Month: April 2024

Yesterday when we were visiting the Gaudí house, as you may have read, I slid down a spiral staircase several steps. I was wishing we had taken a photo of that staircase. But found this one online:

I had a feeling I’d done something to my right knee. I could walk ok so was hoping for the best. Still can walk just fine but find I cannot put any weight on it when it is bent. Makes it interesting to get up and down from sitting!

We had really been looking forward to today’s walk and were pleased that walking wasn’t painful and didn’t seem to make anything worse so we got to do the whole walk. We were lucky that it was a relatively flat day with smooth surfaces. Tomorrow might be a different story!

Now for the weather. Wind! Wow, the worst we’ve seen this trip. Comparable to a bad day in Albuquerque or Tatum where I grew up in southeast New Mexico (which has even worse wind than Albuquerque if you can believe it). But, luckily it was sunny most of the way so we weren’t too uncomfortable. It’s been cloudy since we got to San Vicente and now with the wind it is very cold. Good to be in this warm bar.

On this trip, we’ve enjoyed spending an hour or two in the late afternoons in a bar blogging and catching up on email. We usually have a decaf. The bar was nearly empty when we came but now it is nearly full. I think because it is too windy and cold for people to sit out on the patio. We were feeling guilty taking up a table and not buying much.

So, we decided to order something else. Ended up with some ancovy/pepper tapas. Quite good even though I’m still pretty full after our rice/seafood lunch.

I wrote before about the tires on top of the plastic covered hay bales, apparently to “weigh them down”. This turns out to be a clever deception on their part, it does nothing of the sort.

Miles: 7.7 miles from 0 to 299 feet, up 381, down 469
Miles walking on a long beach: 2
Peruvian restaurants visited: 1
Hay bale plots uncovered: 1

Today was a beautiful walk, one of the best of the trip. We (and by “we” I mean Wynette, my memories are scenes with no attached locations) remembered it from 2018. We stopped at a seaside bar that we stopped at in 2018.

It was windy the whole way but coming into San Vicente it was almost blow-you-over windy, and cold.

We ate at Bar Colón. It was listed as a Peruvian restaurant but it only had four Peruvian dishes. We had rice with mariscos (seafood). They didn’t call it “paella” but it was paella-like and quite good.

Miles: 6.1 miles, from 56 to 387 feet, 459 feet up, 696 feet down
Gaudi fantasies visited: 1 (separate post)
Baby animals: lots: horses, sheep, cows – the calves were yesterday, a nice thing about walking in the spring
Markets strolled through: 1

Tonight we are in Comillas. According to the sign at the beginning of town, it is “one of the most beautiful towns in Spain”. We are charmed by it.

Antoni Gaudí, of Barcelona cathedral fame, designed a house for a rich lawyer here. It is called El Capricho de Gaudí, which means “Guadí’s Whim.” We were able to tour it this afternoon.

Guadí was still young when he created this estate. It’s whimsical but not nearly as much as his cathedral in Barcelona that he did when he was older.

Here are some photos.

A couple more stories about our visit:

Admission was €10. However, they said if we were over 65 years old it was €5. We were a little disappointed they didn’t ask for our IDs when they charged us €5.

The stairs to go between floors were tiny spiral staircases with thin wedge steps. It had been raining and the bottom of our shoes were still slightly wet. As we were going down one of them I slipped and slid down a few steps. Yikes. It was scary. Luckily I caught myself. Nothing broken except my pride. A little sore in the knee and little finger. I’m pretty sure nothing serious. It did take me a while to recover from the shock of it.

The above large beautiful church (iglesia in Spanish) was in the tiny town of La Iglesia. Below we see it after leaving town.

In the next tiny town we saw this tiny church:

To our surprise, it was open. So, we went inside. It had some beautiful, I think new, stained glass. Joe, you would have liked this.

Today on the walk we passed this mailbox. The photo hides it but it was mounted on a pole at about the height of a typical US rural mailbox. But note that it was pointed upwards instead of sideways so it caught my attention. And it looked like a typical rural US mailbox. Then I noticed that it said “US Mail” on top. Cool. For some reason I (totally unconsciously) opened it up. And to my shock, there was a loaf of bread inside! That’s when I realized I was looking inside someone’s private mailbox. I quickly closed it and hoped no one in the house saw me do that.

We get a kick out of the fact that people in Spain get bread delivery just like we in the US get newspaper delivery. In the photo I posted yesterday of the older woman waving out the window, her bread delivery person had just left bread in her window sill. We often see bread in a bag hanging on gates and such.

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!