The Tale of Tristan and Emmy

The Camino clan, minus two bold souls who had decided to walk rather than bus the 20 more kilometers to Burgos, sat at dinner in the plaza across from the Cathedral.  "If this were a movie, I would want to cut to Tristan and Emmy right now," Gabriela said.

--

They stood in front of the fountain in yet another tiny pueblo. "Alright," said Tristan, "this might be our last chance at water, so drink up now." They drank and drank; Emmy emptied her Camelbak, and Tristan left only a liter in his bottle. Then they pressed the button on the pump.  Nothing came out.

--
"Dessert!" someone at the table cried as the dishes of morcilla blood sausage and seafood paella and eggs and chorizo and individual pizzas were cleared away. "I went to this great Italian ice cream place," said Tim.  "Let's go!"

--

The road had led through town after town after town, and finally, finally, they were seeing signs for Burgos.  Tristan, in consultation with the guidebook, had led them along a path of gray signs rather than the Camino's yellow arrows in an attempt to reach the albergue faster, but now they were quite lost.  Mustering his schooldays' Spanish skills, Tristan approached an old man, showed him the guidebook's map of Burgos, and asked where they were.  The man pointed below the map.

--

Revelers for the Fiestas de San Pedro began to gather along the river and in the plazas as the group licked their colored gelato cones, flavors with names like fresa and turrón and nata.  They wandered under stone arches, past cafes and tree-lined walkways, through the well-dressed crowds and flower altars, meandering in pairs and trios back to the albergue.

--

It took another 3km of walking through Burgos itself to find the albergue. Along the way, they had seen far in the distance a Burger King behind a mall's glass face. "Tomorrow," said Emmy.  "We just have to get through this, and tomorrow we will take our reward." And now here they were, at 9:00pm, facing the swanky municipal albergue.  As they checked in at the front desk and took the elevator to Planta 3, Emmy imagined her family and friends waiting with open arms, ready to whisk her off to dinner.  The doors opened -- and there were rows of empty bunks.

--

Gabriela, Guardian Angel of Good, walked into their room at the albergue to find Emmy facedown on the bed.  Tristan was asleep a few bunks away. "Are you okay?" Gabriela asked.  "Do you want some food?" Emmy looked up at Gabriela's shining face, and with a sudden release of exhaustion and emotion, burst into tears. "Yes," she sobbed, "Yes."

Overheard by a European Man Smoking by the Clotheslines at 10:30pm

"When people begin to take responsibility for their own lives, and learn not to pay attention to what their mother says they should do, to what their textbooks say they should do, to what their government says they should do, then they begin to figure out what they want.  And once you know what you want you can follow your path."

Bus to Burgos

All but two took a recklessly-careening minibus playing American pop music to Burgos.  We're here a day early because there's a city-wide fiesta tonight, with music and traditional costumes and swarming crowds.  Lots of us thinking about people back home; I lit candles in the cathedral.  For dinner, I had a plate of meat: bacon, chorizo in red wine, chicken, fried egg, and morcilla, Burgos blood sausage.  Then cherry Italian ice cream.  Our first official day of rest tomorrow!

My latest Let's Go blog post!

http://www.letsgo.com/article/3904-5-tips-for-scaling-and-surviving-the-pyrenees

And Somehow We Found Ourselves in the Alpines

We were a small group today -- just six of us walking, and the rest taking the bus for various reasons.  We left at 5:40 in the morning, the earliest so far, and stopped for coffee (Cola Cao and yogurt for me) twice.  As sunlight lifted the fog and the darkness, we became aware that we were traversing forested mountains, the Montañas de Oca, full of purple flowers and a whistling breeze that stirred our feet and spirits.  At noon we had a picnic lunch by the road: bread, butter, chorizo, peach jam, cheese, almond cookies.  Cut-down cedars scented the air; trucks full of logs rolled by, slowing down so the drivers could wave and to keep down the dust.  After a gentle, gradual decline, we emerged into green fields, punctuated with stalks of vibrant purple bell blooms, little pink and white flowers amid wind-tossed wheat, cornflower blue butterflies flitting about my face, the rising red roofs of San Juan de Ortega, where we got ice cream, then Agés, where we met the rest of the group.  And then a chartered mini-bus to Burgos.

My Favorite Thing

Cola Cao -- steamed milk with sugar and powdered chocolate.  Makes mornings bearable.

Belorado

We stopped in Belarado today, a town of crumbling walls, majestic streetlamps, and vibrant graffiti murals. Storks nest in the roof of the old white stone church.  We went to Panadería Paisano and got homemade donuts, and we wandered the Plaza Mayor and surrounding streets, lined with the cast-metal footprints of famous people, set amid the stones.  We chatted and talked serious and lazed and laughed in the Albergue Cuatro Cantones, which had a spacious lawn and a dining room and a swimming pool and suspiciously only cost 5€ per person.  We took a break from cooking and had the best fish, merluza (hake), in the whole world.  I got some scary (but all fine now) updates from home and felt the love of friends new and old, of family near and far.

Having a Swingin' Good Time

Ladies of the Canyon

We made it to Castilla y Leon!!

Sore Feet in Santo Domingo

We're staying in a hostel run by the Confraternity of St. James.  We've got our walking down to six hours or less -- 6am to noon -- to beat the heat.  And new plan: Anyone ready at 5:30am can get started!

Takin' a Break

A PG-13 Pronouncement -- zoomed pic :)

En route to Santo Domingo

The Streets of Najera

For my sister Jamie. :)

The Happiest Moment of My Life: A Real Bathroom

A towel and a door and a tub and everything. "Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good..."

The Pilgrim's Poem

Graffiti of Hope

In a beehive-shaped shelter of stone on the way to Najera.

The First Supper

We bought groceries and cooked in the albergue's kitchen -- pasta with chorizo for €1 per person.  We've broken into teams to do this every night of the week!

Logrono

We're (attempting) to leave at 5:30am now to beat the heat wave that's hitting Spain.  At about 8am this morning we arrived in the college town of Logrono, officially marking our departure from the autonomia (similar to a U.S. state) of Navarra and into the one of La Rioja.  We had breakfast at a cafe called Ibiza (ordering at the bar and carrying it to the table is 40 cents cheaper than ordering from the table!), where I had cola cao, the best hot chocolate in a world.  Then we found an open pharmacy (after 9am of course), and I convinced a pharmacist to give me and Erica benadryl for allergies, even though it is only prescribed as a sleeping aid in Spain.  Go figure.  (P.S. Shoutout to Aunt Vicki for her quick and effective medical advice for an allergic reaction I had to some plant on the trail!)  Wish there was more time to spend in this city -- it's La Rioja's bustling capital and seems like a lot of fun.  Instead, we were off to Navarette!

The Little Lost Boot: A Coda

Written by popular request (from my mother)

--

It was a disturbingly quiet morning for the little boot.  Normally he was being pelted by pebbles and ground into gravel by 7am, but this morning he was tied up to the bottom of the pack, like he had seen other boots tied on the trail when their owners wore sandals.  It was a luxurious ride and a welcome rest.  It must have been one for his owner too -- for suddenly he, his sister, and the pack were tossed into the darkness under a large bus.  20 minutes later, he blinked at the light, and at a sign that read "Viana."  He was traveling by pack again, past a playground, a row of trees, a stunning view of the cluttered roofs below when THWACK!  A fall, a sharp thud, then darkness.

--

The girl nearly ran down Viana's narrow cobblestone streets, darting between the towering cramped buildings made of heavy slabs of tan stone, gathering strange looks from townspeople out for Sunday siesta.  One, two, three pharmacies sought out for allergy meds, and none open on a Sunday, even the one marked 24-hour.  And what was worse, across all the streets of this town there was no lone boot roasting in the midday heat.  She would have to buy sandals.

--

The boot sat beside the counter next to the rack of hats.  A woman's hand had seized him, carried him to this shoe store, given him to the man who owned Planet Agua.  The man had placed him here, a pile of fabric and rubber and mud without value.  It had been better, he thought, to be battered against the rocks and thorny bushes than to sit here, alone and thus useless, purposeless.  As he thought this, a boy came into the store with his mother and his two friends.  "We need to buy a hat quickly, then run back to tell Julia the store's open again after siesta," the mother said. The mother went to the counter to look for hats -- and suddenly, the boot realized the boy was looking at him.  Then the boy was picking him up, and the owner of Planet Agua was saying that someone had found it and dropped it off at the store, and the boy was saying, "That's my friend!  That's her boot!," and the mother and the friends were overjoyed, and they bought the hat and raced the boot back to the girl, who was in the middle of talking to video of her family on the computer, and the girl saw her friends, and the girl saw the boot, and the boot saw the girl, and they both remembered what it was like to be loved.

Escape from Purgatory

The last couple days have tested our mettle.
Yesterday we walked an additional 3km to make up for an early stopping point the day before. Everything was going well -- cute little towns, wine fountain, helpful old man, a lunch/ice cream shop in Villamayor. Mariela, at age 13 the second-youngest member of our group, sprained her ankle, so she and her parents went ahead to Los Arcos via taxi. The rest of us set out for the final 12km, which the guidebook assured us would be isolated and without water pumps but would offer "glorious" landscapes of vineyards, pine trees, and olive orchards.
My group of six brought up the caboose, and somewhere along what felt like the same stretch of road repeated over and over again, we lost it. First came the laugh attack. Then, the improvisation of eulogies for group members. Finally, we approached a crossroads, with the familiar blue Camino road sign with the yellow shell, which we assumed would be our salvation, assuring us that Los Arcos was just over the next hill. With an involuntary moan of betrayal, we looked up to discover there were still 5.7 km left.
That's when things started getting weird.For a minute, it seemed like everyone was going to go all "Lord of the Flies." Instead, we became six-year-olds. We did yoga, lay down in the vineyard, ran through the vineyard, made bad jokes, and finally decided we were in Purgatory.
A man we later learned was from Liverpool passed us on the road and talked with us.With each "and me day," "and me wife," "and me walking pole," we began to believe he was a mirage. As he wandered off into the distance, the good Gabriela demanded we all put on bandanas and inducted us as The Paisley Gang, a gaggle bandits breaking out of Purgatory. We had call signs (nicknames a la "Battlestar Galactica") like Time Bomb, The Bald Eagle, and Little Momma, and we developed a mythology of how we had escaped and who we were and where we were going. Eventually we devolved into shouting camp songs and German hymns. And then suddenly there we were, singing "Que Sera" as we descended gently for the last time into the arms of the good souls who had come to meet us.

We've walked for one week now, and the pretenses and polishing we've kept up are finally fading. We're messy, tired, tense, and we don't always like each other. We're more than a little jealous of the Swedish Lutheran teen church group going home tomorrow. But the saying goes: The Camino doesn't give you what you want, it gives you what you need. As for me, salvation was this evening: four friends with faces aglow, running towards me and holding my lost hiking boot.

El fuente de vino

En route to Los Arcos

Ciraqui

Tons of Tiny Towns

Puente la Reina two nights ago and Villatuerca last night (the nicest albergue ever -- a beautiful bathroom and hammocks!) and Los Arcos today. The walks have been through villages of peeling buildings, over endless hills, in the hot sunshine, past windmills and wheatfields.  We sang songs from "Man of La Mancha" and ABBA.  We watched Ciraqui, a city-covered hill, rise before us and suddenly encompass us in its winding streets and then spit us out again.  We stood gape-mouthed and grinning as a flood of sheep (and a few goats) descended upon the brush under the freeway overpass.  We met a old man in Azqueta, population <40, who invited us to his home to stamp our credenciales and who had biked the Camino in 1965.  We walked alone, in pairs, with other peregrinos, in groups.  We're braving blisters, hurt ankles and knees, rashes and sore feet.  All 14 of us arrived in Puente la Reina together.

In Pamplona

Walking down the streets and the fortress

Pamplona: The Promised Land

Highlights:
The stone fortress walls
Arriving in an honest-to-goodness city
Visiting El Corte Ingles (Costco meets Harrod's)
Going tapeando! Aka eating tapas
Hanging out in Hemingway's territory
Washing machines and dryers

St. Jean Pied de Port

Though technically in France, St. Jean, where we arrived on Sunday, feels a lot like Spain, perhaps because it's so close to the border, or the Basque heritage, or simply because our minds are so focused on the Camino; In any case, we all kept mixing up si with oui, por favor with s'il vous plait.

When we arrived in the morning, we stopped by the pilgrim's office to get the first stamp for our credentials, as well as some helpful handouts about places to stay and the distance and elevation between towns. We also booked beds in a refugio, or pilgrim hostel -- ten of us taking up a whole room, Kevin in another with other pilgrims.

We got our first taste of the pilgrim community in St. Jean.  As we waited outside the office, a British man approached and started talking to us.  He had walked several years ago and was now sightseeing towns along the way with his wife.  He said the best advice he had was "just keep going." Then about a minute later, he returned and added that if we felt a hot spot -- a sore place on your foot that will turn into a blister -- we must immediately stop and put some moleskin on it.

Many interesting characters walk the Camino.  Alessandra, a college student finishing her gap year from Yale and who began walking in Southeast France.  Susan and Nancy, two women from Lake Tahoe who are walking to celebrate their 60th birthdays.  Angelo, an out of work Italian.  And this was before we started walking!

Waiting for the refugio to open, we walked to the citadel, a quiet place with towering moss covered stone walls that suddenly end to reveal startlingly wide yet clear and detailed views (see picture) of St. Jean, nestled in the Pyrenees.  Getting ready for the Camino as much about mental preparation as it is physical and logistical, and up here under ballooning clouds I finally felt ready to kick off the journey.  As fellow pilgrims said to me all day, buen camino!

The First Two Days

Were awful.  That's just the blatant truth.  Day one: the climb up the Pyrenees.  The pain, the fog and sometime rain, the relentless stony uphill.  Several times, I wondered what could have possibly led me to think this pilgrimage was a sane idea.  We encountered moping cows, horses with bells (ringing bells seemed to pervade the mist, even when there were no horses in sight), and a man named Dan who had arrived from Korea, where he'd spent a year teaching English, and would be leaving for an accounting job in Seattle after the Camino.  The eleven of us split into three groups, and mine, the middle, took eleven hours to arrive in Roncevalles.  The albergue (another term for pilgrim hostel) had soft beds and hot showers.  In a word: paradise.

The second day, supposedly easier because it went downhill, was not much better!  It poured most of the day, making for muddy trails (shoutout to my nana, who predicted this before I left) and inexplicable slate pathways sloping steeply downward that became slick and terrifying.  We were in three groups again, and mine stopped at a tiny bar for lunch, where we ate bocadillos (a yummy kind of sandwich) and were accosted by stray cats.  We continued walking, and a sign assuring us we were 3 km from the town of Zubiri proved wildly false.  (A much more motivating sign we passed is attached!)  We met up with the last group in Zubiri, got ice cream, and though we did not think our feet would walk another inch, went on to the last town, Larassoana, because the others were there.

Instead of taking the Camino the last few km, we walked alongside the highway, which was flatter.  In a town we passed through, where pilgrims don't normally go, little kids were running around, and one pointed to her mother and asked who we were. "Son peregrinos," the mother said.  Immediately I became confused -- I didn't see anyone in dirty medieval clothes, barefoot, wearing a cross.  What pilgrims?  And then I realized she was talking about us, about me.  And suddenly, I didn't feel sweaty and sore and severely out of shape and physically and emotionally broken down.  For the first time, I felt the flush of pride at being part of something special, outside of time, celebrated.  I felt like a pilgrim.

Leaving Roncevalles!

Updates coming soon when WiFi permits!

"It's Been A Hard Day's Night..."

"...I should be sleeping like a log"

The Beatles had it right! Everyone tried to catch what little shuteye was possible on the cramped train seats, but by the time we arrived in Bayonne at midnight we were pretty exhausted. And then the real fun began.

With 8 hours to kill before our bus to St. Jean Pied de Port, we followed a group of backpackers to a hotel on the main square. But €75 per night for a double was way out of our price range, so we headed back to the train station -- which was closed! So we camped out against the wall of the station, peacefully talking and snacking until a red-shirted man began hovering around us, talking animatedly in foreign languages, some of them imaginary.

An hour and a half later, we were sufficiently creeped out enough to move. After an inadvertent walking tour of Bayonne, visiting various hotels (most closed or full), we crossed a bridge over the river and settled in a tiny park with two benches and a large column that was either art or poorly-hidden plumbing. I spread my tarp on the ground, laid my sleeping bag on top, put in my earphones to listen to James Taylor, and attempted to sleep. My thoughts drifted back to school, to the shadowy people sleeping on the grass in Cambridge Commons, always studiously avoided after dark. And then I realized -- now we those people.

While I was sleeping, I'm told the brave ones keeping watch scared off a dog and a lost-looking man. My heroes! At 6:30am, the train station opened and we waited inside for our bus (and tried gateau basque, a delicious cake-like bread), and at 8:20 we were off to St. Jean!

St. Jean is a town of white buildings with red roofs and shutters, nestled below the deep green peaks of the Pyrenees. Sea shells, symbols of St. James and of the Camino, adorn walls and signs.  We followed them to the pilgrim credentialing office and picked up our own shells for our backpacks.  Then off to lunch, and a climb up an old stone citadel with stunning views.  Finally we ended at a refugio, or hostel for pilgrims, where we enjoyed much needed showers and relaxed for the rest of the day.

Picture: Outside the train station around 6am.
Picture: The sign on our refugio.

The City of Lights

We made it!  Here are 11 of the 14 pilgrims dropping off luggage to be used after the Camino. We bought our train tickets and then headed to lunch, where I was joyously reunited with my great Parisian love: the tuna fish baguette.  After adding an Orangina (here, pronounced "orAHN-geeNAH"), I now consider my life complete.  This 500-mile walk is just to burn off the calories.

We killed some time before our train to Bayonne by grocery shopping, and then a few of us walked to the Jardin du Luxembourg, a sprawling park that stirred sharply sudden and vivid memories of my last visit, when I was twelve: the imposing gold-tipped fence, the pale green chairs scattered about, the epic zipline in the playground, the carousel where children spear bronze rings with sticks, the bocce courts populated by aging men, the little round lake.  I noticed some new things, too -- palm trees amid the carefully sculpted hedges and delicately arranged flower gardens, a man juggling tennis balls, several couples entangled in each other.

Back at the train station, we found most of the others sound asleep, lulled by the late afternoon stillness, and we quickly joined them.  Just before six, we boarded our train and raced into the crop fields and billowing clouds, leaving the radiant city behind.  The moveable feast came with us in the form of packaged couscous, a fourpack of yogurt, and plastic spoons from the Supermarche.

My first Let's Go blog post!!!!! :)

Camino Diaries: Dust, Cactus, and Time Travel in the California Hills - Let's Go Travel - The Leader in Budget Travel

"'Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,' said the Rat."

Only "The Wind in the Willows" can capture what it is to leave home.  My goodbye gathering (plus Aunt Lizard of course, who was graciously taking the photo).

Where I'm Going

Traditionally, the Camino began at your doorstep and ended in Santiago de Compostela. The particular route I'll be walking is the most well-known, the Camino Francés. It begins in St. Jean de Pied de Port and is about 483 miles long.

Field of Stars

El Camino de Santiago. The Way of St. James. Over a thousand years and nearly 500 miles leading to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.  Going along with the celestial theme, compostela apparently means "field of stars," according to Wikipedia.  There's something poetic about it: feet treading the same road, transcending time and space, forging invisible connections reflected in the starlight.

Past midnight two days before leaving, and I'm starting to muse philosophically about the ramifications of this journey...  Before now my main excitement was how toned my legs will be by the time we get to Santiago!