Get Along, Little Doggie.

Day 10 – Friday, October 1st – 13.5 miles to Triacastela

This week of walking showed us a little different view of Spain – the villages weren’t quite as quaint but rather more farm-based, redolent with the scent of cow puckies.

Friday started out with a little up and down atop the hill on which O’Cebreiro sits. Those ups just continued to wind me, but what the heck – as Kathleen would say, it wasn’t a race.

Here’s a pic of JJ looking very debonair next to the pilgrim monument at Alto de San Roque…


…and me herding cattle off the road.


There are so, so many churches along the Camino. Here’s one with a St. James cross atop the bell tower.


And another heart picture for Joan.


Isn’t the countryside beautiful?


Check out this funky tree.


Next stop – Sarria.

So glad we didn’t walk to O’Cebreiro.

Day 9 – Thursday, September 30th – bus and taxi to O’Cebreiro

Before even the buttcrack of dawn, Kathleen took off for Barcelona. Bye, bye, Kathleen!

Now our group consisted of Kathie, Jennie, and me, of course, plus two peeps I had not met before – Elene and Jeffrey, or JJ for short. Kathie knows Elene from work and JJ – oh, I don’t remember how she knows JJ. He’s a hoot though – as you’ll see further on.

Late in the morning, our happy little group caught a bus to Villafranca del Bierzo. From the bus window, we saw many pilgrims walking the Camino. Because the highway route we traveled was relatively flat, we couldn’t tell that we were bypassing a steady ascent on the Camino to an elevation of 1500 meters (roughly 4500 feet) at Cruz de Ferro, the highest point of the walk. Oh darn.

In Villafranca, we hopped off the bus and called a cab. (Lucky for us, Elene speaks Spanish fluently.) JJ got our bags stuffed into the back of the minivan and we took off for O’Cebreiro. While this segment was along good highway, we could see - and appreciate - the actual ascent of the Camino here. Over 7 kilometers, the trail climbed 500 meters. “Good God – did you see that ascent?” I asked JJ later.

I was so glad we’d taken the bus and cab.

So this is how to pronounce O’Cebreiro – Oh-thay-bray-air-o. Now say that fast three times. I have difficulty saying it once. It’s all I can do to type it accurately.

That evening, we enjoyed the view from our inn, the Casa Carolo. In the second pic, can you see the bridge way below in the distance? We rode along that.



That evening, we enjoyed delicious pork chops for dinner! Mmmm, that was substantial fare for pilgrims. But whenever I think of O’Cebreiro now, I think of what Michener wrote in Iberia about the plight of the British army, under the command of Sir John Moore, trying to escape Napoleon’s advancing troops...

It was in their approach to Cebrero, the highest point on the old pilgrims’ route and surely the most desolate, that the British army suffered its Gehenna. All through the preceding year the army had been pleading with both the English and Spanish governments for money to speed the war, and at last they had got some, but now on the dreadful cliff-lined pass to Cebrero the paymasters had to back their wagons to the edge of the precipice and throw away their funds, a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in gold coins, too heavy to carry any longer, and starving foot soldiers had to listen impotently as the worthless gold clinked down the mountainside. It was January, 1809, the coldest part of the winter, and men froze to death in the heavy snow. Women (the soldiers had brought their families with them) died of starvation and their bodies lay covered with ice beside the road. Horses had to be killed by the hundreds; to save ammunition they were herded to some precipice and forced to jump to their own screaming deaths. At every Spanish village, houses were looted and soldiers would lie down in the ditch, a bottle of wine to their lips, knowing that if they got drunk they would not rise again, but they drank on and hundreds made the noiseless transition from drunkenness to death.

Bet you were hearing a lot of souls talking on that mountain, weren’t ya, Kath?

Next – on to Triacastela.

Leon

Wednesday, September 29th being the day of the strike, it took a bit of looking to find an open restaurant for lunch. Finally, we found a little place to get some sandwiches and took them out to a nearby square.

Check out this cool red monstrous pot. There were several of them.


On a bench, we ate and admired the cathedral. Doesn’t it look a bit like Notre Dame? It’s late 13th century Gothic; supposedly based in part on Notre Dame.



Then we went inside.



That afternoon, I took a nap while some of the group went out and experienced the strike.

We ate dinner at the hotel’s sidewalk café. A couple tables over, a man was interviewing three other people. I kept watching them, trying to figure out who they were and why he was interviewing them (and also because I’m nosey).


This is what Kathie’s room looked like. She was taking advantage of the lull in walking to reorganize…again.


Next – on to O’Cebreiro.

Driving to Leon

Day 8 – Wednesday, September 29th - 200 miles to Leon

I can now say I’ve driven in another country.

I don’t ever have to do it again.

I fretted all Tuesday night about how I was going to get that Kia back up the cliff, through the garage door, and out onto the street the next morning without bottoming out on the threshold or running over pedestrians on the sidewalk. I was pretty sure that I could toggle the accelerator, brake, and clutch well enough to keep us from rolling back down into the black hole. (Yeah, go ahead and laugh – you shoulda seen that ramp. Steve McQueen would’ve been sweatin’ it…)

At 7:30 a.m., with no breakfast in our tummies, we rode that baby up out of the bowels of hell and hit the road. There wasn’t much traffic, fortunately, but we still got lost trying to find the right highway out of town. The car rental lady had shown us two options on the little map – one route with a speed limit of 120 km/h, another with a speed limit of 100 km/h.

Huh? Of course, you have to convert that to miles per hour – 120 km/h = 75 mph, whereas 100 km/h = 62 mph.

Being the big sissy that I am, I wanted the 100 km/h highway but I think we ended up on the other one. Only once, though, did we have a semi fly by on a two-lane stretch, blowing that deafening truck horn at us and shaking his fist at us for driving too slowly.

Sheesh. Couldn’t he tell I’m just a stupid American driver? “Just you wait ‘til I meet up with you on the road back in South Carolina,” I thought to myself.

And hello? Spanish people? Would it be too much to ask that there be a McDonald’s drive-through somewhere between Logrono and Leon? I was ready to gnaw off Kathie’s arm by the time we could find anything for breakfast.

Eventually we made it to Leon. Kathie GPS’d us as far as a strange little stub of a drive that led up to the square on which the Hotel Boccalino is located. We could see the square but weren’t sure how to get through the “gate”. After backing out at least once – with bystanders watching in amusement – we decided to go for it by pushing the button on the post at the side of the drive. Voila, as Kathie would say…magically the gate opened and we entered the square.

As we parked in front of the hotel, Kathie’s daughter Jennie, who had arrived the night before, appeared on the steps, ready to conquer Leon. We checked in and got our bags unloaded, then set off straight away to get that little car back to the rental office. I wanted nothing more to do with it.

Check that one off my list.

Stick Shifts, Traffic Circles, and X-Files

Warning! There are no photographs in this post. It was dark and I was too scared to even think of snapping pictures.

After walking 17.5 miles on Tuesday, September 28th, we finally reached our hotel in Logrono. The lady at the desk got us all checked in. I was ready to go up and collapse on the bed for a quick little power nap before dinner, but Kathie and Kathleen thought we may as well get our travel plans for the next day finalized.

“Tomorrow?” asked desk lady. Lucky for us, she spoke English quite well.

“Yes. We’re taking the bus to Leon tomorrow.” Leon is 200 miles from Logrono. From Leon, Kathleen would fly out at oh-dark-thirty on Thursday morning for Barcelona. Kathie and I would take a bus with our new hiking buddies to O’Cebreiro, with the intention of walking the next 100 miles.

“But tomorrow is a general strike. There will be no public transportation tomorrow,” said the desk lady.

“None?

“No. No bus, no taxi, no train, no airplane. None,” said the desk lady to much rolling of eyes and clasping of foreheads (on our part, that is).

“I gotta get outta here. I’ll see you upstairs.” At that point, I was too exhausted to comprehend the seriousness of the situation…or care. So I went upstairs and started my nightly unpacking routine.

Shortly after, Kathie came flying into the room and said that she and Kathleen were taking a taxi to the train station where they would rent a car for the drive to Leon. “Oh, this isn’t good,” I thought to myself. “Has either of them driven in Europe before? These drivers are maniacs.”

On they went, though, and I showered and dressed. With a little time on my hands now, I noticed a pizza delivery menu on the desk. “Ooh, pizza sounds really good,” I thought. “Wonder if I can convince them to order pizza when they get back? That way we wouldn’t have to walk another step.”

Huh.

The door opened and in walked Kathie with a dejected look on her face. “All they had were standard transmissions.”

Now here I must interject that Kathie – for some reason – never learned to drive a stick shift. No, even her Z-car had an automatic transmission. Back then, I thought a Z-car even having an automatic transmission was sheer and complete blasphemy.

“Uh, Kath? You know I can drive a standard transmission, right?” Had she already forgotten my Miata (2000-2008) and 914 (Dark Ages)?

The look on her face instantly brightened. “Uh oh,” I thought to myself. “Maybe I shoulda kept my mouth shut.”

She picked up the phone, dialed the desk lady, and asked her to get us a taxi immediately and call the car rental place to have them stay open ‘til we got there. (It was already 7:15 p.m. and they would be closing in fifteen minutes.)

As quickly as she did this, my insides started to quiver. You know that feeling of impending doom, of facing a locomotive that you have no way of stopping, of being the deer caught in the headlights? All the clichés in the world could not describe my fear in that moment.

I knew, however, that there is no stopping Kathie when she’s on a mission, so I ignored my own common sense/quivering innards and meekly followed her out the door, thinking “How do I get myself into this stuff?” (The answer, of course, is that I travel with Kathie. Adventure follows this woman like a starving dog.)

Fast forward 30 minutes. We’re in our little Kia pulling out into Logrono’s rush hour traffic. Rush hour, you say? Yeah, the Spanish keep different hours from the rest of the world. And Logrono is no little town – with a population of 200,000 peeps, traffic was hopping that evening.

Kathie navigated with the help of her iPhone's GPS. Somehow, we maneuvered our way through a boatload of traffic circles (“What does that light mean? Am I supposed to go now?”) without hitting any pedestrians.

“OK, now we have to push the button on the intercom and the desk lady will open the garage door for us,” Kathie informed me as we approached the hotel.

The garage door opened inward on its side hinges to reveal a huge black hole. “Oh God.” I felt like Indiana Jones contemplating his leap of faith in The Last Crusade.

Turning left off the street, I crossed over the sidewalk and into the void. The front of the car dipped down and gradually I caught sight of the 30 degree descent before me. "Oh God."

“I want pizza delivered,” I told Kathie. Now was the time to get what I wanted. “With Pepsi.”

“Sounds good,” she replied without tearing her eyes away from the view ahead.

That was one of the best pizzas I ever ate.

Tomorrow – driving to Leon.

(That warning had you going, didn’t it? You were expecting, like, the X-Files or something, weren’t you? Tee hee hee…)

Hey, does anyone know what a "huelga general" is?

On the day we took the train from Paris to St. Jean, I noticed posters here and there about a “huelga general” on September 29th. I asked my resident Spanish translator - Kathie, that is - what a huelga is. She didn’t know, nor did my virtually worthless vest pocket Spanish dictionary. From the looks of the posters, I had a sneaking suspicion that it meant strike. Interesting, I thought. It never occurred to me that a strike might affect us in any way…

Day 7 on the Camino – Shadows, (No) Strangers, and Double Ick

Tuesday, September 28th – 17.5 miles to Logrono

Kathie started out the day fascinated with shadows.


This was to be our last day of hiking with Kathleen. Like JJ about whom I will write more later, Kathleen knows no strangers. Here she is walking and chatting with a Korean girl with whom we met up several times. We were always amazed by her (the Korean girl, that is) carrying her purse along with her fully loaded backpack. Due to miserable feet syndrome, she was going to be buying new boots when she reached Logrono.


Around mid-morning we passed through the 12th century village of Torres del Rio, seen here from the “peak” of Nuestra Senora del Payo (1870 feet).


Much later in the day, we stopped in Viana at the Iglesia Santa Maria, where Kathleen and I took our boots and socks off and rested our dogs on the cold concrete. Ah, nirvana!


In front of this door is a plaque where Cesare Borgia (of the infamous Borgias) was buried ‘til 2007. Cesare was the son of Pope Alexander VI (before he became pope, of course) and his long-time mistress. Somehow, the 15-year old Cesare was made bishop of Pamplona, studied law in Italy, then became a cardinal at age 18. There was speculation that he killed his brother over another brother’s wife, who was also the mistress of Cesare and the brother he supposedly killed. Hello? Did anyone have a lick of sense back then?

At 23, he became the first person to resign from a cardinal position…possibly because he knew that France’s King Louis XII was going to name him the Duke of Valentinois on that very day? Anyway, from this he gained the nickname Valentino.

Apparently, he died during the siege of Viana at the age of 31. Wikipedia attributes his death to malaria or poisoning. Our guidebook says he was killed. Either way, he left behind at least one legitimate child plus 11 illegitimate children. Plus he was intimate with his sister Lucrezia and impregnated her. Ick. Now here’s the real kicker – Alexandre Dumas claimed that paintings of Jesus Christ produced during Cesare Borgia’s life resembled Cesare – influencing the commonly held image of Jesus since that time. Double ick.


Moving on we passed through La Rioja wine (durn good red wine, too) region to Logrono…


…where we arrived to a big surprise when we reached our hotel, Condes de Haro (Counts of Haro, a town in the La Rioja region). That story deserves its own post.

Day 6 on the Camino – Drunken Pilgrims, Vineyards as Far as the Eye Can See, and Shepherds on Cell Phones

Monday, September 27th – 13.1 miles to Los Arcos. Ya just gotta love a 13 mile day. After all, tomorrow’s going to be a 17-miler.

Several places, we saw ropes of these peppers hanging. Suppose they’re spicy?


Uphill through woods to the outdoor Irache wine fountain – no kidding! The Irache monastery of Benedictine monks was established in the 10th century to take care of the Camino’s pilgrims. Due to a lack of novitiates, the monastery closed in 1985 and is now a museum.


Huh. Not only were there no monks when we got there, there was also no wine left in the fountain. The pilgrims before us had drunk it all up – and we got there by 9:30 a.m. The sots!


Kathie’s not the only one in the group who’s skilled at getting photos of people’s backs.


After climbing 300 vertical feet over 3 kilometers, we were ready for lunch! This is where we stopped to eat in Villamayor de Monjardin.




In some places along the first 100 miles, there were vineyards as far as the eye could see…


…and grapes just asking to be picked and eaten.


Somewhere in this pic are a sheepherding dog sitting next to his shepherd, who was too busy talking on his cell phone to watch his flock. Honest – I saw the malingerers.


I got his herd back up out of the road for him…and now I believe the stories about sheep following each other over cliffs.


Before we reached Los Arcos, we took a break to rest our moleskin-clad tootsies…


…and stretch our backs.


Los Arcos is a relatively small place but it sure was hard to find the Hotel Monaco from the directions we had. When we did get there, we had dinner then went out, as usual, to pick up some grub for the next day’s lunch; Kathie snapped this shot of the fuente in the plaza.


Tomorrow, on to Logrono.

Day 5 on the Camino – (More) Bikers, Cirauqui, and GPSing Our Way to Hotel Yerri

Sunday, September 26th – 13.6 miles to Estella

Here we are getting ready to start out on Sunday morning with a pride of bikers on the Puente la Reina behind us.

Of course, Kathie had to get a pic of the hams – I mean, bikers.


Over the next 5 kilometers, we ascended about 375 vertical feet. Cirauqui is a medieval village at the top of the ascent. (Those are grape vines and olive trees in the foreground.)


We sat on the ground to eat lunch in a quiet area almost half way between Cirauqui and Lorca, then encountered this medieval bridge over the Rio Salado (Salt River).


Here’s a heart rock for Joan – Kathleen noticed it on the ground by the bridge.


Walk, walk, walk - a little bit along busy highway, then through Villatuerta (I just love that word for some reason!) and on to Estella, which – with a population of 15,000 – was one of the larger towns along the walk. According to the book Iberia, Michener just LOVED Estella, a hot bed of Carlists. I kept waiting to see him sitting in some sidewalk café, but I was really too busy trying to find our way to the Hotel Yerri with Kathie tracking along on her GPS behind me…plus the fact that he’s been dead for 13 years.

Tomorrow, on to Los Arcos.

Barcelona, Bikers, and Windmills

Saturday, September 25th, Day 4 on the Camino – 13.5 miles to Puente La Reina

On our way out of Pamplona, we walked through the University of Navarre, which looks like a relatively new school. Weird though how the campus ends and country begins…kind of like the Lands End Inn in West Ashley.

But I digress…as we walked we struck up a conversation with a young man from Barcelona, whom I mentioned in that last post. He is a pilot, I think, but he looked like a 17-year old computer geek. He was just walking 100 miles on this trip and would eventually finish the whole camino in stages.

Not far out of town, we passed this scene – see the rainbow?


Now look at this – Kathie caught the actual end of the rainbow! The leprechauns must have heard us coming and hidden their pot of gold. Rats!


Several times we passed ridges lined with windmills. I was just fascinated by them. They didn’t seem noisy to me, but then I have hearing aids plugged into both ears so maybe you shouldn’t trust my opinion on this.


Here’s the wrought iron pilgrim monument at Alto del Perdon…


…with a close-up…


…and some bikers getting a repair done at a roadside van. Kathie’s a sucker for bikers and runners. I think it’s the shorts but I’m not sure. You’ll see further evidence of this later.


And here’s a lovely pic of the same windmills looking back from Uterga.


I forget, Kath – was this the day that a passing motorist almost caught us peeing alongside the road in a partially wooded area? OMG – that was a close one! I almost peed myself laughing. Kathleen was much better at finding secluded spots for “comfort breaks”.

When we arrived at the Hotel Jakue just inside Puente la Reina, the registration desk lady recommended we check out the running of the “cows”, to which she gave us directions. I’m serious – she really called it the running of the cows. We finally found the place and this is what we saw.


Every Saturday evening, the townspeople of Puente la Reina close off the ends of this street and harass the stuff out of young bulls to make them run up and down the street. You can see in the pic the kids up on the balcony – they’re throwing things at the bulls, making them crazy with fright. Perhaps this is how the bulls get toughened up for bullfights? I don’t know; I thought it was really inhumane. Then again, I don’t get the whole bullfighting thing either.

Here’s the town’s namesake, the Puente la Reina, a Romanesque bridge built by the wife of Sanchez III specifically for pilgrim traffic. We’ll cross over it on our way out of town tomorrow.

The Happy Hiker

I was getting tired by the end of that last post so I neglected to note that what I had mistakenly thought was an overwrought groin muscle was actually iliotibial (IT) band syndrome.

And how do I know this? When I finally swallowed my pride and told Kathie of the severity of my pain, she checked for lumps along the left side of my left thigh and knew right away what the problem was, having suffered with it herself in the past.

And the treatment? Rest, ibuprofen, awkward stretching exercises, and Kathie’s pointy little elbow digging into each lump to tenderize it. Really, I think Adolph’s meat tenderizer would’ve been less painful. You know that sudden sharp pain you get when you stub your little toe on the bed frame in the night – the one that would make you fly up and hit the ceiling if gravity wasn’t holding you down? It was a bit like that…except you don’t stub your toe repeatedly and intentionally, thinking that it’s eventually going to feel better.

All the lump gouging in the world wasn’t going to be enough to get me on the road Saturday morning, though. Bigger guns would be required. Kathie fished around in her first aid pack ‘til she found her Vicodin. On the one hand I wondered if it would be enough; on the other I wondered if it was going to leave me staggering along the trail, drooling, and generally looking like a drunken fool. She very wisely gave me just half a tab and we took off.

I tell you that Vicodin worked like a charm! That Saturday and the following two days, I took half a tab around 9 or 10 in the morning (when massaging the lumps while walking no longer worked) and then another half around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. And was I a happy hiker or what? I left the other girls in my dust…


…although uphill was still (and will always be, I’m afraid) a challenge.


We met other hikers suffering with similar problems. For several days, we tracked along with one young man whom Kathie aptly dubbed “Barcelona” – after all, he was from Barcelona. The last day we saw him, he was hobbling along, barely making any time at all. When he described his problem, Kathie – without any warning – reached down and palpated the side of his bum leg. (The look on his face was priceless.) Yup, she said, IT band, and she recommended he get some rest and take ibuprofen. Amazing – I had never even heard of IT band syndrome before.

OK, so the next post will be about the hike to Puenta la Reina. By now, my whining was (almost) over.