Camino Day 4

Unbelievable...another fantastic hiking day! The sun is bright, the paramo is welcomingly flat. Along the trail we have irrigated fields of corn, wheat, potatoes, turnips...most just coming up. The mountains are in the distance and have snow on them...but hopefully those are not the very ones we will trek over.

Last night we met three pilgrims at dinner. Graham from the UK, Marian from Atlanta, and Lucia from Turin, Italy. Each is hiking alone. Marian said she´'d come to Spain on a tour 9 years ago and learned about the Camino. She's been wanting to do it ever since. Next year is a Holy Year...when the Feast of Santiago falls on a Sunday...and 300,000 are expected to do the Camino. So she decided to come this year with fewer people. But there are lots of people and the thought among the pilgrims is that many had the same idea as Marian.

Lucia is a mountain hiker. He has been hiking about about 25 to 30 miles a day on the Camino. He started in France, at St Jean Pied de Port, and came over the Pyrenees on the Napoleon Route the first week in May. It snowed!!! He said people were crying along the trail... they were so cold. Hard to believe you'd hike up the Pyrenees in a snow storm!

Now we are in Orbigo, staying at this wonderful inn www.elcaminero.es

Click here for an Audio Report: The Legend Behind the Bridge at Orbigo

The photos show the Bridge here in Orbigo, the restaurant at our inn Tio Pepe, Storks nesting on a church tower, and a group of kids we saw crossing the street. Notice..you'll need to double click to enlarge...that they are in a 'chain gang.'

Days 2 and 3

Yesterday we started out from Leon after having been blessed by the Domincan Sisters at the Monastery the night before in a Pilgrim Blessing. We´ll post a photo of the crowd when we get home. The one we took needs a bit of poto shopping to ligten it up for posting. More than 100 were there and we think we were the only Americans.

The hike from Leon was a city hike, through the outskirts until we reached our destination...La Virgen del Camino. We stopped at a little inn and spent the rest of the day resting and seeing the sights.

Audio Report: Sunday's Walk

We met up with a Dominican priest who gave us a tour of the church. We learned from him that the Pilgrim Alberque/hostel, where we were not staying, had originally been a residential elementary school for children of emigrants who went to Mexico to work in beer factories.
Today was a breezy, sunny, gradual climb on the paramo, the high plain that makes up this part of the country. We expected a bit more desolate look, but it was actually green, open, and lovely.

The first three photos show us leaving Leon, me with our Dominican friend, and the 12 apostles with the Virgin floating above them on the front of the church in La Virgen where she is said to have appeared to a peasant causing the original church to be built.

Audio Report: Walking the Paramo to Mazarife

We are staying in Mazarife at Tio Pepe, an inn with a total of 20 beds. We have a private room, but other rooms are 4 person dormitories with bunk beds. All the rooms are small and when there are four to a room, the gear doesn´t all fit in, so there are backpacks in the hallways.

We have been chatting with other pilgrims, although most speak only German, so we are seeking out the Canadians. Lots of nice folks.
The photos show the trail today, helping a pilgrim who fell, and doing the laundry.

We Are Here

We arrived yesterday evening in Leon. A lovely place showing heritage of all the times since its Roman founding. The Monastery where we are staying is almost as lovely as its website, which I posted a few days before we left. The trip was excellent. Today is a day to enjoy this small city and recover from our jet lag. I made my first phone call in Spanish and I think I succeeded in getting a reservation for Sunday night in Mazarife. Yipee...maybe!

Audio Report: We´re Here

Photos show Peg saying good bye to noble Jake, us at Gainesville airport with Peggy who brought us over, us having our first Spanish dinner, the Nave at the Basilica, and the find of the day...our first cheese shop in Spain.

Physical Danger?

When we gave our presentation to the Prime Time group at Santa Fe College, we were asked by someone in the audience whether we had ever felt in physical danger when walking through France and Spain.

Both of us scratched our heads, not having experienced anything we could relate to the question. We finally agreed that what we feared the most when hiking was the problem of getting dehydrated and collapsing as a result.





The listener's question came to mind again when we were on a training hike in the San Felasco Hammock State Preserve. We don't particularly worry about bears, feral pigs, rabid raccoons, or venomous snakes, all of which we might encounter. What really scares us are the trees. We have many times walked under the those pictured here and many more.

The one shown on the left is huge, burned mostly through, and scarier than it looks in the photo. And, as the photo on the lower right indicates, some fallen trees are more inconveniences than hazards.

A Place to Stay

We have a place to stay for our first two nights. We reserved a room at the Guest House at the Monastery of Santa Maria de Carbajal. The only other reservation we've made so far is at the airport hotel in Madrid the night before our return flight. It doesn't have pretty music on its website, or monks on the premises I suspect. But this Monastery looks like the kind of place to rest well from the flight and get in the right frame of mind for shedding our regular life and heading out onto the trail. Here's the link: http://www.hospederiapax.com/principal_en.html

Farm to Factory to Farm

Yesterday evening we did a presentation for Slow Food Gainesville about our cheese research. Great fun! About 40 people attended, a nice mix of ages and interests. We selected six cheeses for tasting. People brought wine to share.

Melissa, another Slow Food member, hosted it at her business, The Yoga Sanctuary, close to downtown. It was a wonderful venue. Usually no shoes or chairs are allowed on the yoga floor. Everyone was okay with the shoes part, but several people thought sitting on the floor, even on cushy blankets and pillows, just wasn’t viable. So, the chairs came out of the closet to many smiles.

We talked about cheese history, cheese making, cheese types, and about our interviews with cheesemakers, cheese shop owners, and cheese enthusiasts. We had a bag prepared for each person with each cheese in a little cup with a lid, so people could lift the lid and smell it before tasting for the differences. There was a fresh goat cheese, a bloomy-rind goat cheese, a washed-rind cow cheese, a blue-veined cow cheese, an aged cheddar cow cheese, and an aged sheep cheese. Based on how little was left at the end, they liked them all.

We were happy it was so well received.

Counting Down to Camino 2009

Two weeks from tomorrow it begins. A friend will dog and house sit. We will be ready!

We have hiked a bit more than 11 miles, with our backpacks, three times in the past week. We are getting stronger each time.

Our planning for likely places to stop each day is progressing. We are posting the maps showing where we think we’ll stay during Week 2 and Week 3.

A few days ago we did a presentation for the Prime Time program at Santa Fe College here in town about the Camino, our experiences last year, and our plans for this year. We talked about Why we did it, Who went with us (just us), How we prepared, Where we stayed, What kinds of people we met along the way, What were the biggest challenges, What we most enjoyed, and Whether the Camino is for everyone.

Part of the fun was doing a show-and-tell of what went into our packs, and having the packs with us for folks to try on. The photos show some Prime Time members trying them.

Planning our Route

We missed an opportunity this morning. It rained hard, but too briefly. We had just returned from Cedar Key…

(Where, by the way, we had a beautiful, breezy, sunny afternoon yesterday volunteering at the Friends of the Lower Suwannee Wildlife Refuge booth at the Cedar Key Arts Festival, followed by a great couple of hours of beer, wine, and conversation with some of the other volunteers…)

and we didn’t get into our hiking gear in time, before the storminess ended. We still need to test our rain gear in real weather. Maybe The Universe is telling us that we will have a dry month for our walk this year, unlike last year’s very rainy, muddy one.

We have been pouring over the guidebooks and websites, thinking about how far we may want to walk each day and which of the many recommended albergues we’d like to stay in, if we have our choice. There are lots of types of places to stay along the route. Three categories frame the choices: (1) small hotels, when the route occasionally passes through a big town (2) casas rurales, which are akin to boarding houses (3) albergues, which are akin to hostels. Advice abounds on the web and in books about which ones have ambiance, clean bathrooms, more than 100 or fewer than 6 people in each room, lively dining rooms, lounges, bars, etc..

We are posting a map that shows the part of the route we are thinking of walking our first week, with possible towns to stay in. Of course, we’ll go farther or less far depending on how we feel each day, the weather, and lots of other factors as yet unseen. The photos enlarge if they are double-clicked.

El Camino de Santiago de Compostela -- Redux

We are going back to the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the 1000-year-old, 1000-mile-long pilgrimage and hiking trail in France and Spain. Despite the French rain and mud, our experience last year was great. If you click on the "Camino Project" label at the end of this post, you will see all the posts we did last year along the route.

The map shows the main route in France and Spain in yellow. I colored over the yellow with blue in indicate approximately where we walked last year and with pink to show where we plan to walk this year. We will start in Leon and walk to Santiago. It is about 190 miles…assuming we don’t get lost and have to retrace any steps.

According to the Lonely Planet and The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago, there will be four types of landscape:

1. The Meseta…a high tableland called paramos with wheat, scrubby oaks, heather, broom, and sheep. There is clay soil and brick-making, sparsely shaded plains,and widely spaced hamlets. Here we are supposed to find a stone to represent life's burdens, carry it to the mountains, and then leave it behind. I think I will decide that my burdens can be represented by a very light-weight stone.

2. Montes de Leon…higher than the Pyrenees that we climbed last year. This area has fields of Mediterranean aromatic thyme, lavender, rockrose, and sage growing along the trails.

3. El Bierzo…a valley area nestled between two mountain systems. Here we’ll have cherry trees, red pepper plants, and red wine grapes growing along the trail. The mountains near this region had gold that was mined by the Romans.

4. Galacia…more mountains to start this section, but not quite as high. We’ll expect chestnuts and oaks, then pines and eucalyptuses as the trail undulates down to Compostela…a rich dairy and farming region with an inheritance practice that leads to continual division of the lands and unending stone walls. Abundant villages should provide lots of opportunity for stopping in cafes.

We leave in mid May and plan to walk for a month. We are heavy into our training routine now, walking 4 to 10 miles daily and carrying our packs to get used to them. We are ordering cool gear and surfing for the places we want to stay. We’ll try to share the experience.

Cedar Key, Dallas, and Birthdays

Spring is lovely in Cedar Key and along the Suwannee River and we have been taking full advantage of the nice, bug-free weather.



While visiting Aunt Pat in Dallas recently, Peg explored some cheese shops and interviewed some cheese enthusiasts.



And, we celebrated a birthday!

Kayaking

It was a picture perfect Florida day. The sun was bright. The temperature was in the high 50s and low 60s. No mosquitoes buzzed or bit. We went kayaking with a group from the Friends of the Lower Suwannee River Wildlife Refuge. We paddled on fresh and brackish, wide and narrow water in the Refuge. Great day.