Baamonde!

Hello, everyone.
We walked 20 km today, in good weather. In Baamonde, the 100 kilometer town, we have found three cafes and 1 tiny grocery store.

The name of one of the cafes.

I will try to photograph the 100 km marker tomorrow on the way out.
Plan for tomorrow, 15 km to Miraz. Next day, 25 km to Sobrado dos Monjes. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
Ultreia.

A refreshing bit of memories: Montes de Oca

Hello, everyone.

Yesterday was very busy, with a large party for many children, and the pleasure of working with wonderful ladies! Today I find myself needing to rest a little--rest mentally, that is, with memories of one of our 2014 Camino days.

We departed from the parish albergue in Villambistia at our usual crack-of-dawn time. We walked along seeing the dew on the flowers and watching the cloudless sky change colors. The trail wasn't a completely abandoned place, but we weren't in a huge clump of people, like you may have seen in various Camino movies (like The Way when characters depart from St. Jean.) By the time you get as far as the area of Tosantos and Villambistia everyone is thinned out and less crowded. We got to Villafranca (one of the many Villafrancas, but I can't remember which one just now) about 9:30 and had coffee.

Then we started walking over the range of hills called Montes de Oca. According to the wonderful guidebook The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook (This book is highly recommended--get it on Kindle, read it before you go and refer to it as needed on the way.) the Montes de Oca had at one point been a nest of bandits. It's not at all flat, and there's loads of cover, and when there was only horse travel, feet travel, and slow clumsy wagon travel it was probably perfect for the robbers to hide in. These days there is a marked trail which connects to some dirt roads that were put in to service windmills. There are no services between the last village before this and San Juan de Orbigo.

A waymark on the side of the road

This looks remote, but in the distance there is another little group of pilgrims.

The bridge at the bottom of the ravine. This bit is steep, both going down and coming up. Note arrows painted on bridge.

Just for pretty!

Another pretty flower

At the end of this forested bit, you come to the old monastery of San Juan. San Juan is one of the Engineer Saints of the Camino. He had been a disciple of Santo Domingo de Calzada. After Santo Domingo (another Engineer Saint) died, he came to this place and made a monastery. Santo Domingo and San Juan were responsible for getting roads and bridges built that would never have been there at all back in the middle ages. The monastery is currently being restored. We saw the casket where the saint's remains rest and the church. The monastery was listed as an albergue in various guide books, but it was too early to stop so we ate bocadillo at the little cafe and took pictures of the church and headed on down the road.

The monastery of San Juan de Orbigo

It wouldn't be a pilgrimage without at least one steep climb, right?

Hello, everyone.

We left Ponte de Lima after having the (totally unexpected) experience of drinking coffee at 7 in the morning. This was the on this trip that a coffee shop or bar was open that early in the morning.  We promptly found ourselves walking on lovely forest area paths and passed a dam with pretty water flowing over the top.

After that we came to a Fishing Park, a place where people could borrow poles and catch fish (pay by the pound for the fish) in a pleasant location. There was a snack bar with a nice, clean bathroom. (Don't laugh! Someone, somewhere will be glad to know that, if they make it to the Fishing Park, there is food, drink, and a bathroom.)

We passed the famous Fonte de Tres Bicas (Fountain of Three Mouths) and shortly thereafter came to a road crossing. Our way along the trail continued on dirt--not only straight ahead but steeply up! We stood there looking at it and trying to get up nerve to go. While we, and some other pilgrims, were doing that a young man walking solo came up, said "huh," and trotted right up the hill! After seeing that, we had to quit waffling and go.

We saw sap-gatherers marks on the pine tree trunks.

After we got to the top, and rested a bit on the considerately placed bench, we got to go down. There were even more rocks on the downhill side.

Note the yellow arrow hidden in the electric pylon. This was a standard place to put them on the Portuguese way--apparently folks aren't so in love with having yellow spray paint on their walls and rocks as all that.

DH went out onto the top of the dam to get this picture.

It's amazing how much less steep this things look when you aren't walking them! This is the uphill side. 

The down hill side. 

We reached Valencia/Tui on this day. This is the fort on the Portuguese side of the border.

 We reached the Spanish-Portuguese border this day and crossed over. There is an albergue close by the cathedral in Tui and we happily stayed there. An afternoon snack of tortilla de patata, a tour of the interesting cathedral, and dinner ended the day.

On to Mealhada

Hello, everyone!

As mentioned in the last post, we got lost leaving Coimbra. I don't know if the signage was confusing or the Brierly book was incomplete or out of date. (Or maybe both!) At any rate, we wandered in circles near the edge of town and found ourselves knocking on the door of a scheduling office. The nice man inside opened up and pointed us toward the next landmark on our list, a gas station. The route took us through a tiny village--someone ahead of us was walking along the road and we followed them onto a new stretch of dirt road over a field. Oops. It was sticky mud for the last half!

Near the gas station landmark. They were revving up for a rock concert in the area, we could see signs and people parking their cars.

I guess this will become the New! Improved! back way into that village that you can almost see at the end of the track.

It had rained the night before. We tippy-toed along the edges of the puddles through the woodlot.

Many buildings in Portugal are covered in tiles. Many also have image tile murals like this one, to Mary or a saint.

A suckling pig, ready for service. The chef had done it up in the restaurant oven where we stayed, and he was taking it elsewhere to serve, but he let us photograph the pig. It is a specialty of the Mealhada area.

A programming note: I have been very busy with R's dress. Now making a bead-embroidery slip to put onto the belt. Pictures will come later! Also there have been a few stitches put onto the Catedral de Santiago cross-stitch picture. I'm still up in the corner of the sky, so there's not much to see yet. Pictures later. After there is at least a little bit to see.

Rabacal: a municipal albergue at the end of a forested walk

Hello, everyone.

We walked from Alviazere to Rabacal, for another 20 mile day (30 km) and arrived at the first municipal albergue we'd encountered on this trip.

The bedspreads--please note, there were actual beds! with sheets!--were purple. The wifi didn't work in the albergue, but we found it at the cafe during dinner. I was very tired, so I had the first thing on the menu that looked easy to eat. Scrambled eggs with goat cheese for the win!

The albergue was in the cultural building with a museum, but we arrived at pretty-much closing time and left long before opening time the next day. We had enjoyed comfortable walking weather and were glad to rest at the end of the day's walk.

Resting feet, dumping out rocks. Those little green ferns are stickery!

Walking path

"You are NOT lost, pilgrim!"

Shrine in honor of St. John the Baptist

Just a few thoughts

Hello, everyone.

I will have an update on the shell beading project soon--have scanned the interwebs and discovered ways to do fringe. Also, expanding on the fringe for the Autumn Leaf amulet pouch on a web site (slips my memory just now) I have sketched a design for the fringe at the bottom of this square pendant with a scallop shell. Bonus points: I can use some of the blue enameled crosses that I have lying around in my (large) bead stash.

And one more thing--
When my sweetie and I first felt the pull of the Camino de Santiago, we didn't know what it would be like. What it would involve. And the depth of the roots that is would grow into our souls. Every day I think about the Camino--what it was like. What I wish I'd done a bit differently. What I'd do now if we were doing it again. (Not quite the same as the previous.) What routes I'd like to walk if we are so blessed as to go again.

Not only do I miss the good foods we discovered in Spain--ham cones! Pulpo a gallega with pan! Gambon al ajillo with pan! etc. etc.--but I have begun to make my own baguette bread so we can eat some of the wonderful foods we ate one the Camino, and during the days at the end when we were exploring and waiting for the date of our return reservation home. (No, I'm not recreating the airport food from the 1 day flight series that turned into a 3 day flight series.)

And periodically, like a growing crystal that is discovered by a gem hunter, I find a new lesson that the Camino has taught me.

It's not only the urge to have shells everywhere. The urge to create jewelry of shells and Crosses of Santiago. The every-morning feeling that it's time to walk, even before the alarm goes off.

The Camino de Santiago takes root in a pilgrim. I'm still a pilgrim. I don't think I'll ever stop being a pilgrim. And that itself is probably one of the lessons of the Camino.

Just after the stairs at the entry to the city of Santiago, studying the map of the city. I never felt sorry for the bicycle pilgrims until tha tlast day, when I witnessed them toting their bikes down the stairs alongside us. But at the bottom, they got to ride again. We walked the couple-three miles from those stairs to the center of the city on our feet.

This was another of the approximately 2200 pictures we took on our pilgrimage trip. :-) Enjoy.

Ideas for projects, maybe

Hello, everyone.

The last couple of days have been pretty calm around here. We had rain--and in Texas that's a welcome thing--and my birdies have been getting a walk in the yard most evenings. They're laying--green eggs for the hens and brown for Mrs. Guinea--and so most days we have home-made eggs for breakfast.

I have been wondering about what to make the centerpiece of our wall display, now that the Compostela certificates are framed and hung in the living room.

There was some thinking of maybe putting a poster of the Camino route, but there aren't a lot of those floating around in our neck of the woods.

Then I wondered about possibly putting one of our pictures from the route in the middle of the grouping.

Another pilgrim took a picture of us both, standing with a really cool carved waymarker on the outskirts of Santiago.

My sweetie's photo of the Cathedral doors.

The Cathedral, which is undergoing restoration just now. (The Portico de la Gloria is all blocked off by the scaffolding.)

My sweetie's photo of the Botafumeiro swinging on Corpus Christi Sunday.

There are other photos, as well, perhaps less exact to Santiago de Compostela--the zero kilometer marker in Fisterra and suchlike. I'm not sure which I like. 

On another note, I learned at our Altar Society meeting that the cauliflower salad was a hit. I will write down how I do it, in case anyone wants to try it out and maybe ring changes on the idea.

The idea started with reading low-carb fake-potato recipes. One of which was a "Mock Potato Salad" made with cooked cauliflower. Now I must say that while the creamy cauliflower puree that passes for mashed potatoes isn't bad, I don't think anybody will think that the chunks of cooked cauliflower in a salad are pototoes. People are smarter than that. So I don't call if Mock Potato Salad. I just call it:

Cauliflower Salad. I cut the washed cauliflower up in to little bite size pieces and cook it in the microwave. Then I transfer all the tender little white things into a mixing bowl and add some onion (red or mild white, either grated or chopped up) and some celery bits and some bell pepper. Maybe some dill pickle chopped up into little green things, too. And then I put a dressing that is pretty much like the one my sister-in-law uses for potato salad: 3 parts mayonnaise and 1 part mustard. This whole ensemble is stirred gently around until mixed and then covered with plastic wrap while it waits in the fridge for serving time.

Lesson Absorption is Gradual

Hello, everyone.

I am coming to the conclusion that the Pilgrimage to Compostela doesn't really end when you get on the plane to go home. (Even if you don't have to try again to get out of Spain!)

I find myself trying to process it by, for example, making quilt squares with scallop shells on them.

The first draft of the scallop applique, with color mates. A second draft has been pieced, but not appliqued. I intend to make photos of the assembly of that version, as the angles problem has been worked out now.

(Yes, the scallop square is necessarily applique. I don't even want to think about how tricky it would be to piece that many odd and curved seams. The square would probably outright refuse to lie flat at the end of it, too.)

And trying to make a beading pattern of a scallop shell--the peyote stitch one I started with is presently being "unwoven" back to where I should have bent lines more--but it's a learning process.

Early pic of the beaded scallop picture, right about when I think the design went all wonky. On sheet in background, the pencil sketches for Cross of Santiago, the yellow waymarker arrow, and the scallop shell.

This morning I am thinking that I should just toss over the weaving in progress and start again. Since there are three different threads in it, and at some point one finds it impossible to continue unstringing the threads because of the add-ins and the finishing-offs.

We learned to go with the flow a lot more than once would have been possible. It started on the very first day, when we arrived in Biarritz. There had been a plan for that day--a plan that had involved a lot of looking on the web and considering maps and so on--that involved staying the night in Bayonne, then moving the 20 miles down the way to St. Jean, then the following day (decompressed from plane travel) beginning to walk. This all went by the wayside when we encountered a lady pilgrim from Scotland, who suggested we share a cab to St. Jean. And we did.

I think the pony in St. Jean knew more about what I was doing than I did.

Now I look back and consider what I heard about the weather that hit on the day we would have been starting to walk, and I'm grateful that the plan went by the wayside. Because on May 19 the weather was pretty good. Give or take an evil headwind. Way better than the rainstorms and snow and much stronger winds that hit the next two days, which I heard about from other pilgrims. (I haven't been talking much about the other pilgrims we met on the trail. That's because I don't feel really comfortable spilling whatever they told me, and I overheard, and I guessed without any evidence, without any permission from them nor any expectation that there would be a blog post in the future. It just feels too much like a peeping tom putting up a videocam next to somebody's fence aimed at their uncurtained bathroom window.) On May 20, I heard, the snow was so bad that people were calling cabs to drive up the mountain and get them--one man said that he saw a long string of headlights through the storm, collecting stranded pilgrims to carry them down to start over again. He told of his start when we met him in Santo Domingo de Calzada--he'd decided that he'd freeze to death before a cab could come to him, and kept going. I could not have done that day on that unsheltered trail up the mountside.

I am firmly of the belief that when one goes on pilgrimage, God watches. And now I see that the evidence of His guiding hand was there even on our very first day in France. I look back over the walk and see many more things like that than I realized at the time, too. Directions--unsought--from strangers, more than once. Lodging when we couldn't find it. Encouragement from a passing pilgrim. Too many times to count, really.

Before I close this post, a feet picture set:

They look a lot better two months after returning than they did in Pamplona, don't they? (I will let you go back to that post if you want to see something really scary.) The purple toes are coming right along, the athlete's foot is gone, the blisters are gone. So, if you go and find yourself covered in blisters early on, just go to the pharmacy and get the bandages and use the antiseptic--hand sanitizer if that's what you have on you--every day and change bandages a lot. Wear your shower sandals in the evening so the feet will air out a lot.

Final note on feet: life is not fair. My sweetie only had one blister the entire 500 miles. But he had a new plantar fasciitis develop--the second one--which bothered him a lot. And the Roman roads with their pokey rocks were very hard for him--made his feet more sensitive to other pokey rocks later on. Ibuprofen gel, yes! Ibuprofen at bedtime, yes! And foot rubs.

I encourage anyone reading to make the pilgrimage. And accept that once you do, it will take root inside you.

We are now reading Mr. Kelly's Kindle book about the Via de la Plata, and Mr. Brierly's book about the Camino Portuges. Who can know whether we will be blessed to make another pilgrimage in the future? Or even to repeat the Camino Frances, the route we walked this summer?

We took a bus this time

Hello, everyone.

Bright and early on Tuesday morning, we left the key in the apartment and walked over to the bus station. It isn't far, expecially if you have just come off of about a month of 10-mile-plus days. Food, drinks, papers? Maybbe a little, but not much. Ticket sales? Yes. Bathrooms? Well, they weren't anything to jump for joy at, but they were there. 2-hour express bus to Fisterra? You got it.

And we got it. The road the bus took to Fisterra isn't quite like a backwoods Ozark 2 lane "highway", but it's close. We saw parts of the Fisterra hiking trail too--there is a recognized extension to the Camino going there, and one going to Muxia as well. (It takes about 4 or 5 days to walk from Santiago to either of these places.) There were lots of towns, and the bus stopped at them, if anyone wanted to get off. We passed lots of salt water inlets and observed large wooden square frames floating on the surface. We later learned that these are mussel farms. The mussels grow on ropes hanging down in the cold Atlantic water.

About 10:30 we rolled into downtown Fisterra. Well, as downtown as a cute little fishing village on the Atlantic coast gets, anyway. There was a crowd of people when we got out, gathering hteir luggage from the belly of the bus, handing out pamphlets on lodging, waiting to board the bus, or just being there. I felt some woman handing me a pamphlet and said "Gracias" and pocketed it, then another hand gave me another and I did the same thing. Then I was at the opening in the bus and taking my pack.

After we had our packs, we sat down to drink a coffee in the restaurant across the street and look over our travel information and the pamphlet collection. We settled on the first one I had gotten, a green one, and set out to find it. There was nothing that looked even close along the harbor front. We tried wandering up a side street and gave that up for hopeless. Then we went back to the bus stop area in hopes that we'd see the woman who had handed me the pamphlet and could ask directions. Nobody was at the bus stop. As we wandered along the street and passed by the grocery store, we saw a lady standing outside it. She looked over at our hands and said, "este es mi pension." Then she walked us over there, telling us about the town points of interest as she went. One that she mentioned was the tiny fishing museum.

The museum has a fishing boat, with actual nets and a pair of manikins dressed in fishing clothes.

The man at the fishing museum told us how the nets are treated and how the fishermen catch octopus (in traps) and sardines. He had a conch horn and he demonstrated how the families would blow it to get the fishermen's attention. It was fascinating. He told us that Sardine Eating Season had begun that day, and the sardines would be at their best, fat and tasty.

Of course we had to try the fresh sardines after that.

We had a plate of sardines (sardinias de Fisterra, so they are really fresh!) on St. John's Day. They were great. We enjoyed them so much, we forgot to make a photo until we had half of them eaten!

The town has a small tidal beach. It's not a sunbathing area, the water is much too cold and the beach is only there when the tide is out. We were astounded at how clear the water was and how many fish of all sizes could be seen swimming in it.

Low tide at Fisterra. Boats resting on the beach,
waiting for the water to come back.

High tide at Fisterra. The ocean water is crystal-clear here.

The zero marker.

 We hiked out to the lighthouse at the point to see the zero-kilometer marker. There was a small but steady stream of people going there. (They even had an RV parking lot!) We saw tthe little souvenir stand, but we didn't feel like adding any weight to our packs.

The lighthouse at Fisterra. It still works.

At the very tip of the point, below the lighthouse, some people come and burn clothing.

We spent one, restful, night in Fisterra. The next morning we caught a bus back to Santiago. This time, we weren't on the express bus. It took three hours and stopped in every collection of more than 5 houses on the way. Lots of people got on and off, too. When we got back to Santiago, we located the train station and a hotel. After renting a room for the night, we walked to the train station and bought tickets for the next stage of our exploration. This post is getting long, so that will have to wait until next time.

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.

Up, Up, and--O Cebreiro!

Hello, everyone.

We left Perejes a little earlier than usual--happens when you get waked up suddenly to bright lights--and followed the trail as best we could for a while. It seemed like forever--not a lot of yellow arrows along that route, but a lot of normal town signs and road-number signs. It twists a lot, with ups and downs, and sometimes you're walking left and uphill, but you can see ahead of you that someobody else with a pack is going right and downhill. It was definitely an exercise in trust to keep going!

About 8:30 we encountered a truck stop, with cafe leche, bathroom, and ham-and-cheese bocadillo. I almost fussed about the price of the sandwich, but when it came it had probably twice or three times as much of the nice ham as the cheaper ones always did. I was glad I hadn't backed out of it then. And having breakfast on board made the ensuing hour or more of confusing, twisty roads and trails more bearable. A lot of this morning's early walking was on the roadsides of small asphalt roads, instead of on a trail alongside of the roadway. The many small villages are lovely.

I had been wanting a taste of pulpo (octopus) since the day before, and also really wanting to find a tee shirt to wear. (The lightweight woven shirts worn day after day were proving to be a little less comfortable than expected.) Ponferrada had not had any tee shirts that I liked--the shops had some black ones and some heavy ones, but nothing I could face wearing if the day got hot. I had also had an intention to pick up the Franciscan credencial in O Cebreiro and collect sellos (rubber-stamps) recognizing the 800th anniversary of St. Francis's pilgrimate to Santiago. But in the end, one out of three was all I got--and grateful for that one.

A Pieta in folk style.

View from ancient bridge.

We made it all the way to the top! It was about a 2,000 foot tramp up the rocky goat track.

Traditional Galician Celtic house. Note thatch and monster-sized stone lintels.

View from O Cebreiro

Cows checking out our snack of salted nut mix and sodas. (Linares)

The path the cows headed down en route to their barn.