The unwritten rule that eveyrbody in alberguedom knows is that in the dorm rooms lights go out at 10 pm and are turned back on again at 7 am or whenever all the pilgrims are up, whichever comes first. If someone wants to be up and at 'em prior to 7 am or before all the pilgrims in the room are up, etiquette requires that one gets one's things together as quietly as possible by the light of one's torch, which is what Tom and I have taken to calling our flashlights in the manner of our British brethren. One's torch is a critical piece of equipment on the Camino. But anyway, yesterday morning some pilgrim with ants in his backpack flipped on the light in our dorm room at 6 am. Not cool, but it did get us moving and subsequently we got off to an early start. Yesterday was our easiest day so far as we walked only the 10 k's - 6.6 miles - left between Lorca and Estrella and the path was fairly level for a change. Estrella is a good-sized city with an old monastery, ...and a not-quite-as-old church. We decided to walk through the city to the next suburb over, the small town of Ayegui, where we stayed at the most awesome municipal albergue, the San Cipriano de Ayegui. I know I've already declared the municipal in Villava outside Pamplona to be the best municipal on the Camino, but I think this one is at least tied for first place, if not possibly inches ahead. The San Cipriano albergue is in the basement of a big, modern indoor recreational soccer stadium. The dorm room was so homey, and cozy and - miracle of miracles - most of the beds were non-bunk beds! Because of our unintentionally early start, Tom and I were the first ones of the day to arrive at the albergue. We arrived at about 12:20, and the albergue didn't open until 1 pm, but the friendly hospitaliero saw us poking our noses outside the glass door and let us come in and register, pay our 8€ fee .and pick out our beds. Of course we went for single-deckers. The showers were great: clean, plentiful, and - hooray - gender segregated. And the was a bench outside the shower area to leave your clean clothes instead of having to hang them ove the shower door where they get wet from the shower spray. The only minor detail is that the shower stalls have no doors, ....and so you have to do a little walking around in the buff, I heard one of the French guys call to his friends, "Guys, the showers are college-style!" After we'd gotten our beds and unloaded our backpacks we walked through the town a bit looking for somewhere to eat lunch. We found a nice bar where we had tuna and vegetable quiche sandwiches. My siblings, I know you will appreciate the irony of me eating a tuna and vegetable quiche sandwich in Spain. When my sibs and I were young we thought our mother's tuna-veggie quiche was an aberration of nature. Over here Mom's dreaded quiche would have been a huge hit. The Spaniards love tuna in their quiche. They love tuna in everything. I'm starting to love tuna in everything. By the end of the day the albergue had completely filled up, One of our dorm-mates was a young German woman who had been in Afghanistan with the International Police helping to train the Afghan police. She said it was a very interesting, satisfying experience and she hopes to do more international police work. For dinner we ate the 10€ pilgrim meal, mixed salad (with tuna in it, of course), chicken filet and french fries, creme brulee for dessert. We ate dinner in the stadium restaurant which over-looks the soccer floor so we could watch the game going on between the local teams. The young guys reminded me of my soccer-player son Tommy and his friends. Funny, in spite of our language and cultural differences, how much the same we all are.
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A couple of days ago when we were climbing the Alto de Perdon – the Hill of Forgiveness – I walked for a bit with a woman from Australia who was carrying a pair of boots. I asked her if she’d brought two pairs of boots with her. She said no, that the boots she was carrying were her boots and they’d been giving her feet grief and blisters from the start. The boots she was now wearing she’d found a little way back sitting by the last scallop shell marker.
The woman believed that that day would be her first blister-free day, and so at that moment she was quite a happy, thankful pilgrim. She was therefore intending to leave her own boots at the next shell marker in hopes that maybe her boots would be the answer to some other pilgrim’s prayer. Many pilgrims are walking the Camino as a spiritual journey and we’ve met pilgrims who are walking for a special intention. I’ve met two who’ve said they are walking as a penance for something they've done in their lives and that they hope to find absolution at the end. A Chinese-American lady told me she was walking in repentance for having been a “Tiger Mom” to her now-grown children. I also heard an obviously very religious middle-aged American lady telling a middle-aged British man that she was walking the Camino as a prayer to God for the poor. While I found her intention a very kind one, I couldn’t help but wonder how this woman hiking 490 miles across Spain could possibly alleviate the plight of the world’s poor. Nor can I conceptualize God in that way, like a parent who gives all the food to the first child and will only feed the second child if the first child walks around the block 50 times. So to speak.. Yesterday I walked a while with my Camino friend Lulu, a middle-aged Zulu woman from Cape Town, South Africa. A Camino friend is someone you meet along the way, connect with, then continue to meet up with at the albergues or walk with now and then as long as your pace coincides. After a few days your paths will diverge, then you’ll separate and you’ll each make new Camino friends. Maybe you’ll meet up later along the way, and you’ll be happy to see each other again. Anyway, Lulu and I were chatting about that most common topic of conversation among pilgrims, the state of our feet, when Lulu recollected that she didn’t get her first pair of shoes until she was 10 years old, and that first pair of shoes was a pair of blue flip-flops. Lulu said that she dearly loved those blue flip-flops and her heart’s desire was to own a pair of red flip-flops, too, but in those days another pair was out of the question. But today her son has a university degree and a good job and her daughter, too, is in university. Yesterday we walked about 12 uphill kilometers over some killer terrain from Puente La Reina to the town of Lorca. It had been our intention to walk 20 kilometers -12 miles –to the town of Estella, but by the time we stopped for lunch five hours later at La Bodega albergue in the town of Lorca I’d hit the wall. So after a great lunch of seafood paella in the albergue café, .....I suggested – nay, begged – that we put down our sticks and packs in this spot and call it a day. And so we did. We’d stayed here on our last Camino, a really pretty place with stone décor, ....and, as we recalled, a terrific pilgrim meal. Last time we stayed here, though, the place was practically empty. This time, even though it was early in the afternoon when we registered, the albergue was almost full and soon would be completely full, as would be the other albergue in town across the street from ours. Later in the afternoon an exhausted, foot-sore pilgrim came dragging into the albergue, and when the hospitaliera told her there was not a bed left in town the girl began to cry and begged to be allowed to sleep on the floor. The kind hospitaliera let her sleep on the couch for free. Tom and I both had to settle for top bunk beds for 7€ each, but that was okay, we were grateful for a bed. We learned that, because of the strenuousness of the trail that day and the heat, we were not the only pilgrims to cut short their plans to bunk at Estrella and decide after lunch to just stay Lorca instead, which was probably why the albergue filled up so early in the day. That night at dinner - a delicious 9€ family-style meal of spaghetti with sauce followed by chicken legs with french fries, bread, wine and water and ice-cream sandwiches for dessert - we managed to be at an all-American table. It turned out that five of the six of us had started at Puenta La Reina, planned to walk to Estrella, and ended up stopping at Lorca instead.
One of our dinner mates, a recently retired Air Force officer, was beating himself up over, "wanking out", not being physically able to meet his distance goal for that day. The rest of us told him to let it go, that on the Camino it didn't matter where one started or stopped, or, for that matter, whether one even finished. And besides, he was in good company with the rest of us wanker-outers. Dinner at La Poseda in the town of "Z" The day before yesterday was a rather hard, mostly urban 16-kilometer trek from one end of Pamplona to the other and then across the beautiful campus of the University of Navarre, ...which kind of reminded me of the campus of Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio and where they stamped our pilgrim passport for us in the administration building. We walked on to the small town of Cizur Menor, the western suburb of Pamplona, where we stopped for a lunch of tortillas and bread, ....after which we were back in the countryside and where for the next two hours we slogged up a steep, hot, stony mountain until we reached our destination, the town of Zariquiegui,which no one could pronounce so I just christened it "Z" and I joked with the youngsters that we'd better hope there were no zombies there. We stayed a a cute little - emphasis on "little" albergue called La Poseda,. ...where for 20€ each we got a bed and a lovely 5-course dinner. The dorm rooms were pretty small and squishy, ...but the pilgrims were all friendly, happy campers. Eva and Kati from Dusseldorf Lulu from South Africa One couple from New Zealand told us that on the night they spent in Zubiri there was not a bed to be had in the whole town, and not even a mattress on the floor of the municipal gym was left. So they slept without a mattress on the gym floor! Not me, I'd have taxied it to the next town that had beds. But those two were newly-weds, so maybe their young love softened the hard floor. When I said all the pilgrims were happy campers, I neglected one exception: a group of six older French women whom I christened The French Not-Panera Posse because all they seemed interested in was bee-atching about the accomodatons and busting the nougats of everyone in their space. I witnessed one of them barking in French at the non-French-speaking hospitaliera, a hard-working girl who was flitting around trying to find beds for arriving pilgrims, work the bar and prepare dinner, Anyway, the Non-Posse lady was furious because the dorms were on the second floor and the potties were on the first floor and because one of the three showers in the albergue was located off the dorm room of the Not-Posse group so the pilgrims were walking through “their” room. Big whoop. Like the poor young hospitaliera had designed the building or could do anything about it. And those old gals weren’t carrying any backpacks but had luggage which they were having transported for them from town to town. I wouldn’t put it past them to be taxi-ing the whole Camino. But the rest of the pilgrims were super-nice. ...and seemed to be trying to be nice to and considerate of the young hospitaliera. Among the 36 pilgrims in the albergue there were few who spoke Spanish, so, using my French, survival-Spanish, and my few words of German, I became the albergue translator for the night. Pilgrims kept grabbing me to ask questions of the hospitaliera: what time is dinner? Is it included in the price? What time is breakfast? Is it included in the price? May we have some red wine? What time is the mail pick-up? I felt bad bombing the busy hospitaliera with all those questions, but she seemed to understand that I was just the messenger. In fact she, too, availed herself of my translating service. Apparently someone in the French Non-Panera Posse had stiffed the hospitaliera, not having paid for their room or dinner. The hospitaliera had me ask one of the French women if she had paid, or if she knew who in the group hadn't. But it turned out the hospitaliera had corralled the wrong French woman; this woman wasn't in the Posse and had paid. So I then translated the "I'm sorry's" as well as the "don't worry about it, no problem's" I hope the hospitaliera got her money. Then yesterday we left "Z" town and started the climb up to the Alto de Perdon - The Hill of Forgiveness. During the Middle Ages any pilgrim who made it up to that high point was granted by the Church a plenary indulgence, which was a special dispensation that set a person's sin-o-meter back to zero, and so if the person died at that moment they would die sin-free and so would go directly to heaven. However, if the person continued living for much longer they could, if they didn't watch their p's & q's, start racking up the sins again and so could end up spending the afterlife in The Tropics anyway, all that climbing having gone for naught. These days the Alto de Perdon is a famous spot for pilgrim photo-ops. We stopped for lunch at the town of Uterga, then traveled on for a total of 13 kilometers to the pretty town of Puenta La Reina, ...where we stayed at the Albergue Santiago Apostol, a large, modern, spotlessly clean albergue with 100 beds, but divided into cubicles of four beds each, which gave the place an open yet cozy feel. A bed in one of the four-bed cubicles cost 10€, but for 11€ one could get a 2-bed private room, which was the option Tom and I went for. For as crowded as the place was, the staff was friendly, helpful, and organized, especially with all the pilgrim meals - and delicious they were - that they had to serve. After dinner groups of pilgrims hung around the dining room chatting and socializing, ..and there showed up a foot-first-aid specialist and his nurse who travel up and down the Camino giving any pilgrims who needed it free foot care and advice. One sees much kindness along the Camino. On our way from Zubiri to Villava, the suburb of Pamplona that was our next stop along the way, I spent some time chatting with four delightful older French-speaking ladies from New Caledonia, a 30-mile by 120-mile island in the Pacific half way between Australia and New Zealand. They told me that New Caledonians love Americans because during WWII the Americans saved them from the Japanese. I felt glad that somebody out there still loves us. Anyway, these four ladies kind of reminded me of my Panera Posse, except that they’d started the Camino in Le Puy, France, had already walked 1,000 kilometers to St. Jean Pied-de-Port where we started, and they were now walking another 1,000 kilometers to Santiago de Compostela. I’m not sure the Posse’d be up for that. Not me for sure. Besides the New Caledonia Posse we also met along the way a British man who’d done the Camino in 2010 and has returned to stay and restore this 12th century church, ...a fellow and his donkey, ...two friendly Russian ladies who got a kick out of helping me with the few words of Russian I remember from college, and these little sweeties, ...who we met at the little cafe where we stopped for lunch. When we reached the town of Villava, about 16 kilometers from where we’d started, we headed, believe it or not, straight for the municipal albergue. Now, if Zubiri has the worst municipal on the Camino, Villava has the hands-down best one. The Villava municipal is in a big, beautiful, modern building, ….that looks out over a pretty river, …and is so clean that it smells faintly like Clorox inside, a smell I happen to be quite fond of especially in the albergues along the Camino. And the staff was super-friendly and helpful. Hardly any pilgrims stay at this albergue because they tend to either stay at the famous monastery in the previous town or walk another 4 kilometers into Pamplona and stay there. Subsequently we had a 4-person room to ourselves with our own private bathroom which had a soap dispenser by the sink, paper towels and a hand dryer, and a rack in the shower to set your soap on. These things are very rare treats along the Camino. And though the shower had the standard button that you press to get 30 seconds of water (I counted) then you have to press for another 30 seconds, the water was hot and plentiful during each 30-second interval. Also not a given in the albergues. There was a washer but we had to hang out our clothes to dry from our second-story window. For dinner there was a café attached to the albergue where we had a delicious 8.50€ pilgrim meal, vegetable soup for starters, then a delicious beef stew, and for dessert Tom chose an alcohol-laced ice cream dish called “whiskey pie”. While I went, once again, for the rice pudding. We’d planned to stay at the Villava albergue for 2 nights – most albergues allow you to stay only one night but those in the big cities will allow you 2 nights – so that we could spend a day visiting beautiful Pamplona. Which we did: We also saw the little running man. At the crosswalks when the light turns green the little man starts "truckin'", then as the seconds count down he starts walking faster and faster until the last few seconds before the light turns red, during which time he runs. I love the little running man. We wandered around the city all day, took a brief nap on a park bench, then took the bus back to our albergue in Vallava. We rested up until it was time for another delicious meal at the albergue café – this time Tom had tuna stew made with fresh tuna, strange-sounding but really good, and I ordered this time a chicken filet -again, thin but juicy -with fries. After dinner we walked a quarter-mile through the town of Villava, ...to the monastery in the next small town of Arre, then we walked back. It was nice to have a day without backpacks. “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? 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 |
AuthorPatti Liszkay Archives
November 2015
CategoriesThe sequel to "Equal and Opposite Reactions" in which a woman discovers the naked truth about herself.
A romantic comedy of errors. Lots and lots of errors. "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Kindle: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or in print: http://www.blackrosewriting.com/romance/equalandoppositereactions or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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