Month: September 2019

Here is what a “Compostela” looks like:

Linda’s

and Jim’s

Its all in Latin, including the Latinization of our names. Translated, it says:

The Chapter of this Holy Apostolic Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint James, custodian of the seal of Saint James’ Altar, to all faithful and pilgrims who come from everywhere over the world as an act of devotion, under vow or promise to the Apostle’s Tomb, our Patron and Protector of Spain, witnesses in the sight of all who read this document, that: Mr/Mrs/Ms…………………has visited devoutly this Sacred Church in a religious sense (pietatis causa).

Witness whereof I hand this document over to him, authenticated by the seal of this Sacred Church.
Given in Saint James of Compostela on the (day) …… (month) …… A.D. ……”

After we received our Compostelas on Wednesday afternoon, we got a taxi back to San Marcos, a village we passed on our way into Santiago on Wednesday morning, where we had a reservation for the night at Hotel Akelarre.

Thursday morning we slept late and after a late breakfast, walked across the street and caught a bus (1€) into Santiago.

We had booked two nights in A Casa do Peregrino (120€/nt)

which is located on Cervantes Plaza

less than 100 steps from the Catedral (“Cathedral” in Spanish) de Santiago de Compostela. It’s a great location because every pilgrim who walks the Camino and is on his or her way to collect their Compostela, must pass by our room (with a balcony overlooking the street).

As we discovered in 2017 when we also stayed here, the positive energy and excitement of pilgrims from all over the world about to fulfill their goal fills the air throughout each day.

When we weren’t soaking up the energy from our balcony we were walking among the pilgrims, tourists and locals in this medieval city, exploring and marveling at the boundless examples of architectural masterpieces and religious relics accumulated over the past 1000 years or so and beautifully concentrated in this single location.

The Cathedral, whose magnificent exterior we happily saw uncovered for the first time and kept revisiting, viewing and photographing, was almost totally masked in the interior by scaffolding and draped in ugly plastic and fabric sheeting while a near total refurbishing effort is underway to prepare for 2021, the upcoming Holy Year celebration. The noon mass, a central part of most pilgrim’s Camino experience was not even being held here, but in another church, while work was underway. It was really sad to see all the coverings, and knowing from our previous visits, what beauty and inspiration, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims (for many, a once-in-a-lifetime- experience) are missing and will continue to miss for the next two years.

The iconic statue of Santiago (St James) the focal point of the Cathedral, was obscured by scaffolding and plastic draping. Faithful pilgrims still lined up for the chance to embrace the statute from the platform behind the altar and to view the tomb and sarcophagus containing the remains of the Apostle, in spite of the disarray of the refurbishing effort.

We has an interesting lunch at Cervantes, a nearby restaurant discovered by Linda in 2017. We selected a variety of tapas and shared a plate of Padrón pimentos.

This morning, Friday, we checked out of our hotel and walked about a half mile or so, south, away from the old city into the very much more modern version of Santiago de Compostela to Hotel Gelmirez,

our home for the weekend, and began a new phase of our post Camino 2019 adventure.

If our life was simplified on the Camino these past couple of months, it really got simple when we moved into Gelmirez. It was a very nice, modern, roomy habitacion con baño. The hotel had a buffet breakfast but no bar or restaurant or other services. It seemed to be a terminal for pilgrims finishing the Camino or tour groups doing a short version of the Camino.

Bar/restaurants, takeout food and nice grocery stores were nearly next door to the hotel, so eating and snacking were effortless and fun.

We spent our time resting, reading and exploring the area between the old city

and the train station, again, effortlessly and without a backpack.

During the two day stay we had sunshine and overcast/drizzle, but it had no impact on any of our “activities”.

On Monday morning we donned our packs and walked 10 minutes to the train station, had breakfast, bought a snack lunch for the 5:15hr trip to Madrid, boarded the train at 7:35 and pulled out of the station at precisely 7:48 to begin our trip back home.

Walked today: 5.9 miles

Walked Camino 2019: 414 miles

WE MADE IT!!!

Our walk today was about as easy as any we’ve had so far. It was mostly on pavement, only moderate inclines and they were short in duration. The fog didn’t make much difference as we were mostly in commercial or industrial areas or city streets.

We played hopscotch with a tour group of 15 pilgrims from Belgium who started their Camino in Sarria.

We also chatted briefly with three ladies from Wales who also had started in Sarria.

We got to San Marcos, where we have a reservation for the night, made weeks ago when we thought room availability would be an issue. But we continued walking on into Santiago, through city streets for nearly 3 miles until we finally saw the tower of the Catedral de Santiago. A few minutes later, we finally, after 3 Caminos, got to see the Catedral without scaffolding blocking the front entrance of perhaps the most beautiful structure in Christiandom.

We took a few photos and walked on to the pilgrims office arriving at 11:00 to present our credentials to receive our Compostela. We were issued a ticket designating our place in line, #881 and #882. At that time they said they were serving pilgrim #331 and were processing pilgrims at an estimated rate of 100/hour!

The pilgrim office recently implemented the ticket system to avoid the long waiting in line (2 hours +) which we’ve experienced in the past. The new system lets you scan your ticket with your phone and see what was the last number served, so you can be at the pilgrim office when your number is called . So the long lines have been eliminated at the pilgrim office, but based on our experience today, the wait times have been significantly increased.

Hopefully the Santiago pilgrim office people will do some more work to improve the system. Pilgrim numbers continue to increase each year (Elena, the owner of our place last night in San Paio, said this year over 350,000 pigrims will receive Compostelas) and with 2021 being a “Holy Year”, the pilgrim traffic could easily double, possibly triple current numbers.

We found a small bar and had a prolonged coffee/hot chocolate break, walked to the Decathlon store to look around, had a long lunch, then returned to the pilgrim office “waiting area”

and waited until our numbers were called finally at 4:15… after a 5+ hour wait (but not in line😜).

So at 4:15 p.m. today, we officially concluded Camino 2019.

As we mentioned earlier, because earlier flights were not available when we tried to adjust a few weeks ago, we”ll now spend the next 4 days (5 night) in Santiago, board a train for Madrid on the 30th, spend two nights in Madrid and then fly home on Oct 2. Hangin’ out in Santiago and Madrid hotels for a week is something we would normally not do on purpose, but we”ll probably make the most of it and use it as a transition from our very simplistic existence for the past 59 days back to the everyday life we left behind for a while.

We’ll also use the transition time to reflect on Camino 2019 and will share our thoughts and takeaways with you from our temporary base in Spain.

Walked today: 4.9 miles

Walked Camino 2019: 408.2 miles

It rained a lot last night but appeared to be over when we left Pension CHE this morning. We walked about a quarter mile on the roadside, then took a gravel farm road, that after another quarter mile,

joined the Camino. We chose this route, rather than walk 4 km back into Arca to pick up the Camino there. This cut our planned walk today by about 1.5 miles.

Even though the rain had stopped we dodged puddles all the way.

We did a lot of uphill’s today, mostly of short duration but totaling 65 floors according to Linda’s FitBit. About half was through forest and half on narrow, lightly traveled paved road.

We walked around the Santiago airport, hearing only 3 aircraft over a span of a half hour. Half-way around the airport we broke out of the forest enough to see a stone marker for Santiago, beside a major highway heading into the city. We also got a brief glimpse of Santiago, some 11 km in the distance before going back into the woods at one end of the runway.

Switching back onto a paved surface we entered the hamlet of San Paio (pop.25) and stopped for breakfast. Our casa rural, “The Last 12 km” (65€), is our reserved destination for the day, but after finishing breakfast, we decided to keep walking.

We walked to Lavacolla (pop. 171) which literally means “wash private parts.”

Medieval pilgrims seldom if ever bathed along the journey and even “ridiculed Muslim and Jewish enthusiasms for personal hygiene,” but apparently took advantage of the small stream on the edge of Lavacolla

to finally cleanse themselves just prior to arrival in Santiago. Also, Laffi recorded in the 17th century: “There is a river in a wooded place two miles from Santiago called Lavacolla, in which French pilgrims, out of respect for the Apostle, wash not only their private parts but, stripping off their clothes, clean all the dirt from their bodies.”

We walked on past Lavacolla for a mile or so and finally stopped in Vilamaior (pop.<25) at Casa de Amancio for OJ and Santiago cake, before calling a taxi (13€) to take us back to San Paio.

San Paio and the small Iglesia in the hamlet is dedicated to San Paio (Payo) a Christian child that was martyred for refusing to convert to Islam.

She was 14 when kidnapped by the invading Muslim troops and taken to Sevilla and tortured, body cut into pieces and thrown into the Guadalquivir River.

Our home for the afternoon and evening is located facing the iglesia.

The owner let us check in over an hour before normal. We believe she owns both the bar/restaurant where we had breakfast and lunch plus the guest house where we are staying.

She speaks excellent English and personally

decorated her charming/upscale property. Our late lunch was also enough to suffice for dinner, but we took two slices of Santiago cake and the remains of our lunch wine back to the room for later, just in case.

Walked today: 6.7 miles

Walked Camino 2019: 403.3 miles

After checking out this morning we sought out the owner, Miguel Santiago,

who was serving guests in the breakfast dining area.

We have a delightful history with Miguel. He observed some spider bites Linda had gotten several days before we arrived at Albergue Tourista Salceda in 2015 and called a pharmacist friend who advised that Linda go to the clinic in the next town as a precaution. Miguel shared this information with us and told us where to find the clinic and a shortcut to cut our 4 miles walk to less than 3. The next morning a doctor at the clinic saw Linda immediately, gave her a shot and a prescription for followup medication. We filled the prescription at a nearby pharmacy for 5€ and were on our way. Linda subsequently recovered from the bites by the time we got to Santiago, several days later.

In 2017 we stayed at the same place and Miguel was delighted to see Linda was ok and he and his family welcomed us again. When we left the next morning, taking the same shortcut, Miguel was returning in his car to the albergue by the same route and stopped, shook our hands and wished us “buen Camino” with his voice and kind eyes. That moment was one of the highlights of the Camino for us.

This morning in tribute to Miguel Santiago (approximately named) and

because it is indeed a shortcut, we began our walk taking the shortcut to

rejoin the Camino for the day.

About an hour later we stopped at a new cafe, which had not been there in 2017. It turns out, the owner had just finished celebrating their first anniversary. We thought it was interesting to see the contrast in this modern rest stops external design and the more typically new, but renovated multi-hundred year old structures one sees on the Camino. And the toastadas were very nice, too.

The path alternated between eucalyptus forests and

roadside paths. The weather threatened rain, but it was only a threat.

At one point we stopped for a photo in a forest and a couple from Brisbane, Australia stopped and offered to take our photo. We accepted and then walked awhile with them.

They were celebrating her 40th birthday by walking the Camino from Sarria and following with a short trip to Santorini and several other Greek islands. They owned a recruiting business together and spent most of their vacations on the nearby Australia Gold Coast and in SE Asia. They had numerous questions about the Camino and we tried to answer as best we could.

We parted shortly after as we were walking considerably slower than they.

Our walk to Arca (pop. 5,050 )/O Pino,/O Pedrouzo, was relatively easy until we got to O Pedrouzo and began looking for our place to stay, Pension CHE. The Booking.com map and the Google Maps took us to the wrong place, two baggage transport employees said it was 4-5 km out of town, and finally, in a residential neighborhood where CHE was supposed to be, a helpful gentleman working in his yard, explained in beautiful Galícian (which is not Spanish or Portuguese or a blend of the two, but a unique Romance language of its own) what the situation was. Jim and Linda listened intently, after several “repita por favors” and after thanking the helpful gentleman, we walked back into town and still guessing what the guy was telling us, made a few more inquiries along the way and ultimately we figured it out.

It seems that Pension CHE is an extension of a place in Arca called Pension Platas. We actually stayed in Pension Platas in 2017, a several story hotel in Arca. The way it works is, after 12:00 noon you can go to the receptionist at Pension Platas, give her your name and she will summon a driver who will transport you to Pension CHE some 5 km out in the countryside. He then escourts you into a bar/lobby and calls the receptionist, who apparently lives nearby, because she appears in less than 5 minutes.

We discovered later once arriving at CHE that the receptionist copies your passport, accepts payment for the room, advises you that no food is available at the site, but you can order takeout for delivery to the pension or be transported back to Arca for dinner between the hours of 6-8 pm. She points out that tomorrow morning they would transport us back to Arca to pick up the Camino or we could walk a few hundred meters from the Pension and pick up the Camino in the direction of Santiago, saving us probably 2-3 miles of walking. We’ll have to think about that one … for about 4 nanoseconds. You can guess which option we’ll choose in the morning.

She then gives you the key to your very nice, new, clean room

and things get back to “normal” for the rest of the evening.

Now, being the seasoned peregrinos that we are, once we talked with the Pension Platas receptionist at 11:30 and guessed how things might play out, we went into action.

We left Jim’s backpack safely with the receptionist and found a place to have an early lunch, in case lunch might not be available at Pension CHE.

After lunch we found a grocery store and bought the fixin’s for dinner, should we have limited or poor options at Pension CHE.

Below is a list if our purchases in euros with notations where a translation might be needed for you.

We then headed back to Pension Platas at 12:15 to summon our driver to Pension CHE.

We were taken to CHE and followed the sequence outlined above, got into our chore mode, took a short nap and then gathered our purchases and went to the open, but no services, dining area and had dinner.

We need to add that while shopping in the grocery store for wine to go with our dinner, Jim came across a wine that we have purchased at Total Wine for $12-15 a bottle and in restaurants or cruises have paid $20-30 and more. The price for the same wine was €6.75!!!

After a tasty 17€ dinner including wine we rested and blogged for the remainder of the day.

Walked today: 6.6 miles

Walked Camino 2019: 396.6 miles

At 7:30, both Accuweather and Weatherbug apps said no rain for 120 minutes, so we left our hotel and stopped for breakfast briefly, before leaving town without our rain gear, but had it easily accessible if we needed it.

Just as we left town and began our first steps on the dirt path, the heavens opened up and delivered some serious rain in our direction (Good work, weather apps!). We quickly got into our rain gear and waited in a relatively dry spot under a tree until the shower let up a bit before proceeding. It continued to rain for a half hour or so, then evolved into a light drizzle, then stopped for the rest of our walk.

Like yesterday, we walked on some narrow paved farm roads

but mostly through forests.

Pilgrims were very much in abundance the entire way. Resting places were nicely spaced and frequent enough to prevent excessively long waits for services.

We had a short chat at one stop with Paul and his wife from Holland that continued later when they passed us. They started their Camino from home and expected to get to Santiago sometime tomorrow after walking over 2600 kms (1600 miles) since late June!

Jim had another interesting conversation with Eddie, another guy from Holland. Jim mentioned that his father had visited Holland in 1942 when his bomber crashed landed on a beach near Vlissingen, Holland and was quickly taken captive by the nazis. Eddie said that his father was a member of the resistance forces in Holland during the same period, trying to disrupt nazi efforts in his country. Eddie said he never knew about his dad’s activities because they were classified and only discovered them after his father died. Jim shared that he had a very similar experience with his dad and related Jim Sr’s roll in the Great Escape. At that point in the conversation Jim realized he was walking faster with Eddie and bid farewell to his new Dutch friend and walked backwards to let Linda catch up.

We also walked briefly with a lady from Sidney, Australia who had started in SJPDP, like us, and had been walking alone. She was curious as to why we had walked the Camino more than once.

When we got to Salceda, our room was not ready. We waited in the Albergue Tourista Salceda dining area until our room was ready and chatted with a young lady from Hanover, Germany, who had walked from SJPDP and we enjoyed sharing our experiences and impressions of the Camino Frances, until our respective rooms were ready just before 1:00.

Both lunch and dinner

were had in the albergue’s modern dining room.

We renewed our acquaintance with the owner and his wife who remembered us from our visits in 2015 and 2017.

We’re both nursing mosquito bites which we received at our hotel in Arzúa last night. We didn’t sleep well last night as a result. We brought a high powered steroid salve from our doc in Greenville that helps the itching. We’ve used it with some success earlier in Camino 2019 and hope it will help us sleep better tonight.

Walked today: 4.0 miles

Walked Camino 2019: 390 miles

When we awoke this morning there was no rain, but all the weather forecasts and weather maps showed it was raining, or would be in 18 minutes. So we put on our rain gear and departed for Arzúa, a mere 4 miles away.

When we realized we were going to arrive in Santiago a week early, we tried to change our airline tickets accordingly. But we only had two openings, one on the Sept 27, which was too early and the other was Oct 2, sooner than our original ticket by 5 days, so we rebooked it.

We preferred to have two days in Santiago after finishing Camino 2019, a day for the train trip from Santiago to Madrid and two days in Madrid before boarding our flight back home. The two day buffers were in case there were unforeseen delays in getting to Santiago and/or Madrid. With our new schedule, we still had four extra days to burn, so we decided to burn two of them on the Camino and two in Santiago, since Madrid hotels were running about twice the cost of Santiago.

Our method of burning two days on the Camino was to have several very short days leading up to Santiago. Today was one of them at 4 miles and the other two will be 3 and 3.2 miles respectively. In addition to making our final few days physically easier, this will also let us experience three new properties and two new villages on our way to completing Camino 2019.

Getting back to today’s walk, it was threatening rain the entire way with slight drizzles but nothing to justify serious rain gear. Linda was first to take off her poncho, but Jim hung on for a little longer feeling that if we both took off our gear we would lose it’s deterrent effect.

The path took us through alternating corn fields, holstein pastures, open unplanted fields and eucalyptus forests, not necessarily in that order.

We did pass through the 16th century village, Ribadiso da Baixo, where we stopped for breakfast and a credential stamp.

In order to validate our pilgrim credential to qualify for a compostela, we must have at least two stamps per day during the final 100 km into Santiago. Our second stamp today will be at our Arzúa hotel.

The final mile was along the road or on city sidewalks into Arzúa.

We arrived at Pencion Domus Gallery in Arzúa at 10:15 and were able to check-in shortly thereafter. As soon as we sat down in the pencion lobby, waiting for our room, it began to rain seriously… boy, did we dodge a bullet this morning.

Arzúa (pop. 6,238) was previously known as Villanova, as it is called in the Codex Calixtinus. Ample evidence exists of both pre-Roman and Roman settlement nearby. When the area was reconquered, Arzúa was repopulated with Basque people. It was the principle stopping point for medieval pilgrims before Santiago.

Arzúa today is known for its cheese, made from cow’s milk from the municipalities of the Ulloa, raw or pasteurized. It is also known as Ulloa cheese, Ulla, “Paleta cheese” or other more generic names as “Galician cheese” or “cheese of the country “.

The cheese is creamy, rich and smooth. Its crust is thin waxy of yellow and elastic texture, while the paste is white or yellow, very soft and buttery. The flavor is mild, somewhat acidic, varying from a slightly bitter to a slightly sour taste, depending on whether its development has been in winter or summer.

We’ve eaten Arzúa cheeses several times during our walk through Galícia and like its smooth creamy texture and taste.  

For lunch/dinner we walked to a small hotel/restaurant on a plaza a block from our hotel. It was a delicious combination of pizza, roasted padrón peppers and ensalad Rusa.

Afterwards we retired to our room for the day for naps, reading and blogging.