of various albergues. Several pensiones were full up as well. 

Pilgrimage art on the Repsol gas station

We struck out for the lovely village of Villambistia and the Hotel Rural Casa de Los Deseos. As this is a small village the hotel offers a menu for supper and also a  small (traditional for Spain) breakfast. We really enjoyed our supper! And since we have "broken the stages" we aren't surrounded by crowds. We don't expect that we will hear people in the next room hooting and hollering after 9 pm either. (In fairness, when the bedtime/lights off time of 10 pm arrived last night, everyone got quiet. And the famous chickens of Santo Domingo are surprisingly good neighbors!)

Vila do Conde

Hello, everyone.

Returning to our series of pilgrimage posts, the end of our day of walking on the boardwalk along the lovely beaches of northern Portugal ended at Vila Do Conde.

Vila do Conde is close to the beach, but not really spread out all along it. The place we stayed was on the plaza, which was decorated with symbols of different parishes. It turned out that this particular Sunday was the day of their Marchas de Sao Joao. DH got right out there to take a picture or two--yours truly was in the middle of washing dirty clothes.

Procession for St. John the Baptist in Vila do Conde on Sunday afternoon.

Ancient Monastery in Vila Do Conde area

DH views the Roman aqueduct ruins in Vila do Conde.

The weather that day was cooler than it had been, and it rained on us a little.

Y'all may remember comments about the great beauty of plants in Portuguese gardens. This flower escaped! It's a calla lily and it's growing out in the middle of trees.

Your humble blogger with the Barcelos chicken statue.

View of downtown Barcelos. Note another chicken on the building.

At Barcelos, at the Capuchin church of St. Anthony, we were blessed after Mass by the priest. This was the first pilgrims' blessing we received on this trip. One of the servers, a young man studying to become a Capuchin, spoke English. We were so grateful for their kindness and friendly welcome!

We stayed at Barcelos for two nights, as we planned on a little side trip here: a bus ride over to Braga.

A pretty walk

Hello, everyone.

We walked from Redondela to Pontevedra today. We're very tired from yesterday, so before we wander out in search of food, we're going to rest a bit.

This is one of the pictures of the fort in Valenca, which froze when I tried to upload it that day.

Of interest to my fellow chicken lovers, the most common variety of birds we have seen is the Naked Neck. A cafe owner told us today that so many people keep them because they're good layers.

Barcelos

Hello, everyone.

This morning we rolled out at 0630, bright eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to troop right down the gray-dots route to Sao Pedro de Rates and on to Barcelos. For about forty minutes. Then we conceded that we weren't up to walking an un-waymarked route and went back and found the yellow arrows that led to Arco. (This name still reminds me of trudging through a Hatfield last year, part of a long line of pilgrims, about a mile aside from a ridge of thunderstorm generating hills. Each pilgrim or pair about twenty feet behind the one in front, all of us collectively one of the tallest things out there, and the thunder sound only two seconds behind the lightning flash. Have I mentioned that lightning scares me?) But this Arco was devoid of storms. Between the floundering at the start and the scheduled walk for the day, we put in almost twenty miles. And our feet have a lot to say about long days now!

When we got to Barcelos, DH found a Mass to attend and we were blessed--the first Pilgrim Blessing we have received on the trip so far! I want to gratefully mention the Franciscan fathers at St. Anthony's church in Barcelos.

And here is a picture of the famous Barcelos miracle chicken. (I admit that I haven't read the story yet.)

So much for the warm days...

Hello, everyone.

We've gone back to the chilly weather again. Today it was cloudy all day long, with some bits of rain, and I don't think we got as high as 55F.

The chickens didn't even want to get up and come outside for their breakfast! But by afternoon they were a little more chipper. When we let them out for their afternoon walk, the guineas did their usual squawking chorus as they ran from the pen to the back patio.

My sweetie went to Ruben's grocery on Saturday afternoon and found paleta (shoulder) of pork, Spanish serrano type, and a nice little tetilla cheese. So we had fresh barra bread and the "ham" and cheese for dinner. Also a salad and the first of the baby broccoli tops from the gai lan row in the garden. (Cooked with the leaves that came along, as there were only about 6 tiny broccolis in the picking.) It was a lovely dinner and we especially enjoyed the serrano style ham!

This was dinner in Santiago--barra slices with teta cheese and serrano ham.

This morning I used the last little bits of the barra bread to make pain perdu: French toast.

Winter: when it's not "Chamber of Commerce weather" in South Texas

Hello, everyone.

Today it's about 40F and not expected to improve much. Tomorrow is supposed to be even chillier! We wake up and wonder why we aren't rolling up our sleeping bags and hitting the trail before dawn.

A small progress note on the Peanut Quilt:

The stack of squares, with their coordinate labels, in correct order to be seamed one after the other.

I am not going to put up a lot of pictures showing the quilt top until it's with its baby--I think that Mama looks in here once in a while!--to preserve the surprise.

Dogs and cat, contemplating each other

And on the old homestead, the day before the current cold snap hit, the dogs treed another cat. (The neighborhood cats have taken to perching on the top of the green shadecloth of the chicken pen.) This time, the cat went up a tree. A few days earlier, an orange cat ran up the saguaro cactus--that's the fat pole-like things growing on top of the raised mound behind the tree--and perched on the very top! I wonder if what the cats are studying is the collection of small wild birds that keeps trying to sneak a few bits of my birdies' chow.

Rain! and then chores

Hello, everyone.

I am delighted to say that we got about 2 inches of rain from this last spell. My sweetie went out to pull the dry cornstalks the next day, and the fire ants chewed him up one side and down the other. The ants had not only put their nests in the corn patch, we also found them crawling around on the corn cobs when we went to pick them. Darned ants.

Yesterday we let the chickens have a long walk and sicced them on the ants. Don't know if it helped or not, but it made us feel a little better about the situation.

And last night I bumped my toe--the toe that was really, really purple on the trail, and has lost its old toenail--in the night and it hurt all over again. I'm beginning to wonder if when I dropped the cutting mat edge-on on that foot, I might have broken something. And I'm trying to get it well enough to get out walking again and do some hiking, now that cooler weather is arriving down here.

Speaking of chores, today was our day to add another coat or two of varnish on the doors. (We do it every couple of years, when the weather is the right temperature and not too wet.) The doors always look so pretty right after the varnish has gone one, with the wood all shiny and reflecting the light. The wood lasts a lot longer this way, too.

Progress report on the beading: The completed Delica cross was strung onto a strand with assorted Preciosa beads (black fire-polish, purple oval-ish) and other black and pearly beads to make a necklace. Then, inspired, I made a pair of earrings to go with it. Is it still increasing the simplicity of life if when using up the bead stash I end up having more stuff in the jewelry box?

The second of the Cross of Santiago projects is started, the one made from Preciosa seed beads. The background is black, the main color of the cross is red, and the highlights are blue and gold.

Starting the second cross pendant in the fat part, so the shape changes are all decreases. This was recommended by various beading sites on the web, so I thought it would be something to try out.

The Preciosa seeds act like they're a lot of little ballerinas on point, trying to stand still in a line. They want to angle this way and that way, as the sides don't have a flat part to rest upon. I went with blue and gold for the accent colors this time--have no idea whether the blue and gold are also Preciosa brand, but they're more square in form, so probably not.

I'm of mixed opinion whether to write this off at the top as a lesson learned--forget using these beads for peyote stitch--or hang in there to the end. On one hand, the red and black really make the blue highlights stand out. On the other hand, I'll probably have to back the pendant with something else, like maybe a piece of felt, or it will be too floppy to use. And it's really easy to get the count off with the beads trying to slide out of place.

Another random photo from the Camino:

From Logrono, Our Lady with cherubs. Probably an Assumption statue.

New developments on the framing and hanging

Hello, everyone.

The map of the Camino de Santiago came in the mail. And today I got it out of the tube, laid it on the table under a whole lot of books and CD cases to flatten it and keep the cat from napping on it, and trawled the store room for a frame. We had one! It had a poster of "modern military aircraft" in it, but the child who had it hanging has moved out some time back and the poster was just sitting there, taking up the frame. So I took it out and put the map into the 2 foot by 3 foot frame. Added matboard in back of the map, and also used the cardboard the frame came with and the clips.

This isn't the best picture, and I need to get the hammer out and move one of the nails on the side frames, but here it is:

AD 1445 map of the Camino de Santiago. (Please ignore the flash reflection!)

Also today I made it rain! (Well, unless somebody washed their car, that is.) I hung the clothes out on the line, so of course it rained right after the clothes got dry. And I was not home! But arrived home from the store before it progressed beyond sprinkling, grabbed the clothes on the way into the house, and watched the rain quit falling.

I would have been fine with a good soaking after I took the clothes in, really. The garden is dry and I find that the patience to stand there drizzling a good soak onto each pepper and tomato and eggplant and bean and cucumber and the corn patch just isn't there.

But the pecan trees in back have fruited big time this year, and every time I go outside there are a bunch of nuts on the ground. Only a few of them have been invaded by ants. (I so dislike the ants coming out of the nut in my hand and biting me.)

On another note, I've got the birdies taking an afternoon "constitutional" almost every day, so Mr. Guinea isn't nearly as grumpy to the hens. Especially when I put their morning food out in three distinct, separated piles that each is thick enough to be opaque, so he isn't worried that Mrs. Guinea won't have enough to eat. And I include a scoop of kitty chow in with the layer feed, to increase the protein in their diets.

The other day he found a caterpillar on the ground while I was feeding them. She was happily pecking away at the bird food, and he was picking up the caterpillar and calling her. Over and over. Finally she decided she'd had enough of the Layer Feed and wandered over to see what he was all excited about. He's really devoted to her, but she acts like she goes to sleep wondering why it was her fate that her One True Love is such a jerk and won't let her be friends with the other birdies. Meanwhile, he's very protective of her and concerned that she gets all of any food she likes. And when she goes to lay an egg, he stands nearby and guards her.

If he hadn't killed a couple of cockerels, and wasn't so determined to run the hens off whenever he thinks the food pile is too thin, it would be completely sweet and romantic. Instead it's one of those mixed-bag things. I go from thinking what a sweet mate he is to needing to go into the pen and chase him around so he'll understand that the hens are under my protection. Meanwhile, the Barred Rock hen (Princess Stripey) can't decide if she can hang with the gray guineas or not. Sometime Mr. Guinea lets her, sometimes he chases her away. I guess he isn't sure if Princess Stripey is a guinea or a chicken!

A surprise in the henhouse

Hello, everyone.

As I think y'all might remember, we have a few pet birds. Just now, "a few" means 3 hens and a pair of guinea fowl. (Mr. Guinea and Mrs. Guinea, who live alongside Ms. Silver, Ms. Red, and Princess Stripey.) Today, as we have been for the last several days, I let them out about 6 pm for a walk.

The walks in the evening let them get away from each other for a little while, let them eat bugs and seeds in the yard, and let them not notice me getting into the henhouse for the eggs.

When I opened the "people door" and went inside the henhouse, I found the usual two green eggs

Ameraucana egg. (Tastes just like the brown and white ones!) For size, the tiles are 4 inches square.

and an unexpected three guinea eggs. Mrs. Guinea must have been hiding them under the straw, because yesterday my sweetie looked for eggs and didn't see any of the small, brown, speckled looking guinea eggs.

You have to be cautious about collecting the guinea eggs. The hen is very attached to them. And her mate is very attached to her happiness! A few days ago, after collecting eggs, I was sitting outside watching the birds at their activities when the guineas went back over to the pen. Mrs. Guinea went first, calling "Good luck! Good luck!" as she went. Mr. Guinea trailed after and made little screeches. She went inside the house and looked for her egg (now collected) and came out hollering her head off. "BUCK WHEAT!" (There are multiple ways to write down the call. She had definitely gone from concerned to screaming upset.) Mr. Guinea, hearing his lady yelling that "it's GONE!!!!" commenced to giving out his alarm call, too. It was all very traumatic for them.

But if I allowed her to collect a clutch and set, her mate would make the three hens' lives a living hell. He already chases them around when he thinks there isn't enough food for his lady, or that she's wanting peace and quiet to lay an egg. Imagine what he'd be like if she was setting all the time on a clutch of eggs? It would be simply impossible. And so I collect her egg every time she lays one, just like I do with the hens.

I have boiled the guinea eggs, and after you get the shell to open up and peel it off, they make perfect deviled eggs. If weighed to get the amounts to match up, they are fine for baking with, too. And they make good fried eggs, though there is about half the amount of goodness in a guinea egg compared to a large chicken egg.

Another thing you can do with eggs--after you blow out the goodness inside the shell!

Embroidery stuff

Hello, everyone.

I was looking in on Ms. Corbett's page, Needle n Thread, and inspired to put up some pictures of my (not the be all and end all) embroidery transfer method of choice.

I have used it on: my elder daughter's wedding dress (bead embroidery)

Japanese seeds and Swarovski crystals on ivory silk doupioni. Sulky Solvy both stabilized the fabric and held the design. This is the center-front of the dress bodice. At the end of the doupioni assembly, I added fill-in stitches to the seam lines to connect the bodice pieces smoothly to each other and to the band sleeves. It was all quite a project!

my granddaughter's Christmas dress (on corduroy)

Cotton floss on red cotton corduroy. Solky Solvy made a flat surface for the stitching to rest upon and held the design. Burda World of Fashion infant's dress pattern with long sleeves--here rolled up.

a white wrap for a stillborn baby

White and pastel cotton floss on white broadcloth. Tulip center design from (I think) Needle n Thread.com site, lettering created with greeting card program and traced separately after the center was done.

I trace the design onto the Sulky Solvy, a transparent, lightweight, water-soluble interfacing. Then I attach it to the fabric. At the end of the project, the finishing of the small thing or the readiness of a part to be included in a large thing, I pull out the basting stitches holding the Sulky Solvy, pull off as much of the Sulky Solvy as can be removed by hand, and give the item a soak in OxyClean solution. The OxyClean eats the ink and dissolves the remaining bits of Sulky Solvy. (I think the interfacing must be made of starch, as while it holds together for the purpose and tears apart very easily, it has no actual strength of its own.) And then I rinse in cold, clear water and drip dry, carefully pressing as needed and possible.

I have used simple tracing also, in this Thanksgiving themed hand towel:

Another of Ms. Corbett's free patterns. Note that I should have cut the thread between the grass bunches!

And creative adaptation of a pre-printed design, in this portrait of Mister Sexy:

Mister Sexy's portrait, on a chicken-themed dish towel. Sadly, he died of heatstroke shortly after this was done. This is the profile pic I use in my CafePress shop. 

 The pre-printed design on this towel showed something resembling a Barred Rock rooster in profile, with prominent comb and wattles, using some hideous colors. Bright greens, oranges, that kind of thing. When actual roosters are so beautiful, and not hard to do at all, the use of the Crayola-box, kindergarten-art colors is to cry over. IMHO. But the shape being mostly there, it was easy to adapt.

Mister Sexy, the Ameraucana rooster that we had for a while. This pic doesn't show the green iridescence in his tail, but it does show his Attitude. I miss him.

Palas dei Rei

Hello, everyone.

We had a noisy night in Portomarin, because of ambient noises of one kind and another. I don't know why I noticed them so much this time. One was an alarm that sounded like a rooster.

Leaving Portomarin meant returning to the kind of hills and woodlots and small villages and farms that we'd mostly been going thrugh. No more views of the pretty river, sadly--we were heading away from it altogether.

My sweetie's feet were really bothering him now, because we'd had so many rocky surfaces to walk on. We could feel the contours of the rocks through our boots, and if we hit a rock wrong, we got a definite advisory from our foot. I dont' know if this was because the insoles of the boots were dead, or the boots were wearing out, or we were just a lot more noticing by this point. At times now, I was actually walking ahead of my sweetie.

Morning clouds have not lifted off for the folks in the valley yet.

Nothing says fun like giant metal ants in the patio!

Unless it's a hog's head with sunglasses on.

I find in my journal that I forgot to write for a key couple of days--these ones! And in my sweetie's journal, everything stops at Palas de Rei. (He was pretty tired by the end of a walking day.)

As you can see, Galicia is as green as the early part around the Pyrenees. Trail marker in distance says to go left.

 As you can see in the above picture, we were walking along the small roads a lot. There are some big highways through this area, and when the trail comes to it you have a confusing set of arrows that lead you in a spiral that ends in an underpass, and then carries on. The way through the small villages is used also by the dairy farmers taking their cows to and from the barn, so even though the village roads are paved you can't always see much of the asphalt through the dried cow pats. I did say dairy farmers: the cheese style that Galicia is known for is a really rich, really good creamy soft cheese. Almost soft enough to spread!

I learned a new word for drumsticks: "the hams of the chicken"

In Spain, while there are grocery stores, there are also frozen goods stores in many towns. They sell fish, and this one had chicken, too. This congeleria was in Arzua. The sale on drumsticks works out to around $1.50 a pound, give or take for the exchange rate.

If I remember correctly, Arzua was the place where the albergue put us in a "private" room. That is, the room was small and there was only one bunk set in it. Which racked terribly. And I finally got to eat some Pulpo a feria: octopus chunks, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with pimenton. YUM!!! We also tried Galician style tortilla de patata, which is a little bit softer inside. I don't know how the cooks manage that trick. Maybe they just run the stove a little hotter under the skillet, so the egg cooks firmer on the outside faster and lets the inside be still soft and almost like a sauce around the potato chunks.

The poster for the concert. I think Mr. Johansen was going to put out a DVD of the music. Notice the Galician spelling of the date: Xunio.

Arzua was also the town in which we got to hear the concert by the cellist Dane Johansen. It was delightful. Mr. Johansen, an American musician, was traveling the trail with his cello, a crew, and a load of audio equipment. (Obvious, he wasn't toting all that on his back on the goat tracks! It would have been impossible.) He had a project going, to play in the old churches and recreate the beautiful sound environments the way people would have heard it--so no artificial boost to the volume. I still heard him very well. One of the songs was a Spanish folk song (Catalonian?) which brought to mind the walking through hills and looking out over the valleys with their "ponds" of clouds below me.

I didn't even know how close we were getting

After sleeping in the state-run alberge at Hospital de la Condesa we got back on the trail again. The first thing we discovered was that no, we weren't through with steep climbs. In fact, we had one before breakfast! The path just before Alto do Poio is just as steep as the path up to O Cebreiro. It's not as long, thank heavens, but it's certainly just as steep. And at the top of it was a bar and an albergue. All I could think of was that I was so glad we had stopped at Hospital instead of continuing on to this, the very next albergue on the trail.

After eating toast (huge pieces freshly sliced when I asked for it, and then toasted in the oven) and cafe leche, we continued on. At the far side of Triascastela, we went right toward San Xil, wanting the shorter route. (Triacastela is a lovely village. There are some little stores. They don't want you to bring your pack inside the door.)

It was a good thing that we had stopped at the very last grocery in Triacastela to pick up some sardines and some bread. We walked through a whole lotta scenic nothing for a long time after that. San Xil wasn't even a wide spot in the road. It was just a building that had nothing to do with serving food or anything like that. We did find a picnic table out in the middle of nowhere--it even had a soda machine, but it didn't sound like it was working--and we put sardines onto the bread and drank water from our bottles to wash it down and kept on going. We did see some people who had turned that way expecting to find a bar or restaurant with tables and food and drinks--poor souls. If I had had enough to give everyone a morsel I would have. The moral of the story here is to be prepared. This is about the only time we wished we had brought food along that we actually had brought food along. Not everything that is a "thing" in the map books is a place you can get food. Sometimes it's just a name so you know you're still on the right trail.

We stopped for the night at San Mamed del Camino, which may or may not qualify as a wide spot in the road, but it certainly was not a really built-up area. Among the scattered farms and houses was the Paloma y Lerma Albergue. More vegetarian food--very tasty!--very relaxing patio and yard, chickens to watch, and friendly hospitaleros. It was refreshing.

At the Alto San Roque, a statue of St. Roch--minus his dog.

View of the valley in the morning, before the early fog had lifted.

Capilla de San Pedro, a wayside chapel along the trail past San Xil.

The morning after sleeping at Paloma Y Lerma, we walked through Sarria, and the atmosphere of the Camino changed. This post is long enough, so I'll leave that for tomorrow.