2022 Camino Frances

Always take a photo of the menu in the window. They often don’t give you a copy inside. The server will read the choices to you really fast and then wait for you to decide and it’s hard not to feel rushed, much less understand everything they said. Many food names in menus are not generally words that Wynette learned in her Spanish studies. We’ve had to learn a lot of new words in restaurants here. We still see new ones every day.

This photo above was the menu from a previous post with the trout bones.

The menus del dia are wonderful. Cheap and almost always very good. And it’s nice to make just a few choices and be done. Usually we choose two different things and share. And we learned you can order two firsts instead of a first and a second. The firsts have more vegetables. Usually they are 10-12 euro, this one was more because it was a Sunday, but you know us, the last of the big spenders.

We haven’t watched the TVs in the rooms but every room has one. The ratio of TV size to remote size was the smallest I have seen.

Spanish bars always have TVs and they are always on. It’s the only thing we don’t like about Spanish bars. We try to sit as far away from the TV as we can.

In the bars, the TVs are either tuned to sports (fútbol!) or news. In our hotel rooms, we could watch a lot of American or British TV shows. However, all TV shows here, as far as we can tell, are dubbed into Spanish. So strange to watch American characters that we know and love speaking Spanish.

When we were in Portugal a few years ago, we found that all the American or British shows were in English with Portuguese subtitles. Someone there told us that this is why most of the Portuguese speak pretty good English. As opposed to most of the Spanish who pretty much don’t speak English.

People put small change on the rough wall of this bar in Villafranca del Bierzo. Not attached, just carefully placed. A nice effect.

The smallest coin you normally see is 10 cents, except in grocery stores where you get copper (colored, certainly not real copper), that is, 1, 2, and 5 cent coins. They are a real pain so it felt great to leave some on the wall.

This was a very pleasant bar with a friendly server. They were open at 8 so we got coffee before our 8:40 bus to A Coruna. She wrapped up some Spanish tortilla (egg, onion and potato pie) for us to eat on the bus.

It’s not clear to me what game you play here. Anyone know? I saw some guys playing bocce a little farther down.

This was on a drawer in our place. It looks like it would be very useful for something but I don’t know exactly what. Anyone seen one of these before? I assume it’s not just that Uri Gellar stayed in this Airbnb.

I read an article about Keith Richards (no relation to Wynette, as far as we know) that referred to him as the most elegantly wasted man in the world. I feel that way about some of the villages on the Camino. Here are some buildings in Valtuille de Arriba between Cacabelos and Villafranca. The village is not dead though and there are a number of newer and well kept up buildings right beside the ones on the photos. I guess it’s not worth the trouble and expense of tearing them down.

Lunch in Villafranca del Bierzo. A family group of 16 right next to us and another group of 10 by the window. Did we mention that we are trusting the vaccine?

This church is in Villafranca del Bierzo. A pilgrim who gets this far is getting pretty close to Santiago, about 200 km. If a pilgrim gets this far and is too sick or infirm to go any farther they can go through the door of pardon and get the same indulgence they would have gotten if they had made it to Santiago. (That may just be historical. We are not sure if it is still the case.)

There was no sign about this, a private residence I assume. Doesn’t seem like the best idea to have a stream running under your house.