Day: April 25, 2024

The past two days especially, we’ve seen some stunning churches. I showed photos of the romanesque church in Santillana del Mar yesterday. I’ll post some photos below of churches we passed today. It amazes me how low key people here are about these magnificent buildings. In the US they’d be major tourist attractions, I think. Henry and Moira, I always think of you when we see these.

The above is all by itself in a large field west of Oreña. It’s quite large. When we passed it in 2018 we heard beautiful music coming from it that lured us inside. This year it was closed. There were two other pilgrims there wanting to go inside. Here is our 2018 blog post about this church, with some more photos: https://wynchar.com/cnblog/2018/04/29/church-in-the-field/

We continued along the camino and not too much later came across this one.

And then not much further along:

And almost next door:

Hard to capture these in photos, especially the last two. They loom over the town of Cóbreses. Striking!

You see these plastic wrapped rolls of hay all the time as you are walking. It seems like a good idea. I haven’t tried to lift one but I imagine they are pretty heavy and it seems very unlikely that one might roll away in the wind unless they had one heck of a storm. We have never seen one weighted down until today when we saw these.

Worst case scenario: a freak wind pushes one over and it starts rolling down the hill towards those buildings in the distance. It goes faster and faster building up a tremendous momentum and smashes into a building completely destroying it. Could happen.

Miles: 7.4 miles, from 3 to 374, 915 feet up, 735 feet down
Dogs in bars: 2
Dogs Charlie played ball with in bars: 1
Rude pilgrims who hogged a whole three-person bench for him and his backpack and warned us not to sit there while we sat on cold cement steps: 1, but we are definitely not bitter about it, we just shrugged it off and forgot about it (until now)
Stunning churches: 4
Number of hotels that were not yet open for the season that we called before finding one for tonight: 4
Lentil stews for hungry pilgrims: 2, one each

A fairly short day but that is fine with us. Lots of up and down, as usual.

We stopped at a charming local bar run, it seemed, by a middle-aged couple. They made us fried eggs and toast. Their two dogs were in and out looking mournful like dogs do implying they really aren’t fed enough. One dropped his tennis ball at my feet so I had to play with him, rolling the ball on the floor for him to fetch. The ice cream middle man was there talking to the owner. He brought a new ice cream sign to display. Several other pilgrims stopped in while we were there.

The only downside was that the coffee was a bit watery. We do not have high coffee standards but some are too watery and others have a rich full flavor.

The rude guy story speaks for itself.

We stayed in Cóbreces in April 2018 and it was fairly busy but this time every hotel was closed for some reason and there were no bars open. We made those calls two days ago so we got a place in the next little town, Trasierra, 1.5 miles away.

Trasierra has only one bar (tiny). It advertised food but only had tortillas. We are staying in a hotel-restaurant but the restaurant is closed and we are the only people in the place. Nonetheless we are currently sitting in their closed restaurant because the host told us to make ourselves at home. And he gave us some delicious lentils with sausage. So we are quite happy.

Since we arrived in Spain on April 9, we have stayed in 16 different hotels (aka pensions, apartamentos, etc.) I’m pretty sure every room we have been in has had a television. (A few were tiny tiny televisions.) We have yet to turn one on. We’ve tried watching TV on past trips in Spain, but haven’t enjoyed it much. They do have some good US or British shows but they are all dubbed into Spanish and it’s painful to watch for some reason. I’m sure I could find plenty of Spanish TV shows I’d enjoy watching and it would be good Spanish-listening practice. But, mainly, we don’t really have the time or energy.

Even though we are walking short days, it seems we stay so busy after we check into our hotel and have lunch. There’s (1) resting, (2) blogging and catching up with correspondence, (3) figuring out where to stay the next day, (4) figuring out where to have breakfast the next day, (5) exploring the town we are staying in if we do have some energy left, (6) maybe eat dinner, (7) misc. Doesn’t sound like much but it keeps us busy. So, we’re never even tempted to turn the TV on. But …

Today we found a good use for the TV in our room:

Our raincoats weren’t wet but we thought it would be good to be sure they are good and dry before storing them away in their sacks.

It never rained hard today but enough that we needed them off and on. It’s the first we’ve needed them in several days — since the day I lost and found mine (see posts about that a few days ago). So as not to lose one again, Ella, in the comments, suggested we use a carabiner to attach the raincoat to our backpack. I didn’t think there was any loop to attach a carabiner to but, I was wrong. There are tiny straps around the collar that I hadn’t noticed. They are perfect for attaching a clip. So, I used a clip on each side and confidently carried my raincoat hanging off my backpack today during the times it wasn’t needed to keep me dry. Thanks for the great suggestion, Ella!