A new alberque and 2 to Burgos
In some of my notes home I found the following:
We´re in Ages´ after a good day of discovering who I am. James and I hadn’t walked together but he said it was the same kind of day for him. I´ll tell him to put it in his updates, we write from 2 different points of view and he writes quite well. I got lost coming out of Villafranca and went a long ways out of the way. While trekking through the back roads and woods, I found that all the things I´ve been learning in my life, in all respects including the out of doors, helped me to realize that I´m content with who I am, where I´ve come from, how I´ve gotten here, where I´m supposed to be going, wherever that is, and however I get there. The only problem(s) I see if you were to do the Camino is the food, not much variety and very little green. More later, been a long day and time to go to bed. We will be in Burgos tomorrow and James wants to bus to Leon and past the plains. I want to do it all but he’s in a time crunch with things at his business not going exactly as planned. If he decides to bus, we’ll bus and when he leaves I will come back and do what I miss. I have until the 17th and the ticket is non-refundable. Keyboard is in Spanish so disregard the typos. I think about you a lot and wish you were here except it has been tough and if we do it in the future we will need more than a month. I´ll know the good and the bad places to stay after the 1st time. Love and hugs, give Angie a pat and hang on tight for the ride. Lots of seniors here, many have their backpacks taxied to the next place. Love, Larry
When I checked in at Ages, there were 2 new alberques and by that time I’d learned to check it out, before checking in. Both were equally nice. I chose the one I did because the lady there was nicer than the guy at the other one. I asked the only other person who was there and walking the Camino, if he’d seen a woman answering Dominique’s description? He said he had and that she had gone through town about 15 minutes before. I knew by the time I checked in, dropped my gear and got back on the road I’d never catch her unless I jogged or ran and I wasn’t up for that. At the time I thought I’d liked to have walked at least part way to Burgos if not the entire distance and back to Ages, just to see if I could, but that wasn’t to be.
I was surprised that even with the wrong turn I was the second person to town. I talked to the other man and found he’d started at San Juan de Ortega, 7K from Ages. I washed my clothes in the shower, hung them out to dry on a clothes rack outside the alberque and got a bite to eat before others began to trickle in. James was one of the first and I was glad to see that he was feeling better and more able to walk with less pain.
I had checked him in and after he was settled in we sat out in front of the alberque and had a couple of beers. The man who had been talking to the lady at the check-in, I guessed them to be the owners, brought some figs and grapes out to where we were sitting with 4 or 5 others. By their general attitude we felt truly welcome and that they were genuinely glad to see us.
James asked me to go to the other alberque, where they had snacks and get him an ice cream. A few minutes earlier he’d walked in with no shoes on and the man got a little excited, the same one I’d found to be less friendly than the lady at the alberque where we stayed. I went over got the ice cream and while I was there, went upstairs with a couple of people I’d seen before just to check out the sleeping arrangements. Both places were about equal in that respect.
We ate dinner at the alberque where we’d checked in, served by the lady who checked us in and a couple of other local women. The alberque was so new that when you opened the individual gear lockers, one of the only places that had lockers for your backpack, etc., you could smell the fresh, new wood.
There were more beds than takers and we slept in a room with only one other man. A group of about 12 Canadians slept in the other room down the hall. Shoes and boots had to be taken off downstairs, the owners didn’t want the hew floors scratched. The lady had chewed the man out that I’d talked to when I came to town for wearing his boots. She’d told him to take off his boots but he didn’t hear her or something. With Dominique and Alain gone it was the first night that there was only 2 of us in our group, James and I.
I had encountered the other man who was staying in our room, he was from Brazil, a day or so earlier on the Camino. I had noticed that he was walking like a stickman, not bending his knees and obviously in pain. I’d also bumped into him in a farmacia when I was getting some cough drops and he was getting stretch bandages and knees supports. I asked him how far he was going and he said all the way to Santiago. I wondered if it would be worth it to me to go the distance if I was in as much pain as he obviously was. I couldn’t answer that question at that time but when we encountered him again in Burgos I came to a decision, different than his.
The Canadians had all their backpacks shipped to the next destination by taxi. They only took day packs or water bottles. I think they were smart in doing so because none of them looked overly healthy but they wanted to do the Camino. Finding a way to get their needs met without doing damage to their bodies seemed sensible to me.
James and I were the last to leave the next morning but we began catching the others, even those without backpacks, by about 10:00. We had a good walk. James was feeling better but I began feeling worse as the day wore on. We could see the pollution hanging in the air over Burgos but I was glad when we got there. For me it had been a long and difficult day. Burgos was only 21K from Ages.
When we got to the outskirts of Burgos we came to a major intersection. Cars and trucks were stacked up in all directions. We found we were still able to run and made it across the first part, the island in the middle of the main thoroughfare, without being run down, and then to the sidewalk on the opposite side. Once there we sat down with some others, including a girl named Kirsten who we’d met before.
We found out that the others were waiting for the bus and with all the traffic, noise and pollution, we decided that was a good idea. Not long after we got on the bus I, for one, was glad we had made the decision to ride and not walk. The Camino went along the same route as the bus, noise, traffic and a long way through town before we got to the main plaza. The day from Ages to Burgos was the worst physically for me.
JAMES
Camino Day 11
Buenos Dias Los Amigos
Today’s stage took us from Ages to, I can hardly believe it, Burgos!
After yesterdays positively stimulating day, there was every chance of this one falling as flat as the proverbial pancake! The day, it has to be said, did not start off well! As Yoda, the great Jedi Knight, said, “Always 2 dark lords of the Sith there are, one the apprentice and one the master. So it is on the Camino! There has never been any doubt as to Cluesos preeminence as the undisputed Dark Lord of snoring but, in a Brazilian, last night, we met his very capable apprentice! For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, sorry but go and watch some modern film and stop watching Countdown! For those of you who do, if this guy had sprouted little horns and grinned through yellow teeth at us it would have been no surprise. He did not have Cluesos depth, quality and resonance, but what he lacked in general class and experience, he made up for in brutal power of delivery. Larry once more bore the brunt of the attack and, out of North America for the first time in 65 years, is starting to believe that the whole of this continent must be permanently sleep deprived! He ended up spending the small hours sleeping in the shower, and has sworn to kill the next person who even looks like he might snore!
We had managed to get separated from the rest of our group, largely due to my turbo charged attempt at pilgrimage the day before, and so started early in order to be able to catch up. Most people had moved on to the next village to find shelter the previous evening as Ages had very few beds.
There are 3 different types of people who begin the day early and today we saw them all first hand. First of all there are the “Pillow Case Pilgrims”, as I like to call them. These are the frankly disgraceful buggers who sit around the campfire every evening telling their tales of holy deliverance, only to load their bags into a support vehicle the next morning, bound for the next refugio. Having completed this dastardly act, they hotfoot it so that nobody else can see that they walk with nothing but a water bottle and a pair of bloody Ray-bands! When they get to the next town they sit, looking exhausted, waiting to tell us proper baggage mules how fast they walked and how tough their day has been!
The second type of person is the “All Action Hero” and it’s not difficult to work out why they are thus called. They stand at the start of each day, heart-rate monitors whirring, GPS systems beeping, steroids still oozing from the syringe marks on their arms, positively itching to eat 700 kms before the sun has even risen. To be fair, I have never spoken to one of these people as they leave so early and arrive so late that they are known as the phantoms of the Camino. The other day I was told that someone had just completed the Camino in 12 days, 12 DAYS! All I can say is why; are they handing out gold bars?
The third type of person is the type I feel the most sorry for. A typical example of these would be Candice and Mabel. They are both in their 50s, from Canada, have not walked further than the fridge for 30 years and whose idea of hard exercise, up until the Camino, was to use the +/ – keys on the remote control instead of using the numerical pad. They are so desperate to finish and so unlikely to do so that it really breaks your heart! They have to start early just to have a chance of making it to the next refugio in time for dinner! The first 3 kms outside Ages is up a very steep hill and I passed them both halfway up. ”How far until we get to Burgos James?” They gasped and wheezed much as you would expect from a dying person in a dodgy daytime Soap Opera. What can you say to this? If you tell them that, contrary to their hopes, God didn’t wake up and think, “You know what? I’m a bit bored today, I’ll just go and move Ages 23 kms closer to Burgos for the day!” You know you are going to crush them, then and there! All I could do was lie, tell them about 10 kms by my reckoning, and hope they never catch me up to remonstrate with me! At least the likes of Mabel and Candice make the effort: Pillow Case Pilgrims beware, we are on to you!
We positively burned up the kilometres to Burgos, relishing at the thought of Burgosians throwing flowers at our feet and offering up their daughters for our pleasure, grateful for our arrival in their city. Again, all I can say is “Meanwhile, back at the ranch!!!”
Burgos, or certainly the approach to it, is a dump! Where pilgrims of old walked through sunny fields of vines and corn, the modern day disciple tramps through dirty industrial estates strewn with condoms, syringes, broken glass and the odd hobo, whilst trying to avoid being mown down by some lunatic truck driver! In this part of Spain, “pilgrim chicken” is all the rage and several times we had to dive for cover as some overladen olive truck came barreling towards us at breakneck speed.
By the time we got to the centre of Burgos, which is beautiful beyond compare on the Camino, nobody gave a damn! Exhausted, polluted and desperately in need of pure oxygen, we just collapsed in a cafe’ and didn’t even blink when someone charged us 4 euros for a beer! At least we had made it! God knows how many kilometres, 11 days, with enough experiences and hardships to last a lifetime but we had made it!
I am going to go out and get drunk this evening, well and truly drunk! When tomorrow comes, with whatever senses I have left, I will decide whether I will join the rest of our group in taking the bus to Leon and missing out the 6 days of the Spanish Meseta! My heart tells me to walk it, but my head tells me that on my own I will wither out there and not make it to Santiago to place my scallop shell at the feet of St. James. Whatever I do, I have made it to Burgos, and it feels bloody marvelous!
Adios los amigos and Buen Camino!
Sumo
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