Camino 2013

Wynette is still having foot problems so we are showing down a bit. We went five miles today and plan for six miles the next two days. It gets worse as we go farther so this means she can walk mostly without pain. We’ll keep you posted.

Wynette: Yesterday morning while walking through Irache, deep in wine country, we came to fountain provided for peregrinos. Wine comes out the spout freely. Fun. There is a video cam there. If you’d been watching you’d have seen us. But we didn’t tell anybody because it was in the middle of the night in the States. Cam is at bottom of this page:
Irache Wine Fountain

We’ve found that with these not-so-fast internets we are on that it’s easier to post videos through dropbox albums. But we just discovered the videos on dropbox albums won’t play on our mobile phones. We hope they are working ok on your desktop or laptop computers. Please let us know. Thanks.

Wynette: Last night we stayed in Casa Rural Montedeio in the tiny village of Villamayor de Monjardin. (A “casa rural” is kind of a bed and breakfast.) For 40 euros we had a large, comfortable, pretty room and access to a fully-equipped kitchen. They provided basic breakfast stuff (make your own), which in Spain is just coffee and juice and some kind of bready thing (in this case toast with butter and jam). We decided to have a bigger breakfast so yesterday evening we went to tiny tienda (the only store of any kind in town) and bought 6 eggs, tomato, onion, cheese, two fresh from a bakery rolls. The eggs were large brown with deep orange yolks. This morning Charlie cooked an amazing scrambled egg concoction. We had some left over and had it for a snack when we took a rest on the trail. It was even better cold. These are pictures of the lovely casa rural.

No not this one, which we passed on the trail. Here drainage from a field washed out a short section of the trail.

But later, just outside of Puente la Reina, there was a sign saying we had to take a detour because the Camino was unsafe to pass because of a landslide. Northern Spain has had a very wet spring so it was not surprising.

Being rule followers we took the detour along a road that was not that interesting although we met a nice man and his dog.
The next day we talked to someone who had ignored the detour sign and he said it was a big landslide and was a bit scary with a dropoff so we were just as glad we took the detour.

The Camino is an important thing in these towns. We see lots of crosses and other statues and works of art along the way. Here is Wynette in a creative cutout sculpture we literally passed through.

Here is Charlie:

Wynette: For days we have walked by miles and miles of fields planted in this grass. I’d like to know what it is. A crop of some kind, or a winter ground cover? Hoping my Dad or brother Greg or one of my master gardener friends or someone familiar with European agricultural can tell me.

But they are not happy about it.

Charlie: The Camino Frances, which we are taking, starts in France at St Jean Pied de Port. The first day is very hard going through the Pyrenees. We didn’t want to have such a hard day for the first day so we started in Roncesvalles.

We have now talked to several people who started in St Jean and every one said it was just terrible, rain and snow and steep and discouraging. No one liked it.

The first person who said that was Glenn from Vancouver. He was still thinking of quitting because it was so bad. We heard just today that he is still on the Camino though. We talked to a woman from Australia today who came with a friend and started in St Jean. They had been training for a year. After that terrible first day her friend decided to quit and fly home and couldn’t be talked out of it. Very sad.

The Australian woman was part of a tour that booked all the rooms and transferred the luggage so she only had to carry a small day pack. We hear that that is common when hiking in England but she is the first one we have met on the Camino.

There are actually two routes from St Jean to Roncesvalles, the high route and the low route. For those of you who saw “The Way” they showed the high route. But that was in the fall and in good weather. The high route is closed now due to a lot of snow and pilgrims are advised to take the low route. So all the bad experiences we heard about were on the low route which, I should add, is along a busy road and is not nearly as scenic as the high route.

Some pilgrims ignore the warnings and try the high route anyway. Three times we heard the story of the Brazilian pilgrim who died three weeks ago on the high route and of three other pilgrims who had to be rescued and treated for frostbite.

And, of course, Emilio Estevez fictionally died on the high route also.

On the other hand, a few days ago we talked to a young couple from St Petersburg Russia. They had taken the high route and had no problems. Yes, the snow was up to their waist, but no worries. They said you just needed the right equipment and needed to know your own limitations. I guess people from St Petersburg know a lot about snow.

Wynette: We have seen very little graffiti except in the highway underpasses the Camino passes through. The graffiti is mostly political. This is where we see the strong feelings some of the Basque people here have about independence from Spain. These two photos were taken in two far-apart underpasses.

Charlie: We have talked to several people about the economy in Spain. They are all pretty unhappy about how things are going. It has been going down steadily for five years. Angela Merkel in particular is quite unpopular. It is sad to see how many people have been affected by the long downturn. Lots of blame to go around but I think we can all agree that the banks are evil.

Wynette: Above photo is of brother and sister who own shoe store in Estella. I bought shoes from them. Don’t they have sweet faces? They gave me such good service. I had fun speaking to them in Spanish and they had fun practicing their English with me. They are struggling to keep their business open and talked about some things Charlie mentioned above. And they said “oh well, we have a saying: after it rains the sun will come out”, or something like that. They are trying not to let it get them down.