Knee weather report

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:

Courtesy of https://images.app.goo.gl/AEt4Rns93jFMcSKS7

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.

Not so guilty now

Charlie writing today’s diary

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.

Bar getting quite full

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.

Gaudí’s Whim

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.

They said it wasn’t as large as many estates because the lawyer was a bachelor.
The tower
The main entrance
Gaudí designed a lot of the furniture as well
They actually invited us to sit on the furniture. We were amazed how comfortable it was.
The ceiling

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.

More churches

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:

Ermita de San Roque

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.

Reminded me of churches in northern New Mexico
A window in back
The “rose” window was a sunflower

I may have broken the law

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.

Churches

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.

Iglesia de San Pedro, west of Oreña

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.

Back of Iglesia de Cigüenza, built in 1600s.
Front of Iglesia de Cigüenza. It was closed.

And then not much further along:

Iglesia de San Pedro in Cóbreces, Built in late 1800s.

And almost next door:

Well, not exactly a church. Cistercian Abbey of Santa Maria de Viaceli. Built early 1900s.

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

Some fav photos from today

Saying goodbye to lovely Ana, the owner of Pension Oreña where we stayed last night
We are back near the ocean again after being more inland the last few days
Albergue in small town we walked through
She waved at us as we passed. I asked if I could take a photo. She smiled “yes” and stood up straighter. The bread truck had just stopped and left a loaf in her lower left window. Can you see it? You might have to blow up the picture.
We passed a small herd of llamas. So cute.

TVs and rain panchos

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!

Raincoat secured with carabiner clips

Fotos del hoy

Pilgrim Charlie. Didn’t realize how much his hat looks like a pilgrim hat as worn by the wooden pilgrim here. It’s a rain hat that our friend Vicki gave him before our first camino and Charlie has worn it on every camino since. He uses it as a sun hat as well. He’s mentioned several times just on this camino how much he likes it. Thank you, Vicki!
No services in this tiny town tonight so we are blogging in our pension. No bar and decaf this afternoon.
Cheese shop right on the farm, passed on walk today.
Charlie took this photo today. The cow (bull?) was high above us and not quite as close as this close-up makes it look. I really liked the photo. So, it will be my final entry of “photos of the day.”

Santillana del Mar … and breakfast

Walking into Santillana del Mar

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.

Back of the church
Front of the church
On the main street. Lots of cobblestones.

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.