Walking the Camino de Santiago
We checked into Refugio Gaucelmo. This was the view from our window, across the rooftops of Rabanal del Camino towards the distant mountains. It’s absolutely sublime. It’s difficult to believe that just a few short decades ago, this village was largely an abandoned ruin. It was brought back from the brink of extinction by the revival of the Camino in […]
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This morning, halfway up a hill in downtown Tacoma, we arrived in virtual Oviedo. We have been walking our virtual Camino del Norte for months, and we have now arrived at the place where it transitions into the Camino Primitivo. Of course, in a little over three weeks we will fly to the real city of Oviedo to walk the […]
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Rabanal del Camino is one of the great villages of the Camino Francés. I like to call it “the Disneyland of the Camino”. The village is impossibly orderly and clean, as if the Imagineers set out to create a “typical Camino village”. There are several churches, including a small Benedictine monastery with four monks where you can pray Vespers, Compline, […]
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After a short section of road walking, the Camino leaves the road and follows a dirt and gravel path uphill through the scrubby woods. A fence at our right hand is decorated with flowers and crosses made of twigs, markers of hope left by passing pilgrims. There are dozens of these little crosses, perhaps hundreds. They continue for at least […]
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Our first GIF of the day! Francine walks the scrubby uphill trail after El Ganso. Date: 21 April 2013Place: between El Ganso and Rabanal (Province of León, Castilla y León, Spain)Today started: Astorga (Province of León, Castilla y León, Spain)
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Yesterday, Francine and I reached a crossroads on our continuing virtual Camino del Norte. I should explain that we have been recording the distance of our daily hikes into a tracking sheet – one square for every kilometer on the Camino del Norte, which begins in the Basque city of Irún. By my count, we’re at 478km. This was a […]
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This striking plaque, mounted to a gate in the village of El Ganso, contains three symbols: the shell of Saint James, the Cross of Christ, and the Celtic Triskelion. This latter is an ancient symbol, going back at least 6,000 years, and is sometimes associated with Celtic cultures. The oldest meanings of the symbol are obscure and contested, but by […]
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A rare montage! Two views of the interior of the delightfully quirky Cowboy Bar, one facing the door and another of the bar. To say the place had atmosphere is a bit of an understatement. It’s an absolutely iconic place of the Camino Francés. You can see a wider shot of the bar area that I took in 2016 here. […]
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We finally arrived in El Ganso – the place we’d planned for lunch – at about 2pm. Of course we stopped to eat at the quirky Cowboy Bar. This place is a must-stop for pilgrims on this section of the Camino. Three years later, this was the spot where we re-met up with our friend Rebecca. Everybody stops at the […]
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The walk after Santa Catalina de Somoza was exhausting. Francine was starting to feel the strain that starts to catch up with you on your second day. Although it’s difficult to tell in this photo, the Camino is slowly gaining in altitude, and that’s proving a challenge as well. We had expected to make lunch in El Ganso, but it’s […]
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