Brenda and Brent - Trip Diary

Spain - Sep 24 - Sep 30

We spent a rest day day in Burgos, then on the trail again until we were stopped by rain in Pontferrada on Sep 30.
There are a lot of Tapas bars in Spain. A tapas bar has only counter service. You can order a drink - coffee, wine - and ready to eat snacks. The snacks are often a form of sandwich, filled with anything from an omelet to sliced cured ham.

This restaurant in Burgos also served salads and regular meals - but you ordered at the bar and picked the food up at the bar when it was ready.

We managed to get a meal ordered and eaten. You can see Brenda is a little surprised that the portions look small for people who are cycling all day.
We spent many hours the next day, a rest day from cycling, in the Burgos Cathedral. It is full of fantastic altars, paintings, silver and gold goblets, tapestrys, and monumental architecture.

This is the skylight over the main part of the cathedral. It is perhaps 100 feet high, with ornate carving all the way to the top. If is hard to see in the picture but there are two levels of balconies, inaccessible to the public, near the top. Pretty amazing building.

Of course, after the 20th little chapel - each with its own altar, pictures, tombs, carved walls and columns - it gets a little much. You would think that 2 or 3 big chapels would be enough. So, this is not a single building, conceived and built at one time. Rather it is a collection of buildings, built in different styles and different periods, each one to honor the important religious person of the day.

There we signs here and there saying no photos or videos. I took a few, but decided to not use the flash. These pictures are a little shaky as a result of the long exposure times required.

Here is one of the bigger altars.

OK, just one more from inside the Cathedral - a painting. All the paintings are uncovered, easily accessible to the public and to vandals. I suspect that these are modern copies of the originals - the colours are just too bright to be old pictures.
A typical Spanish street - a pedestrian walkway under plane trees near the old city. These trees have such dense leaves that it is shaded here, even at noon. It remains cool and pleasant even on hot days.
After running all over town trying to find a library with an available internet terminal, and working around a few problems with differences in internet usage, we finally got to an internet Cafe.

One glass of wine and a little fiddling here and there and the first web page is up. You can see the statue of El Cid on the monitor.

After the rest day at Burgos we were back on the way.

The countryside after Burgos changes from hilly to flat - this is a high altitude prairie, not a lot unlike the Chilcotin in some ways.

Our daily mileage started to increase as we spent almost all the time riding and almost no time pushing out bikes up and down hills.

The hills are longer and gentler, but there are still hills.

Many little towns have a village fountain. This is one of the least ornate of them - just a pipe with running water. We were drinking 3 liters of water a day so it was nice not to have to carry all of it all the way.
Looking the other way from the fountain, the narrow main road through the middle of the town.

Many of the more rural towns are slowly loosing all their inhabitants. Land holdings are being concentrated into much larger farms. Young people are moving to the big cities. All that is left is the older people.

This is also typical of the countryside - a very large church, often dwarfing the town.

This particular town had 4 large churches and a couple of monasteries.

In the tiny little town of Boadilla del Camino, we found this private pilgrim's hostal. We were just going to get our credentials stamped, but it was so nice to see the green lawn after the desert like conditions along the way, we decided to stay.
The man in the white shirt, pointing to the altar, is the owner of the hostal. He gave us a talk about the history of the area - from the earliest people, through the romans, the Christians, the moors, the Christians to recent times with rural mechanization and concentration of ownership.

Eighty percent of the people in this town are over 60.

It was a very interesting talk. He spoke Spanish and some French, but a woman in the audience - who spoke Spanish, French, and English - translated the talk.

The pews are new. After each talk, he passes the collection basked around. I suspect this is the main source of revenue for the church.

Next time you are in Boadilla del Camino, stop in at En el Camino.
In Leon, we got caught in another festival. This one was not primarily religious - it appeared to be a fall fair, with the highlight for the locals being the ox carts.

There were lots of locals in peasant costumes, with some folk dancing on a stage at the left of this picture.

This monastery has been converted to a hotel - 124 Euros a night to start.

It is a very nice hotel though, with a lot of restoration of the various parts of the monastery, including some Roman artifacts.

It is not just grinding out the kilometers along the way.

Each afternoon we arrive in a strange town, get lost, wander around for a while, eventually find a cheap hotel, dump all our gear, quick shower, then out looking for a place to have dinner.

Most days we are so thirsty, we have to have a before dinner drink. Here we are sitting in a Bar/Cafe in the tiny town Hospital de Orbigo, looking at the sunset.

The cycling is tiring, hot work, but very interesting with the constantly changing landscape.

Getting off the bikes and sitting down in a quite outdoor cafe for a beer is always enjoyable. It does not remedy the fatigue after a day of cycling, but it certainly serves as an attitude adjustment.

This is the city hall clock tower in Astorga. On the hour, the two figures rotate on their platforms and strike the bell.
Astorga is another town with excellent monumental buildings - a great church, some roman mosaic tiled floors.

It also has a fanciful castle, the Gaudi palace.

And a fanciful cyclist wearing a paper crown. The crown was a going away present from Irwin - a former co-worker.

Now, how did Irwin know we would encounter a palace along the way?

From Astorga it was all uphill. Here we are standing in front of a recreation of a peasant house, typical of the area.

The area is at about 1,500 metres altitude. It is cold and windy today and it rained for 10 minutes half an hour after this shot was taken.

I have been wearing my Canada cycling shirt every day. Brenda is wearing her authentic Canada cycling socks as well.

When people see the Canada stuff, they ask us if we are from Quebec. A very high percentage of Canadians on the trail are from Quebec. For Spaniards along the trail, Quebec is Canada. So, all the people reading this from the Rest of Canada - time to get your bikes or hiking shoes and head out to the Camino de Santiago and let people know there is more to Canada than Quebec.

This is the IRON CROSS. It marks the high point on this part of the trail.

There is a little stone building here, as well as a vast parking lot for tour buses. It appears that as well as hikers and cyclists, there are lots of people who do the Camino on tour buses.

Hostals vary in quality quite a bit along the way, but this one was especially authentic.

It is an old stone barn converted to human habitation. It is near the top of this hill - around 5,000 ft high. The farm still has cows.

We stopped to chat with a Dutch couple who were staying here, in the loft of the barn. They had walked all the way from Holland, starting 3 or 4 months ago. She was a little sore of foot, having worn out her previous hiking shoes and still breaking in her new shoes.

A little farther down the hill we caught up with a couple of tour buses and a flock of sheep.

The sheep were being brought down from the hill, through the only street in the little town, and everything waited for them to clear the road.

Back to the main Spain page this way

Back to the trip overview page this way