Month: April 2024

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!

I think we posted a photo very much like the above in 2018. We stayed in Santillana del Mar on that Camino walk but went a few miles past it today. It’s a beautifully-preserved very old town. Quite lovely. It doesn’t feel like a “real” town. It’s essentially a museum with quite a number of tourist shops. But, certainly worth seeing. Has a beautiful Romanesque church that seemed to be closed.

We had planned to eat breakfast in Santillana and were so lucky to find a bar a little off the main street where the kindest man made us fried eggs and toast.

I told Charlie we should mention in our blog that it’s not so much that we are huge fried egg and toast eaters, we hardly ever make it at home. It’s just that they do such a wonderful job making them here. The eggs are bright orange and cooked just right, slightly runny on the inside and sometimes kind of crispy on the outside. The toast is usually made from really good bread and today he served it with some butter and some wonderful peach jam that he served in a little bowl.

I’d be happy with the tortillas (Spanish omelette that is in every bar and mentioned in previous post) for breakfast but Charlie is not a fan. So, the best thing we’ve found for breakfast (when we decide not to just have muesli in our room) is eggs and toast.

We were on a walk yesterday and came upon this little playground.

I remember teeter-totters but not one made of a log. And, of course, the universal playground sign in the US has a teeter-totter on it even though no US playground has had a teeter-totter in many years. Far too dangerous for our delicate kids.

As it happens we were in a town a few days ago and we actually saw two kids playing on a teeter-totter. European playgrounds still have them, but, curiously, don’t use them on their signs.

This playground also had a swing.

The old kind, with a flat board seat that you could stand on and swing really high or sit on and jump off of at the top of the arc. The fun, exciting things that are too dangerous for modern kids to try.

We have a couple of apps that help us follow the Camino but when we get within a mile or so of our hotel we switch to good old Google maps directions. This is the road we were on:

I was getting spoken directions and it said “continue on California 340”. We did some searching and are not sure exactly what the “CA” is, possibly Cantabria, maybe carretera, but definitely not California. I assume there is a look-up table somewhere deep inside the Google Maps code that translates “ca” to “California”.

I use the photo identification app built into my phone. Usually it works fine, although not as well as Google Lens. For example, I took this photo yesterday:

and it said “Asian knotweed”. Great. Then we saw this cow with unusual markings that we had never seen before and we wondered what breed it might be.

and it said — it’s a “cow”. But wait, there’s more! It also noted that it is a “large, domesticated, cloven-hooved herbivore”. Thanks Apple, I guess that settles that!

No short items today. We walked 7.5 miles, up 950 feet and down 830 feet, actual altitude ranged from 46 to 466. In an early blog, 2013, I noted that the pleasant phrase “rolling hills” is actually not that much fun to walk. Some were quite steep.

But today was a very nice walk. The whole way we were walking through rolling hills of green pastures dotted with farm houses. And lots of cows today. They say that walking in nature makes people happy and that was the case today. We both felt at home and in harmony with the environment. It was a good feeling. We always feel energetic and invigorated at the beginning of the walking day. That is an advantage of our short days, we get the good part at the beginning and by the time we are getting tired we are just about there.

It is a bit ironic really since these landscapes are not the least bit in their natural state. They are farms. But still, it feels so good to walk through them.

We saw a few pilgrims today. We chatted with two women from Ireland who were resting on a bench as we passed. They had started the Norte in 2017, got delayed by the pandemic and are now finishing it. They are slow walkers also, although not as slow as we are, who is? But they were saying they liked to go slow and enjoy it.

We are staying at a cute little pension in Oreña, a tiny town, looks like fewer than 100 people. The pension has only six rooms. The owner said that starting soon and through September she is full every day and she could rent every room six times over every night. This is quite a popular vacation area. As it gets hot the Spanish people like to come to the north coast where it is cooler. One reason we like to go in April is that you can actually find places to stay. It can be a bit cold though. We just discovered that our radiator is actually hot. I think this is the first one on this trip that was.

There are no services here so, on the way, we stopped at a supermarket and picked up food for a picnic lunch, a WynChar menu del dia: olives, salmon, two kinds of very good bread, crab salad, a packaged Caesar salad, a chicken empanada, strawberries and some little dessert cups. The pension owner brought us two glasses of water. It was delightful. We had as much fun picking things out at a “Lupa” supermarket as anything we did today. We carried out packs in the grocery cart. Fortunately we are easy to please. 😉

Note: I typed the old-fashioned happy face, ;-), there and it converted it into a emoji, because if I use an actual emoji in one of these posts it fails. It took me a while to figure that out because WordPress just said it couldn’t save and it didn’t say why.