Puente la Reina

Hello, everyone.

In the last post, I skipped lightly over the day we got to Puente la Reina.

The Alto del Perdon, with its bronze two-dimensional pilgrims, has already been discussed. (I did skip over the line of windmills. I'm just not that into windmills. Especially not the modern kind.) The very steep and rocky path down was, as mentioned, difficult. There were some spots where the path included steps, either alongside where the rocks just got too steep for words or instead of them.

Late in the morning the sun came out for a little while.

Those rays of sunshine were the best things I'd felt all day.
The green fuzzy looking plant in from of me here is (I think) wild fennel. The red flowers are poppies--as in "In Flanders fields the poppies grow/Between the crosses row on row...." Before we went on pilgrimage, I had always thought the poppies in the poem were like poppies in the US--carefully tended planting for beauty. Nope, they're not. They're WEEDS. (Thus, the poet was trying to depict forgotten dead soldiers.) And in some fields there were almost more poppies than wheat.
On the way into Puente la Reina, we passed a hotel that had albergue rooms in the building as well as regular hotel-guest rooms. They had a pool, too, although since the temps were in the general area of 50 degrees F, we wondered which two weeks of the entire year the pool would be usable. We kept on going to the Padres Reparadores albergue.
We wandered out in the evening to find dinner along the Calle Mayor and were served perfectly wonderful garlic soup, thickened with the bread hunks and everything. The server said it was homemade, by which I guess he meant made-here and home-style.

Thoughts on lodging

Hello, everyone.
I promised yesterday to put up the first of the stork pictures. Here it is:

These are some of the storks nesting in Puente La Reina, Navarra. They made loud noises, too--they put their heads back and clacked their long beaks together. I guess it's stork love-talk.

I know someone is wondering where one spends the night on this trek. Answers differ, of course, but here is ours: Pilgrim albergues and a few nights in pension/hostels. If your plans for a town involve staying more than one night, you have to choose between staying in the pension to start with or staying 1 night in the albergue and the other night in the pension. The albergues enforce a one-night rule, as otherwise people would just move in and stay, and they all tell you what time you have to be gone the next morning. (It was usually 8 am.)
The pilgrim albergue at the monastery of Roncesvalles, as mentioned in an earlier post, was very luxurious: pairs of beds in cubicles, with cubbies to put the pack in. Cubicles lined up along both sides of a long room, shower and bath facilities at the end on the way into the room. Laundry facilities downstairs--we were told that they have both sinks for hand washing and a hospitalero who will, for 2 euro, run your load through the washer and dryer. I should have done that. It would have meant less fuss and bother in Zubiri the next night.
The municipal albergue de peregrinos in Zubiri was more typical of the albergues: bunk beds. There were some 8 or so bunk sets in a room, if I remember right, and Zubiri's albergue had multiple rooms. The bathroom and shower facilities were across the caliche "yard" area, in a separate building. There were also laundry sinks there--no shelf or table to put laundry on but with caution one could perch the wet clothes on the side of the sink. Drying was with the clotheslines strung alongside the building and along the fence.
Some of the albergues had washer/dryer setups--either coin operated or done by the hospitaleros. The Augstinas (religious sisters) in Carrion de los Condes had a nice, front-loading washer that they insisted on running themselves. (I don't blame them.) They provided the soap, too--you provided the dirty laundry load and some euros to pay for the use of the setup.
In the municipal albergue in Najera, which is near a lovely river, they have 90 sleeping spaces in one, very long, room. The bunks were lined up side by side in pairs, end-to-end down the center, and also set head-to-wall in long lines down the sides of the room. We had about 2 1/2 feet walking room between beds, and you had to put your pack in that walking room. The boots, as usual, and the sticks had been assigned to shelves (for the botes) and a 30-gallon trash can (for the sticks) in the laundry room.
In Santo Domingo de Calzada, we slept at the Cistercian nuns' convent, in their albergue that they had made out of part of the building. (Unheated stone building. I'll go out on a limb and say that I understand why their nun-uniforms looked like actual wool. They needed it.) The room we were assigned to had three simple beds, instead of bunks. I think some of the other rooms there had the standard bunks for pilgrims. The hospitalera did bed checks there, too, at lights-out time. This was something we'd not seen before. (All of the albergues had lock-up times, usually at 10 pm.) Of course, they also had a fireplace in the main sitting room downstairs and she lit the fire and kept it going with new wood, too--I think it all balances out.
In one albergue, in Arzua, we had a bunk set in a small room by ourselves. And when my sweetie climbed the ladder up to his bed, the entire setup racked severely!
By stopping about 1 or 2 in the afternoon most days, we were able to find places to sleep in the albergues most of the time. The only exceptions to that were El Burgo Ranero and Santiago. In El Burgo Ranero, even though there were multiple albergues, we got in late and at 3 pm they were all full. ("Completo.") We stayed in a pension that night: a clean, but small, hotel room with a complete bathroom (shower, not tub) and a "matrimonial" bed. We had a window, too, that looked out onto a patio for people to sit and relax. There were chairs and tables. When the blue norther came in that night, the wind moved the chairs and tables off-and-on until the storms blew on past, around 3 in the morning. (We had expected a blue norther to come in, as there had been a stiff south wind during the day as we walked. It reminded us of the winds we had encountered on the Route Napoleon through the mountains the first day.)
In Perejes  the albergue was a building from the 1300's. The hospitalero told me that the ceiling of the downstairs sleeping room we were in was the original floor of the building. There was a big beam that went through from one side clear to the other, and that was original too. There were no bunks there, just two rows of beds in our dorm room. By the time we got to Perejes, this qualified as luxury living!

 Sleeping in an albergue is not like sleeping in a hotel room. Usually the room is shared with between 10 and 90 people in it. One tries to speak softly, in case someone is sleeping nearby. And while people talk about snoring, most of the time whatever snoring there was blended into a general background noise.
One takes one's clothes to the bathroom to change.
The bathroom/shower is often shared between the sexes. Sometimes they will have separated bathrooms, but doors often give the outside world a good view of the room.

One dresses in the shower stall after washing off. Occasionally there is a dressing area inside the shower stall. Often the water from the timer-governed shower head splatters all over the tiny stall and the only place to put clothes is over the door. I got good at leaning my head on the  wall while putting one leg into my pants and holding the remaining pants fabric off of the wet floor at the same time. I also got pretty good at using my sleeping bag's stuff sack as a shower bag, putting my clean clothes, camp towel, and soap in it for the trip to the shower.

I think one of the lessons of the pilgrimage is to take these things, different as they might be from our normal life and previous travels, in stride. The Camino is not only about the walking, but the walking, and the adaptation to conditions, are certainly an important part of the Camino, along with going to the pilgrim Masses, settling down for a few minutes of adoration if the church has a Capilla del Santissimo, going to museums, eating tapas, and taking pictures of lovely views. 

Hello, everyone.
When we left Pamplona, it was very early in the morning. (Actually, it was very early in the morning almost every time we started walking. That let us get in a serious chunk of walking, yet still be done walking by about 2 pm most days. We weren't trotting down the road calling ahead for reservations, so getting where we were comfortable stopping pretty early was important.) It was so early that we got to the next little town over, Cizur Menor, before we encountered an open bakery to buy some food to eat. And that was a croissant, I think. Plus "cafe leche para llevar" as they say--coffee with milk to-go.
Then we went on down the trail, preceded and followed by the usual scattering of other peregrinos. (On the Camino Frances, whatever the case may be on other routes, one is rarely completely alone.) The day was cloudy, but then we'd been walking in clouds whenever it wasn't rainy thus far. We didn't think anything of it.
The trail got more steep, as we approached the Alto del Perdon. There was a lovely little church along the way--San Andres de Zariquiegui, the sello says--and we stopped for a moment. My sweetie took a picture.

  I was sitting on the bench outside (doesn't show in the picture, it's off to the left) and I looked around at the sky and saw weather coming in.
I was so discouraged. I could feel my feet shriveling up at the very sight of the onrushing bank of rain clouds. Shortly after we resumed walking, it rained. And then it hailed.
But! This time the hail was short-lived. It was only windy and rainy when we got to the pilgrims' monument at the top of Alto del Perdon.


And here is my sweetie:

See how he's petting the bronze dog?
The path down the other side of the mountain was a pile of jumbled up rocks, very unstable, looking to me like a trout stream deprived of its fish-and, fortunately, most of its water.
We slept at the albergue of the Padres Reparadores that night, in Puente La Reina. And that was where I lost my really-cool, pencil-sized flashlight that my son had given me. Though I didn't realize it until a night or two later! (The mind doesn't work the same way on an a trek like this, at least not if you aren't used to it. I had tied it--the flashlight, not my mind!--to the bed frame in case I needed to go to the pot in the night, the string slipped down out of sight behind the corner of the mattress, and apparently I didn't do a proper job of clearing the space on our way out.)
Tomorrow I hope to post the first stork picture of the trip, from Puente La Reina.

Pamplona

Hello, everyone.
We spent two nights in Pamplona. Along with eating the Sepia a Basque (Squid with garlic/parsley sauce) we went to two museums, took a picture of the place the future Saint Ignatius of Loyola was wounded in battle, and found the camino supply shop Caminoteca. Where we bought me a pink fleece top so I could stop freezing to death. Caminoteca is a sweet little hiking supply shop--a selection of souvenirs, of course, some clothes for hiking in, and various books about the Camino. It's just down from the Cathedral and is well worth the stop if you, like us, are needing to pick up a couple of things.
Before the other pictures of the city, my sweetie took this of my feet:

This was all from the two days walking in soaking wet boots. They began to heal with the day of "rest" and no-boots in Pamplona. We wore our shower sandals all over the city. We also learned the value of taking Bufferin at bedtime to bring down swelling.

Pamplona has a lot of neat things to look at. We saw a cool sculpture of the bulls running:

You can also see in the background that many of the apartments have potted plants on their balconies. The northern Spanish towns and cities were full of lovely flowers, and often people who had only an apartment balcony cultivated beautiful pots of flowers there.
The place where, so to speak, grace struck Ignatius of Loyola:

Grace in the form of a cannonball, that is.
The Museum of Navarra had beautiful art on display, including beautiful floor mosaics, wall frescoes that used similar motifs as the floor mosaics from later years, statues of saints, and various altar treasures.
The Cathedral and the Church of St. Nicholas are both beautiful.
The Cathedral Museum had a very good exhibit on the history of Western culture. I learned that the Poema de mi Cid was written approximately at the same time as Beowulf. They also had archeological excavations that had been done there, which had uncovered a Roman village, now displayed with a walkway and some videos.
Many of the artworks from various village churches have been gathered into the museums in Pamplona, so you can see, for example, a great assortment of statues of the Blessed Mother all together and compare the different ways she is portrayed. Even in the Middle Ages, not everything was alike. Different villages had statues to her under different titles, and the anonymous sculptors certainly had different ideas of her face and the Holy Child, besides the customary clothing that is shown with the various titles (like Our Lady of Le Puy.)

Statues of the Blessed Mother, usually holding the Christ Child, from many churches in Navarra

Detail from a retablo showing thte Blessed Mother and many saints

Another retablo

The second night we stayed in Pamplona was Thursday night. This was the evening that we discovered the work week ends on Thursday, at least in Pamplona. All the prices at the bars and restaurants changed. Many more people were out and about for the evening--and the place we stayed was on the most "happening" street in the city! The last noisy drunks didn't go stumbling home until 5 am, kicking empty bottles as they went.
My sweetie's watch sounded at 5:30 am and we got up to begin walking again, in our newly-dry shoes.
We had about 716 kilometers more walking to reach Santiago.

After Roncesvalles

The next morning we woke to the light, about 6:15?, put our things back into the packs and our socks on our feet, went downstairs to put our boots on, and heard rain. With thunder.
It didn't have that pounding, rushing sound we associate with tropical downpours, so after we were booted and loaded up, we headed out.

Behold the fetching rain poncho! (My hat was under the hood to keep the eyeglasses dry.)
The rain was not bad at first. Then the heavens really turned the spigot to "flood." After a while the lightning came back (not that you could see it for the trees) so there was thunder to give variety to the rain sounds.
And then the hail started.

The village of Espinal, about 6.6 kilometers down the road from Roncesvalles, has a fronton court. (Handball court.) I had wondered why this was always mentioned in the guidebooks--then we staggered into Espinal in the midst of hail, rain, and more hail, and discovered that the fronton court was an open building with a roof, and no fence. By the time this batch of hail finished there were about 30 people huddling under the roof. And many of us had so much water in our socks and boots that we could remove the boot and pour water out of it. (I also squeezed water out of the toes of my socks.)
The white stuff you see on the roof across the way is hail piling up. The gray stuff on the ground around the tractor is water puddling. The water puddled a lot that day.
After a while it let up and we thought it would be safe to continue. Then about a half an hour later the rain started up again. It poured off and on all day. The trails were flowing streams, the water flowed over the toes of our shoes going up hill and over the heels of our shoes going down hill. We crossed over two streams that had a row of tall cement posts for fording that day.
Just before we got to Zubiri we had to cross a downhill slope that was nothing but rocks and slick mud. There was almost nowhere to put our feet. When we got to the bottom, I took a picture.

Somehow it doesn't look as impressive as it was to go down! But we made it into Zubiri about 2 pm, crossing over the Puente de Rabia, and settled into the municipal albergue. We had walked 22.1 kilometers: 13 1/4 miles. It was our first night in the bunk beds that would turn out to be standard sleeping arrangements for the Camino. It was my first night dealing with the blisters that would make much of my walk difficult and uncomfortable. It was also our first experience of slapping the dirty clothes in a sink, giving them a good squeeze, and hanging them out on a line to dry. (Or not.)
Fortunately the rain had stopped just before we got into Zubiri. To continue the good fortune, our boots that had been sitting on a picnic bench outside went inside before we went to supper, and our clothes were dry enough to bring in as well. It rained during the night, and people whose clothes had been left on the line overnight were in a real pickle.
We ate the pilgrim menu at the local bar: spaghetti in tomato sauce, chicken wings, soggy fried potatoe wedges, red wine and flan. This was my first experience of the standard potato side dish of Spain. I think they like their fried potatoes soggy like that, because they are everywhere.
In the morning, our boots were still very wet. We had no choice, however, and so we put them on. We started walking and discovered that there was no coffee shop, no bakery, no anyplace to get some foot to start out on. (The day before there had been a coffee shop close to the monastery. Cafe leche for two, and split a croissant with ham and cheese inside it--good start.) We walked down the trail and there was nothing in the way of a food place.
My sweetie had bought a small packet of Oreos and we ate a couple of those. (I hate Oreos. In the States they are always stale and horrid. The Spanish Oreos, however, were crisp and as good as two pressed wafers with Crisco icing inside are going to get.) About 9:30 or 10 we stumbled over a coffee shop and joined the mob scene as about 40 peregrinos tried to use the bathrooms and buy coffee and food in a place with about 15 seats. But we were grateful for the dry seat and the hot coffee! We met three Irish ladies, one of whom had lived in Dallas for a year. Later that day, they saw us again adn serenaded us with "Deep in the Heart of Texas."
And we walked on through another wet day, with a new perspective: at least there isn't any hail.
And I couldn't take any pictures at all, because when we had arrived in Zubiri I had discovered that my camera case was damp all the way through and the camera--and the case--had to dry out before I could take any more pictures.
They came up on us again from behind, and having seen my limping gait, gave me Compeed bandages for blisters. They were going to Pamplona to fly home, as their vacation was over. We thanked them, applied a Compeed to one of the worst blisters, and kept on. My pretty speckled Buff neck scarf was on my head that day. It decided it was embarrassed to be seen with me and fell off somewhere in the forest before we got into Pamplona.
We had walked  20.7 kilometers: almost 13 miles.
We knew there is a lot to see in the city, so we got a small room in Hotel Otona for 2 nights. This is a tiny hotel/pension over a bar on a street full of bars--all of which advertised pilgrim menus or daily menus. We had 2 twin beds, a shower all our own, and a TV. We took off our wet shoes and socks, napped, and wore our shower shoes for the evening. We ate Menu del Dia at a place that advertised Basque food. I had sopa de pesca, grilled squid, and yogurt for dessert. The squid was absolutely wonderful. It was big, too, and white, and I couldn't finish it all. (Many days later we learned that the white squid is actually a different variety of squid, called Pocha I think. It is white because they peel the skin off of it.)
My sweetie had paella, trout with country ham, and crema de arroz. He really loved the rice dessert. It wasn't thick like most rice puddings are.
We were too tired to stroll the city and drink and eat in this place and that place and the other one, so we called it a night.

And then we were in Spain

I woke up this morning and realized that I'd forgotten to post the rest of the first day's walk. Sorry.

The border crossing into Spain is so remote and unmarked that we weren't entirely sure we had passed it until we got to the Fountain of Roland.

There was a French mile marker before the border.

Getting water at the Fountain of Roland

 The Fountain of Roland is along the historic route taken over the the pass. It is potable water. In the background you can see the caliche path, with some peregrinos walking away from the fountain.
By this point we had gotten back below the tree line.
We walked along this path, we walked on leaves under the (beech?) forest, and we walked on damp dirt. A lot of it!
Later on that afternoon, as we progressed farther down the south side of the mountains, we found that the wind became much stronger. It was so strong the last couple of miles into Roncesvalles that I had to lean sideways and hold my sticks at about a 45 degree angle on the lee side just to stay on my feet.
After we got into the monastery, about 4:30 pm, one of the hospitaleros--the people who volunteer to assist in housing the many, many pilgrims--told me that the week before a lady had broken her leg in two places and been flown out.
Roncesvalles is an ancient monastery, with a courtyard and several buildings and a church. We gave our passport information--in Spain you must do this everywhere you spend the night--and got our credenciales stamped with the sello, left our boots in the boot closet and followed the hospitalero up the three flights of stairs to our beds. In the new dorm at Roncesvalles, the floors are divided into cubicles with 4 foot partitions, two beds to a cubicle. And they are not bunk beds! Also there was a locker we could put our packs into. If only we had known what luxury this was. But we listened carefully to the orientation talk from "our" hospitalero, tucked the packs into the lockers, and headed over to the restaurant to make a reservation for the pilgrims meal. (You had to reserve and pay in advance so they'd know how much to make.) We relaxed for a little bit, until it was time to go eat. Then we went to the pilgrims' Mass and blessing and called it a night.

After the setup, comes the plunge

And it was really a plunge into reality!
We started out in the sunshine, at the base of the pass, and for a while it was just pretty and nice. There was a slope, but it wasn't steep, and even someone whose training had all been flatland could do okay.
Then we turned a corner and started to really climb. Still on paved tiny-little-road, so we had to keep to the side and watch for traffic. The French government had helpfully posted a sign requesting that everyone walk in "file indienne"--apparently walk Indian style is their word for single file.
We walked up, and up. My sweetie walked faster than I did, so at some point in the day he just forged on ahead until he had to stop. (I found out later that there were more of those stops than I at first realized. He said that he felt like his lungs were being ripped out through his mouth and shaken hard, then dropped on his head. He did say to me that he regretted every single cigarette he had ever smoked.) That actually happened later on, when it was medium steep and went on and on and on...

The first part, up to Honto, was just steep and we were still energetic and joking. Like apparently everyone else that has done this, we stepped aside and caught our breath while taking a picture of the valley we had left. I reloaded water bottles at the fountain. We kept on, stepping around springs that were dribbling down the path. Eventually we got to  Orisson. (Around 10:30 or 11 in the morning.) There is a restaurant there. I got a sello--a stamp of being there--added to my credencial and bought a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches for later. (Cue sounds of spouse saying "I'm not hungry yet." And the answer: "There won't be Pizza Hut on top of the mountain when you decide that you are ready to eat. We need to think ahead about these things." So we bought the sandwiches, me thinking that we'd have a picnic with our sandwiches and water bottles in a hour or so.)
The ham and cheese sandwiches, so called, were just like the bocadillos we would be buying for the rest of the journey: a slice of cheese, a slice of the lovely country ham, and a short baguette. No mayo, no mustard, no butter. Just the essential elements of the beast. Handed to me in a paper bag.
If I had it to do all over again, I would have insisted that we sit down and eat a bowl of hot soup instead. The fluid, and the heat, would have done us more good.

 

And this collection of pictures gets us just about to the Spanish border.
(Did you see that I added my windbreaker on to the outfit? I was cold. When we stopped for a rest at the statue of Our Lady, I pulled the windbreaker out and put it on.) There was a serious headwind, too, and it just got stronger as we went.
You can see that I was using my walking sticks. These gadgets were a mixed bag for me--absolutely priceless on the first couple of days, then pretty much not used for the rest of the trip. But they paid for themselves on Day 1!
You can also see that there were a fair number of other people walking the same trail. That first day, we were rarely alone. We even got passed by excursion vans going up to see the scenery. And there was a steady trickle of people passing us every time we sat down to catch our breath. This became an enduring trait of the Camino--someone who is sitting down is looked over by all the passers-by. Greeted, too, usually, with "Buen Camino!" or "You okay?" It was comforting to be asked after by all those people. Later on, when we were happily warm and other people were sprawled out under a small bush alongside the trail, we did the same thing. (Well, I figured if they were tired but alert enough to say "buen camino" they'd be along in a little while. But all of us looked at someone who was sitting down on the ground. Because we all were becoming a brotherhood of suffering, though we didn't know it yet.)
I didn't take a picture of the Spanish border; I was tired, and it was too much trouble to take the camera out to snap a photo of a cattle guard.
Tomorrow I'll put up some pictures of the rest of the day.