Camino 2013

Waiting for a bus. Looking at his phone.

Charlie: Our last hotel had malfunctioning wifi and was very slow. It was the weekend so they couldn’t get it fixed. But Dropbox came through again and managed to upload our media.

Kudos to the Dropbox engineers. The app handles flakey connections beautifully. I have done that kind of programming on an iPhone, not nearly as well as they have done, and I know how hard it is to get right and what extensive testing is required.

Since we switched to Dropbox I decided to try the higher resolution video mode on my phone, from 640 by 480 to 1920 by 1024. It takes a lot longer to upload but it will be nice to have it. So the videos will also take a lot longer to stream when you view them.

I am also going to upload all the previous videos to Dropbox since it seems to handle them well.

Charlie: One book about the Camino said the easiest way to know who the English speaking pilgrims are is to look for the orange-yellow cover of the ubiquitous Camino guide by John Brierly. It is by far the most popular Camino guide and deservedly so. It is chock full of information he has a good design sense. The maps are beautifully done. The information is complete and accurate.

He divides the Camino Frances into 33 daily stages. We just finished six stages in 10 walking days.

Charlie: “For Sale” – we see this sign and variations of it everywhere. I can see one out the window as I write in Viana and there were many in the tiny Torres del Rio. The real estate crash has a while to go here. We’ll see how things are in Logroño.

Charlie: What a nice sounding phrase, but with some issues when you are walking. Our guidebook has these wonderful charts of the elevation changes for each days walk but they don’t show all the small ups and downs along the way and there are more of them than I would have guessed. Yesterday we saw Viana in the distance several miles away, thanks to the rolling hills there are lots of high points, but we went up and down 100-200 feet four or five times along the way.

But the beauty of the country makes it worth it and Google Tracks keeps track of all the elevation changes so you can look back at what you did.

Here’s Charlie

and view from table.

Wynette: Even though it is disappointing not to be covering the kilometers faster, we are having a great time. Each day when we set out, I feel happy to be walking again. (I was going to say “my heart soars” but thought that might sound too exuberant, but really it is true.) It’s fun to “take a walk” with a clear destination (the place we plan to stay the night), never sure what is around the corner, watching the countryside change, going through the little villages, seeing the other pilgrims, sometimes chatting with them, then watching them leave us far behind. Stopping in a bar and drinking the delicious café con leche 2 or 3 times a day. When one is particularly good I try to tell the person who made it how much we liked it. It is fun to practice speaking Spanish and they always seem so pleased that we liked the coffee. I thought it might be stressful and tiring to stay in a different place every night, constant packing and unpacking, but it hasn’t been so far. We try not to stress too much about each choice of where to stay for the night and being relaxed about it helps. We are starting to see the rhythm of the days.

Note: We spotted the bar in the photo above a little off the camino when we were really wanting a coffee. It was worth the short detour. The rather strange bartender made delicious café con leches for us, then he went back to smoking and reading his newspaper at the table out front. (If you click on the picture, as with most of the pictures in the blog, you can see a larger picture and more detail.) After we had our coffee he showed us a detour for getting back to the camino faster.

Wynette: We only walked a little over 5 miles today. It was either that or 11 miles and it seems lately my poor right foot can only go 6 or 7 miles without serious protest. I can push it another 2 or 3 miles but those are quite painful. We thought we’d not push too hard for a few days and maybe this thing will get better. So we are taking things one day at a time and not worrying about the future i.e. whether or not we make it to Santiago. We are staying in a charming albergue/hotel, La Pata de Oca, in tiny town of Torres del Rio. Just had a good lunch (la comida) at Casa Lili Restaurant. Best cooked salmon I ever had and fresh mixed salad (ensalada mixta) and rice pudding and water: the menú del día, all for 10 euros. That would have included wine if we had wanted it. It also included French fries (patatas fritas) which I tried very hard to ignore. Every menú del día meal seems to come with patatas fritas. It’s great when we can stop in time to have big meal early afternoon and then have a tiny supper in our room (fruit and cheese and chocolate or something like that).