Walking the Camino de Santiago
With this gigantic sign in the middle of nowhere, we leave La Rioja and enter Castilla y León. We are now entering the second Kingdom of our Camino, having left Navarra far behind. Even with this photo, it’s difficult to get a handle on how truly immense this sign is, made even more so by its isolation from any other […]
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We are still in the long shadow of Grañón just after sunrise. Soon, the sun will burn away the mist, but for now, we are still in the cool shadow of the oncoming storm. The steeple you see is the parish church where we stayed the night. The stormy skies are a portent of the days to come. Date: 10 […]
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That shadow you see across the valley is the shadow of the town of Grañón. The sun is barely above the horizon. The sky seems poised to break into storm at any minute, and far below in the shadow of nature and civilization both, Francine roars her defiance and joy. Or, it’s just possible that she’s singing show tunes. Date: […]
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A new day! We begin walking on April 10 about dawn. First breakfast was at the albergue, and we begin in high spirits, buoyed by the happy memory of the fantastic albergue parroquial de San Juan Bautista in Grañón. Date: 10 April 2016 Place: Leaving Grañón (La Rioja, Spain) Maps!
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The evening in San Juan Bautista in Grañón ended with Compline in the choir loft. The walls of the loft were lined with choir stalls, at the center of which stood a giant, four-sided turning music stand that was obviously intended for the six-foot tall psalters produced en masse in the Middle Ages. One of the choir stalls featured this […]
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For today’s photo, I cheated. Here are five photos that kind of sum up the night at Grañón. Evening Mass was celebrated in a chapel of the church below. Most interesting altarpiece of the humiliation of Christ. Mass was followed by a communal meal, which I very much enjoyed. Not many albergues do this, which is too bad since it […]
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I took a lot of photos at the Grañón Albergue because in my head it is the absolute epitome of what a small albergue should be: intimate, eclectic, homey, and well-loved. This particular photo sums up the feeling of the place. There were guitars and ukeleles, and so of course song broke out! The pilgrims are playing and singing a […]
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This is the exterior of the Parroquial San Juan Bautista in Grañón – both the parish church and the village’s albergue. We slept in the steeple of the church, which is larger on the inside than it is on the outside, as it somehow fits two large sleeping chambers and a kitchen. There is also a beautiful common room with […]
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The actual entrance to the town on the Camino is somewhat uninspiring. Truth be told, it’s a bit depressing with crumbled buildings and trash and bits of discarded concrete pipe. But you go up a set of stairs and just a few streets in, and it looks like this, so huzzah! Grañón is a solid little town with a good […]
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Camino graffiti is by turns inspiring or enigmatic or just plain silly. Wherever on that spectrum you think this particular one sits, however, it has special meaning for me. Partially this is related to the admonition of a priest when I was in high school exhorting me to “seek Truth” – which I proceeded to do for twenty years before […]
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