My sister got the ‘Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits’ album when I was around 12. It was the first time I’d heard music that was about something. Music that was, if you like, more than just tunes.
I fell in love with New York vicariously. In my dreams I’d go to New York and it would look like the red sandstone tenements of Glasgow (the only big city I knew) with some steel and glass towers in it. Later on I watched the 70’s New York movies like Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. All fantastically sleazy and beautiful at the same time.
Paul Simon’s songs, like The Boxer and America were a fundamental part of my teenage years. They can still reduce me to tears in seconds.
Steve : Some people go to great lengths to avoid the heat of the day. I got up around 3:30am to do my old-man-goes-to-the-loo-in-the-middle-of-the-night trip and someone else was up, packing their bag for the day.
We got up with everyone else and we’re on the road at 5-something am. Today is a short and boring day. 19 km to Carrion, almost all of it along the road.
19 km along the roadside
We had a first rate breakfast at Poblacion de Campos in a rather upmarket albergue as it opened at 6:30am. We must look for more such albergues!
In the garden of the 1st breakfast albergue
A second breakfast at a fun hippy albergue followed in Villarmentero de Campos.
Then, heads down, suncream on, headphones in, off we go along the roadside.
We arrive in Carrion around 11am. We have beaten the worst of the heat!
Our albergue, a convent just inside the town, called Santa Clara, is very nice.
We have a room with three beds and lots of room. Excellent.
Following the rinse, lather, repeat washing cycle H and I go out for lunch whilst J falls asleep. We find a proper restaurant with white shirted waitresses and air conditioning. We have a veggie version of the peregrino lunch special and are well satisfied. At the next table are half a dozen men who we think are the guitarists for a concert that is happening in the evening. They have the correct fingernails and – dead giveaway – one of them has a guitar. the leader of the group, an American, also has a very small kitten in the top pocket of his white shirt. Every now and then we hear a miaow and a tiny leg pops out to bat at something.
It’s now very very hot. I bought another pair of socks from a specialist hiking store. The lady tells me they are a good Camino choice. I hope she is right.
Back to the albergue for a sleep, difficult in the heat.
In the evening we go to the guitar concert in a converted church.
Awaiting a guitarist…
The American man in the white shirt in the restaurant is, indeed, the leader of the guitar school that is housed in this church. I ask after the cat and he tells me that it died.
I relay this to Jen who says that sick feral cats are very common in Spain. It looks like our American friend was trying to save one small kitten and had, sadly, failed in his efforts.
The guitar concert was excellent.
Back to the albergue where H made some banana and Huel pancakes and finally got to use the Huel he’d carried across half of Spain.
A final wander around outside the albergue, where H decides to do some slack-wire…
And then to bed.
Sunset over Carrion
Tomorrow is a long 30km+ day with the first 17 being the longest stretch on the Camino without water. Right!
Steve : I’vemade it through all 27 episodes of ‘Cabin Pressure’. Moved on to a few Kermode and Mayo film reviews shows that I had saved (hello to Jason Isaacs). Today was an excellent Radio 4 play from a few years back (I have hundreds of GB of BBC radio programmes saved over the years) called ‘Double Jeopardy’, a fictional retelling of the relationship between Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler as they worked on the film script for ‘Double Indemnity’.
Steve : Last night was very hot. The Castrojeriz albergue is one big room and it didn’t cool down until well after midnight. Not too much snorting and I reckon I’ve got the pilgrim way of being able to sleep through anything pretty much sussed.
Bags loaded and out by 5:30am.
Castrojeriz albergue at 5:30am
Moon over rio Odrilla
Castrojeriz lies in a valley between two high plains. The hope was that we’d reach the other plain on the west side of the valley by sunrise. We made it with a few minutes to spare.
To the summit for the sunriseSun through turbines
Take H’s advice…
We walked the high plain…
Atop Alto de Mostalares
…and then descended into Itero de la Vega.
Another cafe stop at 8:30.
The landscape was changing. The fields were larger and flatter and stretched to the horizon.
It was getting very hot. We crossed the Tierra de Campos, through Boadilla del Camino…
Storks on the roof of the church in Boadillo del Camino
…and walked into the scorching town of Fromista around 1pm.
Fromista is rail yards and canals and long low buildings holding who knows what. The albergue was just off the main square. We arrived, did the pilgrim thing of shower, clothes wash and sleep for an hour or so. We Scots cannot handle this heat.
The 25km had taken their toll. Our feet and legs were fine but the heat had exhausted us. We sat around. H and I fiddled about with tech and backed up the thousand or so pictures that I’d take so far. Dinner was in a cafe off a rather tired looking strip: tagliatelle with mushrooms times three. As we were sitting outside a considerable wind blew in from the east. We were grateful for the cooling effect but in the end we had to retreat into the cafe. We watched a rather good basketball game on the bar TV.
Steve : Way back in Pamplona we were in an albergue when an unusual snoring-related event happened.
The albergue had some 20 beds, so we expected at least 4 snorers. I think we had three and they were giving it the full treatment.
But, but… glory of glories. The three of them were (a) snoring all at the same pitch and (b) had snorts of the same duration. So rather than the quasi-random snorting you get with the solo snorer this trio were synchronising nicely. One would start and just as his snort came to an end another would pitch in. When he had finished the third started, ending just in time for the first to kick in again.
Result? We had a constant background roar. Think of an old air-conditioning unit in a dodgy American motel. I can sleep through that! Easy-peasy!
So, snorers of the world. A plea. If you must snore in shared dormitories than please plan your trips such that groups of you, of similar pitch, always travel together and snore in symphony. A grateful audience would surely agree….
Steve : We were up the big hill beyond Hornillos this morning for the sunrise, so, of course, Sheryl Crow started up in my brain’s music player.
Jen and I have been discussing ideal playlists on a pilgrimage theme – however you’d care to define that.
Top of our list is the great Paul Simon song, “America”:
Cathy, I’m lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping And I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike They’ve all come to look for America
There will be more…
Ironically, given we’re on a pilgrimage where you’re supposed to be paying attention, on some long days, like today, when the sun is hot, you need distractions from the relentlessness of the trail. For the last few days I’ve walked the meseta listening to ‘Cabin Pressure‘, from BBC Radio 4, on my Sansa MP3 player. If you’ve never heard it, I urge you to give it a go. Extremely funny. Unfortunately I finished it last night in bed, whilst trying to block out the snore-fest.
So, today’s trek across the wide open spaces was accompanied by a BBC ‘Book at Bedtime’ recording of Robert Harris’s novel ‘The Ghost‘, from, I think, 2007 or so. This novel, and the Roman Polanski film version, are favourites of mine when travelling. I’m not entirely sure why, but they seem to transport me better than most. I remember listening to the BBC recording about ten times whilst my brother and I took shifts driving a minibus full of kids to a camp in Finland.
So, in the 34 degree heat of the Spanish midday I strolled into Fromista with the book ending about half a km from the albergue.
Steve : Another beautiful day. In an effort to beat the sun we got up at 5:30am when the air was cool and damp. Out on the trail by 6am.
A short climb out of town and we were on the meseta again. I know I keep saying this but this place really is magical. Last night we met a couple of Frenchmen who had walked from Grenoble and were doing 40+ km/day. They arrived in Hornillos around 7pm and were going to keep going. It was a full moon and they wanted to cross the meseta by moonlight. What an excellent idea.
Moon at your front…Sun at your back
The sun rose at our backs around 6:30. This place looks like The Shire from Lord of The Rings.
Wildflowers along the trailCatching the dawn light
A breakfast stop around 9am in Hontonas.
An interesting fountain
We passed through ruined churches…
…along perfectly smooth empty roads…
…and finally saw the town of Castrojeriz and it’s ancient hilltop castle.
Today is a short day of around 20km and we were in the albergue by 11:30.
It was getting proper Spanish hot.
We couldn’t quite suss out the town of Castrojeriz. Like a lot of the villages through which we walked there were many ‘Se Vendre’ (‘For Sale’) signs.
For sale, anyone?A not untypical façade
Similarly for this small town of population 500, according to Brierley. It looked like some money had been spent on Castrojeriz. There was a rather good museum of the Camino that we visited and the street furniture of road signs and lampposts were all new and of interesting design.
Half way up the high street (the whole town is strung out along a single road) was a house with a painted bicycle outside. ‘La Casa del Silencio’ read a sign hanging on the bike – ‘The House of Silence’.
We entered in to find an entire house filled with art, books, music and no-one around. It was really lovely. We must have spent the best part of an hour looking at the art and drinking in the atmosphere.
House of Silence back garde – beautiful
Grade One Hippy and all the better for it. If you’re in Castrojeriz pay it a visit.
Now, we’re still sending on a bag each day because we’re basically lazy. Each morning for the last week we’d attach a courier envelope, with 5 euros, to our bag of stuff and it would automagically show in the albergue that evening. But in Hornillos we’d not read the small print (we’d never read the small print) and we didn’t know we had to phone the courier to arrange pickup. We thought that the couriers just visited all the albergues and picked up whatever was there. So, we found ourselves in Castrojeriz minus clean clothes and the other pilgrim essentials that we were too lazy to carry.
Oliver, the immensely helpful German ‘hospitalero’, who actually ran the hostel, sorted it out for us. Our bag showed up around 3pm and we felt very stupid and grateful.
Dinner that evening was a big pasta-and-thing concocted by J and H. We shared it with Tom, an American gent from Florida, who was good company.
Early to bed as tomorrow is a long 25km and we need to be up to beat the sun.
Steve : I have an MP3 player packed with stuff but I find myself largely walking in silence.
But, that doesn’t stop the internal music player in my brain from running.
Today, we saw the sun come up over the meseta. And it was a thing of beauty. My internal MP3 player could only think of one song with any lines about sun rises, so my morning was spent singing Sheryl Crow’s Crash and Burn.
I watched the sun come up on Portland I waved goodbye to all my friends I packed my car and headed to LA I gave away all my loose ends
I’ve no real idea what the song is about but I did remember that first line. And there’s a splendid liquid electric guitar throughout. A great song for the day.
Steve : The Camino is supposed to be what you make it. You do what you want in your way. It’s your Camino.
That said – you want to do it ‘properly’, and ‘properly’ should not involve getting on a bus. More on that later.
My feet were giving me hell. 21.3 km to do today.
Leaving Najera
Past the route markers and through Azofra and Ciruena…
..with the compulsory breakfast stop of strong coffee, potato tortilla and an orange juice.
It was getting properly hot, at least for this Scotsman. As a former skin cancer patient I always keep full covered, which I reckon is the best idea anyway. At the end of this day H’s legs were traffic light red.
We arrived in Santo Domingo and had a crisis meeting.
We’d lost two days because of the British Airways IT failure. And our original Plan A required us to claw back a day at some point in the trip. The idea was to take three 20-ish km days and do them in two 30-ish km slogs. But our experience of the last few days has told us that 30 km is too much.
So, to make our flights on July 3rd, and to have something of a good time in Santiago (after all, the point of the exercise!) we decided on Plan E…
Take the 14:58 bus to Burgos, cutting out three days of walking. Jen tells us that we’re not missing much in these three days, in fact today’s walk was too much road and not enough country. Looking at the map, if we were to skip any section this would be the one to choose.
This would get back the lost BA days and might give us enough time to do something that both J and H really wanted to do – go on from Santiago to Finisterre ‘the end of the world’ on the Spanish Atlantic coast.
So that was our plan. We got the bus and went to Burgos. And we hope to make it to Finisterre.
I took no pictures of this sad departure from plan.
As the air-conditioned and completely splendid coach pulled out of Santo Domingo for the 70km trip to Burgos we were conflicted. And rather startled at the speed of the bus! After all these days of being a pedestrian it was rather a shock to roar along the road – the pilgrim trail follows the main road for much of the trip – and pass all the Camino route markers. In an hour we were there in Burgos. It felt like cheating.
We booked into the enormous municipal albergue. Very modern and very splendid. And very cheap, 5 euros each.
Burgos albergue
Jen performed surgery on my feet, with sharp scissors and a safety pin that had been sterilised with a cigarette lighter that we’d bought for the occasion, plus a lot of tissue paper to catch what Jen refers to as ‘blister juice’. I put on my sandals and felt grim.
Take good care of your feet
Somewhere along the way Jen had picked up some bed bugs. Jen greatly loves all kinds of animals but bed bugs aren’t in the approved list. They bring out the screaming heebie-jeebies. So she hot-washed everything – clothes, sleeping bags, the lot. And wrapped her backpack in a couple of plastic bags to be left out in the sun. The little beggars stood no chance.
Burgos has a truly magnificent cathedral. The albergue is just up the street from it, so we took our broken feet for a small walk and went to see what we could see.
There was to be a pilgrim’s mass in the cathedral at 19:30, so we scrubbed up nice and went along. This was a very different affair to Los Arcos. A real priest showed up and conducted the service. Being neither a Catholic nor a Spanish speaker I didn’t really have a clue what was going on but it was nice to watch other pilgrims for whom this was clearly a meaningful experience.
After that we found a restaurant that had a good vegetarian selection and we splurged. J and I continued our discussion on liturgy and authenticity. Whereas I rather like the Burgos pilgrim’s mass, she thought it was totally lacking in sincerity.
Maybe Jen will fill us in on her ideas on ritual and religion at some point.
Back to the albergue, just in time to miss a thunderstorm.
Thunder in the air
A few words of advice….
As the Beach Boys put it in the classic 1971 album, Surf’s Up, you need to take good care of your feet, …
Day 9 : Stats
Najera to Santo Domingo de Calzada
Steps 38,071
Distance covered, according to Brierley
21.3 km direct, 22.8 km actual walking
565.4 km to go
Other Fitbit stats
34.3 km walked (based on 0.9m stride length)
335 ‘active’ minutes
5,088 cals burned
Santa Domingo de Calzada to Burgos by bus.
Bus trip removes, according to Brierley, 72.7 km and 3 days of walking.
