Month: April 2023

We have to take a photo like this on every Camino. It’s the law.

Some towns embed bronze shells in the payment along the Camino path through their town. We took this in Bedanzos this morning. The scallop shell is a symbol of Santiago or Saint James.

Post by Wynette

Today we saw two different small plantations of palm trees. Charlie’s phone identified them to be Chinese windmill palms, native to Asia. They certainly are not native here, but we do see palm trees fairly often. They seem to do well here. We’re not sure whether these plantations serve any agricultural purpose.

Post by Wynette:

I am pretty hopeless when it comes to identifying plants. I know a few and have heard the names of more but I always forget them. But this trip I have been having fun identifying the plants we see. There are so many interesting ones.

The reason I have been doing it is the advent of plant identification software on my phone. For a while I was using google lens, which you invoke from google photos but I started using the one built into my iPhone camera because it is a little easier to invoke on my phone.

Years ago I got a few, easy-to-use identification keys. With them you went through a series of questions with two possible answers and finally got to the identification. They were fun but didn’t always work and were limited in the range of plants they worked on. I have always wished I had a magic way to identify any plant. Well, that magic is real now and easy to use. You take a photo and few taps later you are at the Wikipedia entry for the plant.

It is not always correct but probably more than 95% correct. It is based on billions of photos of plants with metadata about what they are. If lots of people are wrong about a plant then it will be wrong too. Or sometimes it comes up with something clearly wacky, kind of like the “hallucinations” of chatGPT.

I collected all my plant identification photos in an album. So if you want to see what we are seeing go there and fire up google lens on the photos.

Post by Charlie and Wynette:

We were walking and came upon a pilgrim from Seville who was pointing to a plant like this. It turned out he was pointing to a snail like the one here. He said they are good with salsa de tomate (tomato sauce). He told Wynette the Spanish word for them is caracol.

Post by Charlie and Wynette:

Now that we are on a real Camino we have started seeing people over and over again. This couple are walking about the same speed as we are so we have seen them 5-6 times over a few days. We chatted with them a day or two ago and but we saw them in a bar and spent more time with them. We told them about the restaurant where we were planning to have lunch and they met us there later. We had a very nice lunch getting to know each other.

I wanted to say a little more about the place we had breakfast yesterday. She runs a bar and a little tienda.

The tienda is separated from the bar by this glass divider. You can see some of what she offers on the shelves, and the next photo shows the rest of the stock.

While we were there 10-15 people came to the tienda counter. Most bought baguettes of bread, one got bananas, one cigarettes, one a newspaper. As we were walking out the potato guy came in carrying a clear plastic bag of maybe 40 pounds of potatoes.

I note all this because, to me, this is a perfect example of how the capitalist economy should work. People at the top of the hill (it is a steep walk into town), mostly older people, need things like bread and the other things she sells. She gets deliveries from little vans that come by with bread, potatoes, etc. She then sells these things that people need at a small profit. She saw a need and filled it.

It was also somewhat of a social center. Some people got coffee. Most people stayed and chatted with the owner and each other for a while.

Spain is filled with these small, independent businesses filling people’s needs, The US was also filled with places like this 50 years ago.

Now Walmart and Amazon fill those needs but, obviously, it is not the same. It is a matter of opinion which is better, both have their good and bad points. We love to patronize and observe these small businesses and we are glad to we can go to Spain and do that.

This is typical of the charming little bridges we see going over quiet streams. You can see how well the Camino is signposted.

There is a Camino video blogger we enjoy watching, Sara Dhooma, and she always does a “bridge dance” when she goes over a bridge so we sometimes do that too.

Here is Sara’s YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@SaraDhooma

We came across this little building today. It is typical of ones we see, in need of repair. The original purpose of the building is not clear. When we approached it, two dogs inside startled barking furiously, so the current purpose is a dog kennel.