Walking the Camino de Santiago
Today was not a great day. It poured rain, I only managed about 17 km, and I’m homesick. After the monastery tour yesterday, Martha from Brooklyn and I headed over to a tiny chapel on the outskirts of town. This is the oldest part of the monastery complex, though it is not physically located at the “new” monastery, which was […]
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We had a fantastic community dinner last night. The only challenge was getting across the street to the place where the dinner was being served. It was seriously stormy. By morning, it was still raining but not so much storming at first. The weather report even indicated a rainless period of several hours. Breakfast was served at 7:00, and I […]
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Last night I stayed in the albergue parroquial in the little hill village of La Faba. This particular albergue is staffed by volunteers from the German pilgrim confraternity, and it’s a great place. Next door is the clean, well-kept village church of San Andrés. What a lovely little church! It came complete with a cat sleeping in the presider’s chair. […]
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For no good reason, this morning I woke up at 4:30. I went back to sleep, and then wasn’t up until 6:30. I left about 7:15. Tara left about the same time I did, but she wasn’t going to stop for breakfast. The rain had stopped, but everything was damp as I walked through the town, with only the street […]
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For such a relatively small town, Villafranca del Bierzo is full of churches, monasteries, and convents. This evening, I attempted to visit some of them. First I tried to get into the 17th century Convent de la Anunciada, which contains the tomb of Saint Lawrence of Brindisi, but I was ultimately unsuccessful. Since this is still an actual Cistercian convent, I […]
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Last night I caught the Vigil Mass at the Basilica, and afterwards Tara, the sisters Ava and Marty, and I went out for dinner. It was a lovely conversation with friends old and new. Today I walked through the beautiful valley of El Bierzo. I began in Ponferrada, its modern capital city, and ended in Villafranca del Bierzo, its medieval […]
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Today I had two objectives: be at Cruz de Ferro when it was light, and arrive in Ponferrada in one piece. Spoiler alert: yes! However, it was a long day, longer than it had any right to be. So to start at the beginning, what is Cruz de Ferro? Cruz de Ferro is, as the name suggests, an iron cross. It is […]
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On this day, 13 October in the year 1307, the Order of the Knights Templar was suppressed. That day was a Friday the 13th as well. The Templars loom large on the Camino, because for much of the 12th and 13th centuries they maintained a series of fortresses along the route to protect pilgrims from bandits, raiders, and the depredations […]
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We had a generous dinner at the albergue last night with perhaps two dozen pilgrims. We left a little late this morning, at 7:10, mostly due to my having a coffee half the size of my head at breakfast. Soon after leaving the village, we left the highway for the traditional gravel road running parallel to the highway, sometimes closer, […]
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Vespers and Mass yesterday evening with the Benedictine sisters ended with the priest conferring individual blessings on each of us pilgrims. Last night was just your average Tuesday night in León. That means that the streets were full of people talking and laughing in the outside terraces of cafés and bars, couples walking arm in arm through the streets, the […]
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