“I hate Zubiri,” I muttered for about the fifth time as we hauled through the town, trying to find an albergue, hostel, or pension that didn’t have a sign that said completo – full – posted on the door. The problem, aside from the fact that we’d arrived so late in the afternoon, was that the small town of Zubiri is pretty much a mandatory stop along the Camino as there are no other towns around and there are not enough beds – or restaurants - to support all the pilgrims who start piling into the town every afternoon. “C’mon, we’ll have to go to the municipal,” I said sourly after we’d been turned away from every other place. The municipal is the public albergue found in every town along with all the private ones. The municipals generally have more beds and are cheaper than the private ones and vary in the quality of the accommodations. Some municipals are quite nice while others are more on the primitive side. The municipal In Zubiri is the pits. We stayed there last time and I never wanted to stay there again. But we had no choice. Except that we actually did. There was a ritzy-looking hotel on the edge of the town square. Don’t ask me why we didn’t even consider this place. I guess we were just in such a pilgrim state of mind that somehow the thought of staying at a fancy–looking hotel didn’t register. So we dragged over to the Zubiri municipal, a huge ediface that was once a school and where the pilgrims were housed in bunk beds shoe-horned into the small class rooms. It could house 70 pilgrims. There would surely be room there. . .But when we arrived at the municipal the hospitaliero sadly informed us that there were no more beds available but that for 8€ he could give us a mattress on the already-crowded gymnasium floor. Now, Scoutmaster Tom, who during a tent camp-out would have found a mattress on the floor an absolute treat, was fine with the proffered arrangement. I, however felt my spirits going down for the count when suddenly a voice from down in the bottom of my soul rose up to the top of my head and this is what it said: “CHECK OUT THAT HOTEL, DUMKOPF!” Tom had gotten into a conversation with some other pilgrims, but as the voice in my head was now sounding pretty insistent I sort of rudely interrupted. “C,mon, let’s check out that hotel,” I cried, dragging him away. The hotel cost 76€ - about $82 - per night including breakfast. I’d have shelled out $182 without breakfast. And the voice had warned me just in time. We got the second- last room in the place, and a man, a middle-aged American pilgrim, who came dragging in directly behind us got the last room. He said that his friends, a husband and wife, were just behind him and that they, too needed a room. But alas, there was no more room at this inn, either. The hotel , called the Hosteleria de Zubiri, was pretty and cozy. …..as was our room. Now that we had a place to rest our heads the next project would be dinner. The two restaurants in the town had a crowd of pilgrims waiting around outside for a table, But last time we were here a local had tipped us off to a restaurant about a mile down the highway outside town.
So we walked the mile – oh, so easy when you’re not toting a 22-pound backpack – to a cute little not-crowded restaurant where we ordered the 12€ menu. We started with the standard – but very good, as usual - mixed salad. Next Tom ordered a delicious lamb stew while I couldn’t resist another paper-thin but mysteriously juicy filet, tasty veal this time, with the usual pile of fries on the side, for which the meat juice works wonderfully well as a substitute for ketchup. For dessert Tom had peaches in syrup and I had yummy rice pudding. On our way back to the hotel we saw pilgrims laden with their backpacks and sticks, still wandering around looking for a bed for the night. I wondered where they would stay. I expected they’d have to taxi to the next town, Larrasoana, or maybe on to Pamplona where there'd be plenty of places to stay. I wondered, too, how it must be for the residents of Zubiri who, from May to the beginning of November, can’t get into a restaurant in the evening in their town. But walking in the balmy evening air with no weight on my back, a good meal in my tum and a lovely place to sleep, I decided that Zubiri is actually a nice little town. But I wondered what the poor crowded-out residents of Zubiri thought of me?
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We were starting to fear we were under a Camino laundry curse. The way it generally works while hiking the Camino is that we hike all day for 9 or 10 hours until, drenched in sweat and smelling on beyond rancid, we reach our albergue where the first thing we do is beeline for the showers. after which we change into clean clothes, which we'll sleep in then wear the next day. Since, in order to keep our packs as light as possible, Tom and I bring only one change of clothes, a critical part of our evening routine is cleaning the previous day's clothes so that we'll have clean clothes to change into at the end of following day. The standard method used by pilgrims is to wash the clothes out by hand then hang them out on the albergue clothes line to dry; however many albergues have washers and sometimes dryers or often times you can pay the hospitaliero to do your laundry for you. So we wanted to wash our clothes when we first arrived in St. Jean but we arrived too late to do so. But that was actually OK since our clothes were only travelling-for-24-hours gross, not hiking-over-mountains-for-9-hours gross, so we figured we could wear our dirty clothes for another day and save our clean clothes for when we arrived in Valcarlos, where we figured we'd arrive early enough to then wash our two-day-old dirty clothes. We did in fact arrive in Valcarlos early enough to use the washer there then hang our clothes out to dry, except that the nice young, harried hospitalero who was running back and forth between the albergue and his job at the town's tourism office sadly told us that he had so much laundry to do that we could use neither the washer nor any of the yards and yards of clothesline out in the yard as he had too much laundry to do himself. Well, that wasn't actually too bad either, since we did have one clean pair of clothes left to change into and could wash all our clothes when we got to the next town of Espinal, where we were pretty sure there was a washer and dryer in the hotel there.. There was in fact a nice laundry room in our hotel in Espinal, but, as were at the end of the pilgrim line to use the washer and dryer, we decided to shower, put our dirty clothes back on, then when we'd done a load of laundry, change into our clean clothes and do another load of dirties. There was plenty of time. Just before we went down for dinner I threw our laundry, that is all our clothes except what we were wearing, into the washer. In fact I threw both my pairs of dirty hiking pants in, figuring that I could go around for the rest of the evening in the polka-dotted skirt I wear to bed. Most guy pilgrims wear undies and a tee shirt to bed, including the Scoutmaster. Some of the gals even do, too, but the Scoutmaster's wife prefers to cover up a wee bit more. After dinner I returned to the laundry room, threw my wash into the dryer, inserted my 2 euros into the machine, pressed the button, and...nada. the dryer had quit working.
"You better go get the lady," said Tom. But I didn't want to go get the lady. It was smack in the middle of the dinner hour and the lady, our hard-working hospitaliera, was running around trying to get all her hotel guests and pilgrims fed. Still, Tom was right, I had to go get the lady. I waylaid her as she was hurrying across the dining room with a cup of coffee in each hand. In the most polite, apologetic, obsequious Spanish I could muster I told her of my problem. I fully expected her to say, "What's with you, you crazy Americana? Can't you see I'm jumping through my elbow trying to get everybody served?" But no. The hospitaliera's face registered great dismay, she quickly delivered her coffees, then hurried to the laundry room, signaling me to follow. She fiddled with the dryer for a bit then declared that it no fonctiona.. She left the room then soon returned hauling a large aluminum contraption that folded out into a large drying rack. "I'm sure your clothes will be dry by morning," she said with much sympathy in her voice. ,I sure hope so thought I as at looked at all our clothes squished together on that rack. Otherwise I'd be walking the Camino tomorrow in my polka-dotted skirt. Now, in the albergues the pilgrims are all up in each others' business, mostly in a good way, and so soon everyone knew about, and was sympathetic to, the plight of these two old Americans with their wet clothes. Later that night a few minutes after lights out when we pilgrims were all tucked away in our sleeping bags, a male voice called out in English: "Hey, I think the dryer's running!' I lay still for a moment and, sure enough I, too, could hear a distant electric rumbling from down the hall. OMG! Thought I as I sprang our of bed, ran down the hall to the laundry room and found the dryer tumbling away. I quickly grabbed my clothes and threw them into the dryer before it decided to no fonctiona again, I went back to bed one exceedingly grateful Americana. The following morning Tom and I had nice clean, dry clothes and at breakfast we pilgrims were all marveling over the aural acuity of the man who'd heard the dryer when none of the rest of us had. He explained to us that he was a retired officer in the Canadian navy, and that on board ship they always had their ears pealed for sudden changes in the sound of the electronic equipment, which could signal that something was wrong. We all gave an orange juice toast to the Canadian Navy! By the way, Randy, the tablet is working great. The WIFI here is fantastic, lightening fast. Tom thinks this is because the whole system over here is newer so it works really well. Thanks, Randy, for all your help getting me set up on this machine! ,And a message to my kids: Dear loved ones, I haven't sent you any emails because I'm having trouble with my email, not receiving, just sending. But I hope all is well with you all, I'm thinking of you all, and I'll try agsin to send you all an email tomorrow if I can. Love, Mom 8) Yesterday morning after a breakfast of huevos fritos (fried eggs) and bread at the same little rstaurant we ate at the night before, we stopped to buy some provisions for lunch then started off from Valcarlos for another day of walking along the Camino through the Kingdom of Navarra, which is the name of Spanish Basque country, which I call the Kingdom of The Snails, as these cute little critters are everywhere around here. I myself kind of identify with the Basque Country snails, being a Camino Snail myself. I'm surly the slowest pilgrim along the way, which slows down my faithful mate, who doubtless could finish the Camino in half the time if he weren't always waiting for me. Besides the snails, I also had an encounter the day before yesterday with another inhabitant of the Camino. Along the path there were clumps of what looked exactly like lemon balm, but when I reached down to break off a fragrant leaf my thumb was bitten by tiny sharp bristles lining the underside of the leaf. My thumb stung like crazy for a while then was numb for the rest of the day. Did I learn a lesson about messin' with the flora & fauna! The exception of course, being the sweet, ripe, backberries that grow along the way and which we do regularly partake of. Though we passed though fairy-tale forests and towns, ... ...and passed by flocks of sheep gazing on the mountainside, still yesterday was a rough day. We schlepped 8 steep miles up the mountain then another mile downhill to reach the town of Roncesvalles, which has been a major pilgrim watering hole since the 13th century when the monks built a monastery there that included a vast hostal for pilgrims as well as a hospital for ill or injured pilgrims. We did not stay the night at the Roncesvailles monestery, but just dragged our weak, weary bodies over to a bench on the monastery campus where we ate our lunch of bread, cheese, and fruit. After our lunch break we walked another three miles - a total of 12 miles in 9 hours- to the town of Espinal, our destination for the day, In Espinal we stayed at the cute Hotel Hazaiea, which reserves its top floor as a pilgrim albergue The pilgrim dorm: The albergue sitting room: The hotel dining room, where we ate dinner with some dorm-mates, a Canadian couple and a physical therapist from Denmark. In the above photo we'r eating the first course of the 10.5€ pilgfim meal (wine included), which was followed by the second course, the tastiest, juiciest chicken leg and, of course, a mound of french fries on the side. Dessert, which I skipped, was yogurt.
So, for our lodgings, dinner, breakfast - a warm ham and cheese baguette sandwich with coffee for Tom and a toasted split baguette with butter and jelly and tea for me, and a lunch of foot-long ham and cheese baguettes for the road, we paid a total of 65€, about $70. The church bell in the town of Zubiri, where are tonight, just rang 9:00. Time for all worn-out pilgrims to rest their weary bones. Everyone have a wonderful day! Yesterday Tom and I set out from St. Jean Pied-de-Port for our first day on the Camino. Now, probably 99% (or more) of all pilgrims on their first day take the Route Napoleon, which is 15 miles long and goes up,up,up 3,500 meters then steeply down to the next stop, which is in the town of Roncesvalles. Tom and I, however took last time and this time the low road (which actually involves some pretty steep hills but not as steep as the Route Napoleon) around the mountain through beautiful countrysides and scenic little Basque towns (not to mention lamb traffic jams, behind which the morning commuters on the road must line up). The low road then crosses the border from France into Spain and continues to the lovely town of Valcarlos. Few pilgrims take the Valcarlos route because few have heard of it. The Camino guide books mention this route only briefly if at all, therefore only a few eagle-eyed pilgrims (Scoutmaster Tom among them) have discovered its existence, and so have to schlepp over the mountain on their first day - though the mountain route does supposedly have some breath-taking vistas. But I figure we'll just catch the breath-taking vistas at the end of the trail in the mountains of Galicia. So anyway, we walked the 8 miles to Valcarlos, ...where we stayed in the 10€-a-night municipale albergue, a clean, comfy, roomy place where only 8 other people besides us showed up, six other Americans and two nice Finnish ladies, and so the 2-shower, 2-potty ratio was much less crowded than at Beilari, our last Albergue. Our hospitaliero there is a hard-working 22-year-old youngster named Michael who runs back and forth between taking care of the albergue and working at the town's tourism office. We chatted a bit and he told me that he went to school to be an electrician but that unemployment is so bad in Spain - 60% among kids aged 16 - 25 - that employers tend to only want to hire experienced workers. But how can one get experience if one can't get a job? He said that some young people work in their fields without pay just to get experience. I told him young people in America are sometimes in the same situation and so have to take unpaid internships with the hope of getting paid later. I guess it's hard for young people everywhere these days For dinner we went to a cute little restaurant in town, ...where we ordered the the 12.50€ three-course "menu del dia". I started with another salad nicoise, called ensalata mixta in Spain, and involves a variety of veggies over the base elements of lettuce, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, olives and tuna. For my next course I ordered that paper-thin but somehow amazingly juicy filet of beef that we ate so much of last time we were in Spain, with the requisite pile of french fries on the side. Tom ordered paella, a rice and seafood dish, for starters and for his main course he had: Dessert was a beautiful brick of vanilla ice cream layered with that chocolate shell that coats ice-cream bars: Then we rolled back to the albergue, and by 9:30 the lights in the sleeping area were out and all the tired pilgrims, except for me still sitting alone in the dining room working on my blog, were tucked in for the night.
Everyone have a beautiful day! Yesterday we arrived by bus from Pamplona at our starting point in Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, a little jewel of a town in the heart of French Basque country, We stayed at an equally charming little gite – the French word for “albergue”, or pilgrim hostel,- the same one we stayed at last time, but the new owners changed the name from “L’Esprit du Chemin”, to “Beilari”, the Basque name for “pilgrim,”. The new owners, a nice young Basque couple named Joceleux and his wife Jakline, like most hospitaliéros who run the Camino albergues, see their work of providing food and shelter for the pilgrims as a vocation. Therefore before dinner Joceleux had the pilgrims, 20 of us altogether, sit around the dining room table and led us in getting-to-know-you games and a few spiritual exercises. Unlike last time we stayed at L’Esprit du Chemin when there were a variety of languages represented among the pilgrims, this time all of us, except for one Brazilian man, spoke English, though our nationalities were well-represented: Americans Irish, Australian, New Zealander, and Dutch. As last time, though there were a few youngsters among us, most of the pilgrims staying at Beilari were middle-aged or older. I think this was probably because this gite is a bit pricier than most. It cost 34€ (about $40 ) per person, which included dinner, lodgings, breakfast, and a substantial lunch to take on the road the next day. The dinner was fantastic, and was prepared by the gite's cook, a beautiful and sweet young African-American lady from San Francisco named Elizabeth who's lived in St. Jean for three years with her Basque husband. The dinner was served family-style and the servings were copious, more than enough for seconds, which most of us went for. The first course was a delicious pea soup which we mopped up with thick slabs of fresh crusty bread from a basket that was always being refilled throughout the meal. The second course was a salad nicoise with lettuce, green beans-well, they were actually yellow beans, shredded carrots, hard-boiled eggs, olives, and tuna. Next came a vegetable gratine, which is like mac & cheese with veggies instead of mac, served over pasta shells. And two bottles of red wine at the table. The pilgrims say that the red wine in this part of Spain is so mellow that you can drink all you want without a hang-over the next day, though not being a drinker I can't vouch for that one. Dessert was bowls of rice pudding and herb tea. Now, it's been my observation that when it comes to rice pudding people seem to fall into the "love it" or "leave it" camps. Some of of the pilgrims left theirs, though since I fall into the first camp I ate every spoonful of my own rice pudding and could have scarfed up all the left-behind bowls as well if a modicum of delicacy had not prevented me. Sleeping accommodations were co-ed dorm-style, the norm along the Camino, with two commodes and 2 showers to share among the 20 of us, though we managed.. Joceleux had announced that wake-up was at 6:15 am but that we shouldn't set any alarms as the angels would wake us in the morning. Sure enough at 6:15 we heard a beautiful, heavenly-sounding choir, angelic music piped into our room. After a breakfast of the same crusty bread with cheese, butter, jam and Nutella, cereal, orange juice, coffee, and tea, we pilgrims all gave a toast to world peace. Then we returned to the dorm room, where the piped-in angelic music had been replaced by the opening strains of the William Tell Overture played over and over, presumably to inspire us to get ourselves packed an on our way,which we soon were, ....ready to start our first day on the Camino.
We made it to Madrid with only a brief episode of drama at the Madrid airport when Tom’s luggage, that is to say his backpack, was temporarily lost, which subsequently caused us a brief episode of, well, not exactly panic, but of envisioning a nightmare’s worth of time-consuming bureaucratic procedure on top of the gargantuan ordeal of trying to somehow replace over here Tom’s backpack and everything that goes in it. But fortunately the helpful customer assistance folks helped us locate it – it had ended up on the wrong belt, or something – at which point we were two mighty relieved Americans. But otherwise our flight from Columbus to JFK was fine and our flight from New York to Madrid was even finer as we flew Iberia Airlines, which is about as good as flying gets. They serve an awesome dinner in the evening, breakfast in the morning, and a great variety of as many free movies as you want to watch. I watched “Volver” to hear some Spanish and “San Andreas” to hear some Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Which begs the question: why don’t all airline companies offer the same to their passengers all the time? Aw well, in our dreams, right? Anyway, when we disembarked Tom and I were both struck by what a different impression we both had of the Madrid airport this time compared to the first time we were there two years ago. At that time the interior of the airport, all glass and geometric columns and dark because of the night sky through the glass, and fairly empty of passengers, struck us as stark, futuristically high-techo and a little scary. But, maybe because this time we arrived two weeks earlier in the season than last time, the airport was crowded with travelers, and maybe because we weren’t quite the strangers in a strange land that we were that first time, this time we found the architecture of the Madrid airport to be not intimidating but really cool. In truth I’m glad we lost our luggage the second time around and not the first.. Anyway, though we lost about 45 minutes on the luggage false alarm we gained time from not having to wander ‘round and ‘round the airport (as we did last time) wondering where to go next, since this time knew where where the RENFRE (the Spanish railway system) office was located and we also knew how to purchase tickets for Pamplona. So we bought our tickets, one set to get us from the airport to Atocha train station in downtown Madrid and another set to get us from Atocha to the train station in Pamplona. At Atocha we did not mosey timidly around as we did last time, but strode right into a station café station café and up to the counter where I confidently ordered a coca light (diet coke), café Americano, jugo de naranja (orange juice), and a bouteille de agua ,(bottle of water), which liquids we used to wash down Ne😇xt we took the train from Madrid to Pamplona.. How do I love the Spanish trains? I love them for the wide aisles and wide, comfy seats, the dining cars, the lady who walks down the aisles offing cups of coffee, the free movies, the clean, better-than-airplane bathrooms, and the overall convenience they offer.
We arrived at The Pamplona train station and from there took the #9 city bus to the main bus Pamplona bus station (which last time took us a finite to figure out but, again, this time we confidently strode right up to the stop outside the train station), meeting along the way a couple of young first-time pilgrims who were oh, so grateful to have someone to follow. As I write we are waiting for the ticket counter to open so we can buy our tickets to St. Jean Pied-de-Port,our final destination for this day. As I now recall, this first day of the trip, the day of just getting there, is the hardest. May this day be a good one for you! The Madrid airport
certificate of completion of the Camino.
So now everywhere I go when the people in charge point to my passport and ask, "Que es eso?" ("What's that?") I'll have to say "El gato ha comido mi credencial". ("The cat ate my passport").
last bus of the day to St. Jean Pied-de-Port in France, our starting point for the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. I include so much information for a purpose: The first time Tom and I did the Camino two years ago, the one bit of information we couldn't seem to round up was precisely the best way to get from the Madrid airport to St. Jean Pied-de-Port. And so after arriving we did quite a bit of muddling before we got it figured out. Luckily for us we met a Puerto Rican pilgrim also on her way to St. Jean who was just as clueless as us so we were able to muddle around together. But our Puerto Rican companion had the Spanish to be able to ask for and understand directions much better than I with my minimal Spanish could have done. So anyway, if any future pilgrim needs to know how to get from the States to St. Jean Pied-de-Port, there it is. Several times over the last few days I've been asked if I'm all ready to go. In answering it's occurred to me that this is really a two-part question. There's a first part, referring to all the logistical preparations, like ...cutting out only the pages of the guidebook that you really need for your trip for the sake of keeping your pack light, ...locating your old shells from your last Camino to tie onto your pack. Anyway, I'd say at this point the meager logistics involved in the trip are pretty well together. So I'd answer "yes, we're ready" to that part of the question. But the other half of being ready is mental: are you ready in your mind? Have you wrapped you head around the fact that you're actually going back to walk the Camino again? To this part of the question my answer is: Uhhhhhhhh...... But I guess that when one is having a bit of a struggle absorbing the fact that one is actually going to do something, the way to deal with it is to just go through each motion: pack your bags, get to the airport, get on the plane, get off the plane, make your way to your starting point, start walking, and then, ready or not, you'll be doing what you set out to do. In other words, just do it. And so, "it" is what I've been doing, and hopefully will continue to do until we're where we set out to be, doing what we set out to do. I can't say for now when my next available WIFI opportunity will be, but 'til then good wishes and good days to you all!
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AuthorPatti Liszkay Archives
November 2015
CategoriesBooks by Patti Liszkay"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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