Walking the Camino de Santiago
We had a great dinner last night in a dining hall full of pilgrims. The food was some of the best I’ve had in Spain, and the company, from all over the world, was engaging. I stayed up rather later than I intended. Today, most of the lands that I walked through were once controlled by the Order of the […]
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Last evening after Vespers I had a delightful time touring the church of Santa María de Blanca with Vicky from New Mexico. I first met her back in Estella when we were both trying to get into the same locked church. She’s a comparative religions professor, and together we deciphered some things about the fabric of the church, including the […]
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Last night I took the pilgrim dinner in the albergue. We were seated at long tables, with pilgrims from around the world. I had a delightful conversation with a photographer from Georgia (USA) named Joseph. He’s working through some things on this Camino, as are most of us. Joseph crossed the Pyrenees in the same storm I did, and he […]
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Last night I had a great time conversing at dinner with a couple of retired German pilgrims, Marcus and Hubert, as well as a younger French guy named Thomas who started in Le Puy about a week before I did. Hubert is currently walking his third Camino this year. In the spring, he walked the Portuguese with his daughter, later in […]
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On this memorial of Saint Francis of Assisi, I am mindful that the great Saint also undertook this pilgrimage back in 1214. I was out of the hotel just after 6 AM. I had to walk back across the river and to the Cathedral to get back on the Camino route. The way out of town was relatively straightforward, as […]
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Yesterday after arriving in the city, I spent an unconscionable amount of time running errands. I have a room here for two nights, which allows me to completely empty and rearrange my backpack. Somewhere, tucked deep in a pocket, I found a tiny folded up map of some unknown town in France. The errands included replacing some missing or lost […]
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Once again up early in an effort to beat the heat. I was up and packed before 6 AM and out the door ten minutes later. San Juan de Ortega is a tiny village – really most of it is just the buildings of the old monastery – and so the street lights ended after less than 50 m from […]
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Yesterday evening, I prayed for the intentions of the Camino in an early 12th century chapel built into a cave on the site of a hermitage that was in use from the third through the sixth centuries. Since I was staying in the parroquial, they took us up to the cliff and gave us the tour. The statue of the […]
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Great dinner last night on the plaza with Tara and Stefanie. I made the decision to walk a slightly longer day today, adding an extra 6 km to go past Belorado to Tosantos. We shall see if any of our pilgrim cohort join me there. I woke up stupid early this morning, thanks to a rooster crowing somewhere nearby, and […]
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I learned last night that the storm we walked through in the Pyrenees was one of the worst of the year so far. Winds were clocked at 80 km/h, which is roughly 50 mph. Up and packed by 6:30, and the question of breakfast was next to tackle. I wandered back to the bridge, trying to make sense out of […]
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