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.

The sun rose at our backs around 6:30. This place looks like The Shire from Lord of The Rings.

A breakfast stop around 9am in Hontonas.

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.

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.

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.

Day 11 : Stats

Steve : A long walk out of Burgos, through the suburbs.  Today I’m trying my Merrell sandals.  Let’s see how they do.

And then through Tarjados and Rabe and up onto the Meseta.  This place is magical…

Panoramas

21 km done through the best countryside so far.  My feet survived a day in sandals.  All is well….

Day 10 : Stats

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Steve : The second 30km day. I was hurting…

Logrono is a pleasant town with a huge park on the outskirts.

We’ve now come far enough to get a better calibration of our physical abilities. I was fine, except for probably the most important part of the walker’s body, the feet.

My trusty Merrells, which have transported me without incident for nearly two years, were producing blisters.  And then blisters on top of the those blisters. I was hurting a lot.

My default position when in physical pain like this is just to knuckle down and go. This is fine when I’m at home in the Scottish hills and I can spend the next day resting up.  But the Camino is relentless and you simply cannot rest up.  If we are to get to Santiago in time for our flights home for J and H’s graduation we have no slack at all in our schedule.  In fact we need to claw a day back somewhere.

At the end of this day we knew that wasn’t going to be possible.  We can do 20-23 km days,  we cannot do 30 km days.  At least not without sufficient rest, and that’s just not possible.

We’ll need to make an alternative plan.

In spite of all the pain it was another beautiful day in the Spanish countryside. Lunch in Navarrete…

..and a climb over Alto San Anton. Then a long descent in Najera, a rather scrappy town by Spanish standards.  But it does have this rather famous landmark.

We trudged into town, absolutely exhausted.  This abandoned sofa next to a yellow ‘go this way’ sign felt like an appropriate metaphor…

The municipal albergue was full so we went private, which was probably a good idea.  Jen had a spot of sun stroke – nothing serious but enough to send her to bed for the evening. We had a room with shower for just the three of us – a rare luxury. No snoring!

Our fellow albergue occupants were a gregarious bunch of South Africans so we sat in the back garden and talked.

H and I dragged ourselves for an evening walk around town, primarily to try and prevent our legs from seizing up.

An early night.  Tomorrow we need a better plan.

Day 8 : Stats

Steve : Today is the first of two long (c 30km) days, back to back.

Paul Simon once wrote “I can gather all the news I need from the weather report”. The Camino is one place where that is true.

Thunderstorms were predicted and the sky looked like something from the ‘Twister’ movie.  Beautiful and deeply threatening.

We left Los Arcos and headed west…

Thunderclouds to the east. Thunderclouds to the south. Thunderclouds to the west. But blue sky above us, which is what matters as we still haven’t got any raincoats.

We strode out at a good pace. H has a new app that tells us that we’re averaging over 5km an hour. And, without wishing to brag (ok, allow me to brag a little) we were not overtaken once on this particular day.

20km of walking found us in Viana, another simply beautiful Spanish hilltop town. An early lunch of goat’s cheese salad and we were off again, 10km still to go.

The walk into Logrono took us through the outskirts of town, something most people zoom through in their car.  This hinterland between the picture perfect country side and the ancient medieval town centres has become a common feature.  Let’s just say they are never the favourite part of the day’s walk.

We arrived in Logrono and went for a wander to find raincoats and a cheap bag for us to fill with all our rubbish that we want to forward.  That done, plus some ice-cream and a visit to a rather splendid photography exhibition about Chicago.  We were overwhelmed with the visuals of Spain and now we were immersed in Chicago for an hour.  Surreal…

Today we booked into a donativo. These albergues are free and are run, usually, by the Catholic church as a service to the pelegrinos. There is a rather different ethos to these places.  There is a simple communal meal for dinner and for breakfast the following morning. Today was a vat of pasta and tomato with salad and red wine for the 25 or so pilgrims. The priests welcome us, offer a grace and help get the conversation going. Sitting around us were Mexicans, Germans, French, Koreans and Bulgarians.

After dinner and a communal washing-up (where we fought to help) …

…the priest led us through some tunnels under the ancient donativo building into the equally ancient church.  We crept through the huge dark sanctuary into a back room. There we had a short service of blessing and he stamped our pilgrim ‘passport’ with the official albergue stamp.

As you’d expect by the name, donativos, are kept going by donations.  But at no point did anyone even mention money.  As we were leaving the next day I had to hunt down the donations box.  And when I found it, it was open, with money in it and was just sitting there.  As I’ve said already the Camino does things to your sense of honesty.  Good things!

I think the donativos are the best albergues.  They preserve the original intent of the Camino.  This is supposed to be a pilgrimage, and a pilgrimage isn’t just a long walk. You are supposed to think about life, the universe and, indeed, everything.  Even if all you can really think about is how much your feet hurt…

A good, if immensely tiring, day.

A postscript.  Some quality graffiti in Logrono

Day 7 : Stats