Month: April 2026

I’ve been sick. A lot of fever every day and a runny nose that just won’t stop. It sure is hanging on. I’ve spent most of the last two days in bed. Charlie has been so nice to me. He’s made a few trips to the farmacia and several for groceries. He did manage to get out to see the incredible Burgos cathedral (which we toured in 2013) and to visit the Museum of Human Evolution.

We are glad we are in such a nice comfortable apartment. We called this morning to see if it was available for us to stay an extra day and it was! We got charged for our cancelled reservation in Rabe where we had planned to be tonight (April 30), but it was worth it to have another day to recuperate. I just hope this will end soon! Since we have reserved all our alojamiento (lodging) for this Camino, we’ll have to skip walking to Rabe. Another taxi tomorrow, no matter what.

I’ve started taking photos of confessionals when we go into churches. Up to now they were the “open” kind where the priest is inside the center box with a sliding window on each side. The confessee kneels on the side. This was the only kind I saw from Saint Jean to Burgos.

In a church in Burgos I finally found the kind I am used to where the confessees are also enclosed in a box.

But wait, let’s zoom out.

Hey Burgos, what with all the sinning?

I grew up Catholic and when into those boxes many times, always on a Saturday so I could take communion on Sunday. Or do you receive communion? I forget. But I did not forget what you said when the priest slid the slider open:

“Forgive me father for I have sinned. My last confession was (well, let’s see, hmm…) 63 years ago. My sins are: …”

I just checked with Claude and it says the second part is “It has been [length of time] since my last confession” and it used the word “penitent” where I have been using “confessee” which is probably not a real word.

Another confession: I never confessed all my sins. Somehow masturbation never made the list. Even at age 13 I was aware of the irony of lying to the priest at confession. On the other hand the “get out of jail free” aspect of the whole confession thing always appealed to me.

Miles walked: about 4, all around Burgos

It was clear I had caught a bug so we scratched all plans for walking and took a taxi from Atapuerca to Burgos. I told Charlie we need to call this “The Taxi Camino.”

We got to Burgos around 9:30 but couldn’t get into our apartment until 3:00. We filled that time having breakfast in a great bar (Boston), going to the Post Office to pick up a package we’d cached here, walking to a pharmacy for a covid test, going to another bar for coffee, going for raman noodles at a Japanese place (ok, not great). I was starting to fade but made it through all that. The covid test was negative. Yay!

When we finally got to our apartment, which we had reserved for two nights, I crashed. Lovely comfortable beds. Great roomy apartment.

Miles walked: about 6

We started the day with a taxi ride around the once-bandit-filled Montes de Oca (Goose Mountains). That’s an option the medieval pilgrims did not have. We weren’t too worried about bandits, but we did the taxi to make the too long distance manageable. The taxi left us off in San Juan de Ortega. Closer to Atapuerca than we wanted but it was the only place on the Camino that the taxi could get to that wasn’t a farm track.

We had breakfast in San Juan de Ortega in another best bar ever. Charlie just made a post with photos.

We got into Atapuerca around 11. Couldn’t get into our (extremely charming) albergue (private room with private bath) until 1:45 so we had coffee in the Atapuerca bar and then went to the tiny grocery store and got food for a picnic and ate in the park.

Went back to our albergue to wait to get in and found a bunch of other pilgrims waiting. We had a nice time visiting with a French Canadian couple, a French French couple, a Dutch woman, and a young couple from Yorkshire, England. Luckily we were under a cover because it started to thunder and rain.

It was probably just as well that we had a short walking day. The night before I had noticed a tickle in my throat and by 2:30, after we’d gotten into our room, I noticed I was getting a fever. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in bed.

Note: Atapuerca is a famous archaeological site. Here are some photos from the web. We didn’t get to see it. You have to arrange a tour ahead of time.

The bars are one of our favorite things about Spain. Each one is different and it is always an adventure to see what the next one will bring. And, of course, we love the cafe con leche’s.

I don’t think of the Catholic Church as a leader in marketing innovation but check this out. 50¢ for five candles, 1€ for 10, and 2€ for a whopping 20 candles. I dropped in a euro and behold, let there be 10 lights.

Kinda fun too. Try that with real candles! Well, I guess you could just light ten of them but somehow it seems kind of piggy with real candles.

In Belarado they have dozens of these in the sidewalks. Each one is for someone who was important in the history of the Camino. Martin Sheen was the only one we recognized.

From the web: The Paseo del Ánimo in Belorado, Spain, is a 2008 public art project on the Camino de Santiago featuring bronze tiles with handprints, footprints, and signatures of notable figures who supported the pilgrimage.

We just read there was one for Emilio Estevez as well, but we missed seeing that one. Of course Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez were there about then making the movie The Way.

We have about 30 pounds of stuff. We send about 25 of that in a pack that is transferred by a service, Jacotrans, to our next hotel. This makes the walk so much nicer. This is our second year to take advantage of this kind of service.

We put an AirTag in our bag so we can see where it is and can find our hotel by going to the AirTag.

When we went on our first camino in 2013 this was pretty unusual but it is very common now. Here are the bags that were waiting to be picked up this morning from our hotel.

This was actually an albergue where we had a private room so it is mostly packs. When we are in a proper hotel it is mostly suitcases (or “grips” as some people in Minnesota called them).

We’ve been transferring every day and so far, it’s worked flawlessly.

Miles walked: 8.2

Cumulative total: 139.5

Flights of stairs equivalent climbed: 17

Pleasant easy walk today, cold at the beginning, warm at the end. Went through several charming little towns.

We had breakfast in the small village of Tosantos. I’m mainly bringing this up because I love that name: Tosantos. The bar there seemed like it was set up in someone’s house and was run by three or four very young people. Barely in their 20s, I think. Our order of fried eggs and toast really confounded them and they spent a long time trying to figure out what we wanted and then how to charge us since it wasn’t on their regular menu. They were very serious and discussed it together for a long time.

Villafranca Montes de Oca is a small town but as usual with an impressive church.

This was a feared point in the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago because it is at the beginning of the Montes de Oca (Goose Mountains) which were plagued by bandits and robbers.

We wanted to stay in the super nice and historic hotel here (where we stayed in 2014) but there was no vacancy when I was making reservations a few months ago. So we are in Pension y Bar Ivis which, despite 4.3 review on Google, is not great (soft beds, ouch). We decided to hang out in the bar/meson at the other end of town. (The only other place in town open.) A busy place full of locals out for Sunday lunch.