18 kilometers.

Day 6 on The Camino.

Or

Remember That One Time We Slept In A Barn.

This post is our trip log from Villafranca to Atapuerca. You can read more posts from this walk, or from other Camino trips. 

One of the reasons our albergue in Villafranca was full, besides being the only one open, was that the next town was 12km away. Along most of the Way, there are stops every few kilometers, but from Villafranca, you walk up a steep mountain incline (really the only one between Logrono and Burgos) and then follow a long, slow descent into San Juan de Ortega.

The mountain trail began right outside our albergue, and we welcomed the incline on the first part of our day as a way to quickly get warm with fresh morning legs (as opposed to already tired afternoon legs). The trail was still snow-covered from the day before, which made the walk quite beautiful.

Especially since it was not currently snowing (or raining).

Kandace and I talked all morning for the first time in several days. We realized we hadn’t been talking while walking on the previous couple of days because of the weather. In fact, our whole faces had been covered and we had just been marching with our heads down for most of the day.

The first 12 kilometers flew by and as we descended into San Juan, we decided the biggest gift of this day was that we were finally out of the wind. 

It was still cold, so we were grateful to find a cozy bar in San Juan with a fireplace. It was completely empty when we arrived, so, as usual, we re-arranged the chairs so that we were sitting right by the fire enjoying our coffee and eggs by the time others started to arrive.

Everyone was in good spirits after the previous day and we laughed as we filled the small space and tried each other’s food. After about an hour, a new group came in so I started collecting our things to get moving again. It seemed like a good time to vacate our seats by the fire. The young guy who was journaling the night before and  his walking partner from Australia gratefully took our seats, the Australian mentioning that he needed a new pair of legs. Apparently they had come well over twice as far as we had walked the day before and it sounded like they had perhaps pushed it too hard. It reminded me of why I really enjoy doing the Camino in stages rather than all at once.

Perhaps the 800 kilometers is so daunting that you find yourself just wanting to get as much of it behind you as you can each day. And so some days you just walk until you can no longer feel your legs. I’m not sure. We later ran into the first guy again. He passed us as we were stopping for the day and introduced himself (Fernando…which of course, I took as a cue to break into the Abba song). He had left his friend behind and was planning to walk all the way to Burgos. Burgos!! We couldn’t believe it. That was nearly 40 km in one day! But I suppose that once Burgos felt within striking distance, he just wanted to keep going until he got there. He was planning to take a rest day in Burgos so he said he’d see us there when we arrived.

One day I think I will tackle doing a whole Camino, and I’m so curious how it will change my perception of The Way to walk for longer than a week. At this point, I wasn’t quite ready to get to Burgos. I felt a bit sad about the journey coming to an end.

We walked in a slight drizzle after our mid-morning stop, but still no wind and nothing like the rain or snow of our other days.

From San Juan, there were villages about every three kilometers the rest of the way into Burgos, so we had plenty of choices for stops if the weather got worse. 

We continued through a forest and kept up a fairly happy pace through another village (Agnes) and over some lovely green hills before getting to the next town, all the while enjoying being able to laugh and chat without being blown over by wind.

As we came into the little town of Atapuerca, a small parade of people came out of a building led by two men playing instruments. They walked from the town hall to a bar at the edge of town, where they all went inside for drinks and dancing. Kandace and I had no idea what was going on but we (and several other pilgrims) followed the musicians like the Pied Piper into the bar and proceeded to stay there for the rest of the afternoon.

We ordered lunch and drinks and listened to the small band for as long as the party lasted.

(Here’s a short video of us sitting in the bar.)

When it finally finished up, we decided that we might as well stay. There was a little rain falling and we had already walked 18km. Kandace held down our table at the bar, while I headed up the street to put our names down at the town albergue.

I had read that there were only 18 beds, and maybe it was because the rooms the night before had been full, but I was concerned that we needed to go ahead and claim our beds. The albergue was at the top of a hill, called The Hutte, and I went into the reception area and communicated to an older lady that I wanted to pay for two beds. I might should have been a little suspicious when the fee was only 6 euros per bed, but I was delighted at the bargain. After paying, I walked back down to the bar where Kandace and I finished our lunch and our drinks and sat visiting with some of the locals for the afternoon. We kept expecting to see some of our friends, but they had either stopped at the town behind us or continued on ahead. 

We finally pulled on our backpacks and walked up the hill to the albergue, which actually turned out to be a barn. We laughed and laughed as we spread our things out, took showers and got dressed for dinner.

We had planned to find a grocery store to buy dinner but there were no shops in town, so we ended up back down at the bar until the restaurant next to our barn opened for dinner.

The same lady who checked us into the albergue served us dinner, including a gorgeous eggplant dish as my vegetarian option. A wood-burning fireplace (our fourth in two days) in the restaurant made our lonely two person dinner a lot warmer.

After dinner, we went next door to our room, where we were the only ones. We laughed at my earlier need to “secure two beds” out of concern that it would be full. The barn door didn’t lock from the inside, and all of a sudden, the small, quiet town felt kind of creepy, so I barricaded the door with some chairs before we crawled into bed.

The room was drafty and cold, and I kept having to get up to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t seem to fall asleep. I was awake for what felt like all night, and couldn’t get warm. I kept imagining animals crawling out of the barn roof and into our beds.

I would get up and go to the bathroom and then have a whole conversation with myself about how or why I had chosen this poor sleeping arrangement. I managed to convince myself that it was going to be funny eventually, and I just had to endure a few more hours of the cold, dank room. Finally, I looked at my phone and it was a respectable enough hour to wake up, and I so I asked Kandace if she was awake and when she moaned back a sleepy “Ugh, yes,” I said, “Dear Lord, please let’s get out of here!” 

This post is our trip log from Villafranca to Atapuerca. You can read more posts from this walk, or from other Camino trips. 

The post Day 6 on The Camino (Villafranca to Atapuerca) appeared first on Alison Chino.

22 kilometers.

Day 4 on The Camino.

Or

Thank God It’s Not Raining.

This post is our trip log from Santo Domingo to Belorado. You can read more posts from this walk, or from other Camino trips. 

We had a little coffee and breakfast before starting out around 8am.

We were so relieved that it wasn’t raining when we started. In fact there were a few patches of blue sky. It was still cold and windy, but Kandace and I both had an extra layer on and had managed to get most of our things dry the night before so we were happy.

We started out walking in a larger group, but everyone else got ahead of us when we stopped in Granon (about 7km into the day). We had coffee and tortilla in a cute little bar, and on a tiny shelf near the bar there were four seashells and two hats for sale. The seashell is the sign of St James, so most pilgrims hang a shell on their backpacks (You can’t ever see ours in photos because our rain covers are ALWAYS on). These were the first hats we had seen since Kandace had lost hers. We hadn’t managed to find one the day before, and this one was so cute, so Kandace bought it along with our coffees.

We didn’t stop for long because we had a bit further to go on this day. We wanted to stay ahead while it wasn’t pouring down rain. And though it rained here and there, we never had the same thrashing rain from the day before, so we were in generally good spirits all day.

In the afternoon, the path seemed to hug the local highway a good bit, which was a little loud. Also it was fairly dull going, just a path between a field and road for long stretches. 

We didn’t stop again until we reached the edge of town. We were both getting cold and needed a bathroom, so we popped in a cafe. I ordered a tea and we ate what was left of our dinner from the night before. As we came out of the cafe and near our hostel, the sun started to shine. It was so delightful. It seemed like years since we had actually felt the sun on our faces.

And as we reached the door of the pilgrims’ albergue in Belorado, a dog came out and greeted Kandace. Between the sun and the dog, Kandace was insanely happy. She spent at least the next hour with that dog. (She was missing her own dog back home.)

This hostel actually ended up being one of our very favorites. The host was incredibly welcoming and friendly. We paid 10 extra euros to have our own room and he carried both our backpacks up to the third floor for us.

We immediately took hot showers and then dumped our backpacks out everywhere, taking full advantage of all our space.

Because it was winter, the albergue wasn’t serving dinner, so after we had settled in and cleaned up, we walked into town to get food for dinner. We loved the grocery store in this town. I noticed in a lot of the stores in Spain that you don’t choose your own produce. Instead, you would tell an attendant what you wanted and then they would bag up your two apples or your carrots or whatever. For me, this usually entailed a lot of pointing and signaling, but in Belorado, the girl who was attending spoke perfect English and was super helpful. She was handling the produce the bread and deli, which was about a third of the little grocery store. But she was very efficient, and even recommended which bread we should eat with our wine and cheese. While she was helping us, she noticed that some of our fellow pilgrims were starting to touch the produce, so she finished us up and went off quickly to go set them straight. We felt like she was really running the whole place, and I could have stayed in the store a while longer just watching her assist everyone. 

Back at the albergue, we ended up finding lots of folks who we hadn’t seen in a while. The French couple we met the first night and the Italian bikers from our second night were both there. We figured they had gotten way ahead of us, but the weather seemed to have set everyone back.

It was like a big reunion at dinner. Everyone shared their food and we even had a special Chocolate + Banana + Creme Fraiche Dessert that Tony made after discovering that the Koreans had never before tried freshly whipped cream. It was a big hit.

While we were sitting around the table, it started to snow outside, so everyone began checking the weather and confirmed that yes, it was also supposed to be snowing the next day. Tony suggested that since the following day was Sunday, we could take a break from the snow by going to Mass in one of the towns along the way, which we thought was a great idea. 

Kandace and I had built in a couple of extra days, so as we were going back to our room, we talked about how we could do a short day if the weather was really brutal. There’s no hurry. We were laughing as we went to bed, probably partly because I kept hitting my head on the low wooden beams in our room. But also, rehearsing the events of the day before we went to sleep always made us laugh.

This post is our trip log from Santo Domingo to Belorado. You can read more posts from this walk, or from other Camino trips. 

The post Day 4 on The Camino (Santo Domingo to Belorado) appeared first on Alison Chino.

21 kilometers.

Day 3 on The Camino.

Or

We Only Thought It Was Raining Yesterday.

This post is our trip log from Najera to Santo Domingo de la Calzada. You can read more posts from this walk, or from other Camino trips. 

We had decided at dinner the night before that we three Americans would start out walking together. We were planning to get to Santa Domingo which was 21 km away, and Rohit, our new BFF, was hoping to get a little further to Granon, which was 28 km away.

If you’re walking the whole Camino, I think you have to average about 28 kilometers every day in order to reach Santiago within a month or so. On our first night in Navarrete, everyone else had been walking since well before Logrono. Actually there were many nights that we sat around the table with folks who had walked lots more kilometers than we had. 

In Najera, we were the last ones to leave the albergue. One of the advantages of being the last to go is that it’s always super easy to find your shoes.  

Our new friend was probably anxious to get going, but he was super patient with us. We took a photo with the albergue hosts before setting off. 

As soon as we got outside of the town, the wind really picked up. But even though it was cold, it was a beautiful morning.

We were soon walking through vineyards again and enjoying talking with one another.

When we came to Azofra, we had been walking a little over an hour.

But we hadn’t really had any breakfast, so we stopped at a cafe in town.

We ordered coffees and a slice of tortilla, which in Spain, is a dish of eggs and potatoes, layered together in sort of a pie or really like a frittata. All the bars along this section of the Camino had tortillas baked, so we ate it often, but we first tried it in Azofra.

After a quick stop we got back out on the trail and kept walking into the wind. It had definitely picked up. It was blowing so hard that you wanted every little part of your body to be covered. 

The views all around us were gorgeous.

You could see for a long way in every direction, which also made you feel like you were going to be walking against the wind for a really long time. The sky kept changing because the wind was blowing different weather patterns through so quickly. 

You could literally lean forward as you walked with all your weight and the wind would hold you up. It was crazy. It reminded me of the many windy walks from my days of living in Aberdeen, and I was thinking about how I would get home from a walk in Scotland and just be exhausted from the wind. I started dreaming about a hot cup of tea. 

Somewhere on the windy plain, our American friend picked up his pace a bit and got ahead of us. We figured we’d see him in the next town or in the next life, so we sat down on the side of the road for a minute to try to get a break from the wind. If you got really close to the ground, there was a pause in how much the wind was whipping your face.

We watched a sweet man and woman from Korea who approached us walking in a line. The man was in front and she was walking behind him so he could block the wind for her. They thought we had the right idea, so they came and sat down with us to get some relief from the wind.

Another friend who had been at our hostels for both of the last two nights walked by and paused to give everyone a little encouragement. Earlier when we had seen him, he was singing Rocky music out loud: Dun dun dunnnnn dun dun dun dun dunnnnn, which made us laugh and forget about the wind for a minute. In fact this Italian guy from Belgium probably made us laugh more than anyone else we met on the Camino. Among other strange items, he carried a pink wig in his backpack, just for fun. He always got ahead of us, but then we would pass him again because he was stopping to roll his own cigarettes and smoke. He was basically chain smoking throughout his entire Camino. Anyway, he paused to give the couple next to us a little pep talk before going on his way. 

We finally pulled ourselves back up into the wind and walked until we reached the edge of the plain and came to the next little town (Cirueña). It was about noon when we stopped at the first open bar we saw. We weren’t even super hungry, but we both felt we just had to have a real break from the wind.

When we got inside, the girl at the bar was serving up paella, so we decided we’d have some. We still had 6km to go after lunch, so we tried not to sit for too long. We headed back out into the wind, and soon it was also raining. The wind made the rain feel like little pellets of ice hitting us, which is also an experience I’ve had walking in Scotland, but Kandace, who maybe has not been hit with both rain and wind so aggressively was questioning everything. After the little town, the plain opened back up so there was no escaping the weather.

We felt completely exposed, but we just marched on. Really, there was nothing else to do. We couldn’t really hear each other with the wind being so loud, and we had our heads down trying to keep the rain off our faces. For two hours, we continued in the thrashing rain, so that there was not one little piece of clothing on our bodies that was dry by the time we reached Santo Domingo.

Once the town was in sight, we both kept muttering things like, I can’t feel my legs. I can’t wait for a hot shower. I don’t know if I can go any further. We briefly discussed stopping in the first bar we saw, but we were so desperate to get out of wet clothes that we kept marching until we found the only open albergue. It was connected to the church next door, so it felt very somber when we walked inside, with vaulted ceilings and long cavernous halls. There were two hosts, which we later referred to as good cop and bad cop. The younger one gave us very curt instructions to put our wet things in a room off to the side and would not process us until we had dug out our passports, but then there was an older gentleman who seemed to feel very sorry for us since we were so drenched and miserable.

Much to the annoyance of the younger guy, it took us a while to peel off our wet things, and then when we were both down to just one wet layer and shivering, we pulled out our passports and found some cash so we could get our bed assignments. The beds were numbered and he actually gave us tiny little pieces of paper with our bed numbers on them, so you didn’t choose where you slept. We were sort of all filed into this one room full of beds. Then the older host walked us up a few flights of stairs to where the albergue was. We thanked him, threw our stuff down and practically ran for the showers. And I promise you this: A shower has never felt so good in all my life as that hot shower did. It restored us back to being human in a matter of minutes. This was not the first time in my life I have loved a hot shower so much, and I’m sure it won’t be the last (it was not even the last on this trip), but it was the best. I was beyond cold when we arrived at the hostel. Neither Kandace or I had on an extra bottom layer under our hiking pants, a mistake we did not make again for the rest of the trip, so we were thawing out from a deeply settled cold.

We rested on our beds for a while, but since it was still relatively early we decided we had to venture back out. Kandace had lost her hat somehow and so was on the hunt for a new one, plus we wanted to visit the church, which apparently keeps live roosters because of a legend about a rooster coming back to life. (What?). So we put on whatever dry things we could find and went back out into the rain to see the church.

Then we went to a bar and had a drink and a snack before wandering around a little more to look for a hat (no luck) and to find ourselves a little picnic dinner (success).

We went back to the hostel and joined our friends (old and new) at the community table. We pulled out our groceries and tasted some of the dishes being cooked up. Our American friend and several others had gone on ahead to the next town, (Well done them for braving 7 more kilometers in the rain!) but there were several folks we knew with us. The couple from Korea who we had stopped on the side of the road with was there, as well as Tony (the guy from Belgium) and Jin-Young (from Korea). There was a gal from Poland that we had met, and several others from Korea. There was a lot of lamenting about the weather and wondering what tomorrow would be like. But tonight we were cozy and warm. We went to bed in our (mostly) dry sleeping bags. Everyone’s wet things made the hostel bedroom smell like a gym bag, but we still fell asleep grateful to be out of the rain. 

This post is our trip log from Najera to Santo Domingo de la Calzada. You can read more posts from this walk, or from other Camino trips. 

The post Day 3 on The Camino (Najera to Santo Domingo de la Calzada) appeared first on Alison Chino.