the cross and the shell

Just to let you know..... 26 07 2010

2010-07-26T08:17:00.001-07:00

Yes, we are back in England. I am still a bit shell shocked, I suppose, and Alison is back at work dealing with auditors, the world and everything while I get to do house work, write stuff and play with grand children – life is tough, believe me!

We arrived in Santiago on the 19th and got our compostellas after a long argument with the women who give them out. We kept saying that we had walked from England and they refused to believe us/understand us/listen to us. I ended up showing them the map in the back of our pilgrim passports and showing how they correlated with the stamps in the book (we got a stamp every night at the place we stayed at). Eventually they gave in and accepted that we were telling enough of the truth to warrant giving us the certificates.

We stayed our first night in the city at the refugio run by the Francisans (a well kept secret) and I ended up encountering the last ghost of our walk and being bitten several times on both arms, neck and head by the dreaded bed bugs. Our second night was in a hostal booked for us by Dougald and Betty (God bless them).

We had several celebratory drinks/meals/etc with David and Christina, with Dougald and Betty and even met up with Anne and her friend Elizabeth, too. We encountered some of the rudest Spaniards of our whole walk in Santiago and some of the nicest people, too. We also went to the Pilgrim Mass which I hated and Alison thoroughly enjoyed and was moved by. It also featured the huge swinging incense burner that is controlled and swung by a team of men as it shoots back and forth across the width of the cathedral – total madness on a chain and encased in silver. Oh, and we gave St James a cuddle, too. At the back of the high altar in the cathedral there is a very grand and elaborate statue of St James and if you queue up at the right door you can follow the line through the back of the church, up into a high room behind the altar and stand on a little pedestal so that you can put you arms around the statue. We did this and whispered sweet nothings in his ear (yes it was quite a weird experience but no stranger than walking 1600 miles to get there, I suppose).

Finally, we left the city on a bus which left on the 21st in the morning. We travelled across Northern Spain in a slightly indirect but beautiful route and entered France just south of Bayonne. By mid day of the 22nd we arrived in Paris and headed on another bus towards the Channel Tunnel where we spent a very long time being held up by French Customs (one of our fellow passengers tried to go to England using her driving license and could not understand why it was not acceptable – after all, the UK is supposed to be part of the EU, isn’t it?) sadly, Britain is not very welcoming even to its own citizens! Our party was then delayed by UK Passport control who managed to find another couple of passengers who didn’t meet their exacting standards for entry. Finally, we boarded the Channel train, waited for a while and then had to get off and get on another one as that one had decided to break down! What joy!

Our arrival in London was untroubled and gentle and our welcome from Kirsty, Rosalind and the twins was great. We celebrated with Champagne and fish and chips – happy days!

Other delights of our return included the car battery being totally flat and having to wait a long time to charge it up (it started for the first time this morning (hurray) – yes, the book said it would take 24hrs to charge and that’s probably how long it took – with breaks when we went out, went to sleep, etc... Rosalind and the girls stayed over as Paul’s mother was having a birthday party on the Saturday and things go very complicated with relatives staying at their flat, etc. We went down with her and the girls to wish Yvonne a happy birthday.

Then yesterday was my turn at having a birthday (I generally have one a year, I think), and it was a great day (one that would have been even better if we had also enjoyed the company of Dominique, who is at Warwick Uni doing a course, and Ewan and Dylan who couldn’t make it so we will see them during the week if we can organise it...) I made some food for the day, which was part of the day’s fun. I made a very large Paella, an empanada and some bbqed chicken, too. We also enjoyed a lovely bottle of wine which was a present from our very good friend Mike (thank you Mike!). My presents included a DVD of Dancer in the Dark which is excellent and the DVD of the TV series from the eighties called Tutti Fruity which is also excellent!!! And, a lovely bottle of Caol Ila which is an excellent Malt Whisky, if you didn’t know what it was.

So now I am sitting here in New Malden thinking where do I start? I have so much to do/write it is mindboggling but all good stuff, really. I have also made a policy decision – I will write a book on the walk but it will be quite different from any of the others I have seen. Well, very different, actually because in order for me to enjoy writing it I will have to do it my way...... It will not take long to do but I will have to start looking for a suitable publisher – always the hardest thing to sort out.

Sorry it has taken a while to get this bit written but I have just been doing normal things, like making and eating food that I like, playing with granddaughters and chatting to family and friends, walking to places then coming back, cutting the grass and tidying the garden, sitting on a comfortable seat, staying up later than ten thirty without resorting to reading by head torch, sleeping beyond five in the morning, etc....

Life, don’t talk to me about life......

Wake me up before I go go

2010-07-19T10:00:00.001-07:00

We’ve stopped but my feet are still walking 19 07 2010

This is a reality. We are in Santiago and I am sitting in the Franciscan Monastery with a Franciscan nun next to me talking to another pilgrim as I write. Alison, David and Christina are all on their beds resting. We arrived and were welcomed by Betty and Dougald who guided us around. We got our certificate (indulgence) and have had a lovely lunch (thank you D&B!!! The women giving out the certificates refused to believe that we had walked all the way from England. England is an island... you can’t walk from there, etc. I eventually convinced the woman who was looking after me and she got Alison’s woman to accept it reluctantly.

So, we have stopped the pilgrimage and are working out what needs to be done next.

We are shell shocked and are still in a refugio so we are gently entering back into the real world. It will take some time to really sort things out. All of the things that people take for granted that we have been doing without are now going to come back into our lives so we will have to work at this.

Walking with David and Christina has been a blessing. The walking has been hard and because of the heat and the terrain (and the heavy packs) Christina has found it very tough. It has been a lesson in humility for both of us as we have not been finding the walking that tough most of the time and she has had to dig really deep to do it – she is a strong, determined and generous hearted good friend whoi showed us all.

So we have had experiences like two days ago where we stayed in the temporary refugio set in a large warehouse type building. The town was celebrating their feast so the whole town partied u7ntil about 4 am. The dorms were sectioned off areas with bunks open to the warehouse except for a sort of net covering stretched across the top of the walls. This kept us slightly cooler but very noise in the place and all noises outside were magnified by the vast, empty space. So the bands and fireworks were clearly heard by all.

Then yesterday we walked a long day hoping to get to a place called Santa Irene. Suffering from heat exhaustion, it took every ounce of Christina’s strength to get to the rufugio (we arrived just after 4pm) only to find that a group of Poles had arrived just before us and there was only one bed left. The next place was over 4 km further on and the private refugio was closed for the day (Sunday). I was all for getting a taxi to the next place but we ended up with a young Spanish person offering to help us and he ‘phoned some local hostals/pensiones and found us a couple of double rooms only a k and a half away. So we had a good place to rest, we were able to walk there and we were another little bit further towards Santiago!

I am eager to get this loaded so we will search for a wifi place and upload what is here. I have lost track, know that I have missed bits out and have not checked the things I have written. I will sort it out later and perhaps add other bits and pieces before I call a halt to this particular blog. I have so much in the way of sketches, poems and the like I am not sure what to do with them and I have loads of things to write and experiment with that I am not sure where to start. From a creative point of view this journey has been incredible.

It has also been a wonderful time spent with Alison and we are both so grateful that we have been able to spend this time together. We need to think how we will be able to share some of this with others.... But Alison jumps straight back in to work on our return and she will be very busy so I will have to do some of that particular task.

So much to say and no time to get it written down so I will stop and save it all for later. The journey has its own momentum and I will still be travelling long after I leave this place. In fact Santiago is not very real to me at the moment. It looks a great city (I had not expected it to be so big – despite the fact that if I had thought about it it would have been obvious) so another place to come back to!

Needless to say, everyone has been in our prayers and thoughts and will continue to be so on this and other journeys.

Hola!

The big bang is no longer theory 17 07 2010

We are in Melide and it is Fiesta time! We walked across a wonderful rolling countryside to get here, climbing through the clouds and back down into green valleys with stone walled paths and dry-stone walled houses. We had breakfast in a modern little bar/restaurant where the people from the night before had not cleared up and the young guy doing breakfasts worked around the mess.

There were forests of oak and of pine and distant hills crosshatched with the greens of bracken highlighted with the bright yellows of broom and gorse. And most of the paths were deeply set into the hillsides and valleys with small streams cutting through the bottoms and others running down the sides of the way. Every house seemed to have these strange thin structures with either ventilation brick sides or wooden slats, a narrow door at one end of a long side and the whole thing with a proper sloping roof and set on a high platform at least six feet above the ground..... goodness knows what they are for. My suggestion was that they were for wind drying hams but no one in our little group knows.

Tomorrow we push on to St Irene and then to Santiago. Tomorrow is our second last day and the hundredth day on the road (excluding our time diverted away to Dominique’s graduation ceremony) so it is quite strange.

Santiago will be very expensive and we have not sorted out where we are going to stay yet! This s fine as we need to be able to let at least some thing happen at the will of the Holy Spirit, but it is hard for us and much harder for David and Christina – but they are taking it in their stride.

Tonight is yet another different experience for them as we stay in a temporary refugio – the proper one is being refurbished and this one is in a vast warehouse which has been sectioned off into dorms (but only about a tenth of the floor space so every sound echoes across this huge open volume in amazing ways – I sneezed earlier and it sounded like a gun being fired, which is truly an exaggeration of what my sneeze sounds like, honest!

We had a lovely meal in a small restaurant after a nice Polish Mass with a group of Poles who have done the Camino Primitive and are in the same part of the refugio as us. The two caminos join here and go on to Santiago. But now the lights are off and I must stop. I will send this off tomorrow (18th) and have to say that Iam thinking of my dad tonight as his birthday was one week and thirty years earlier than mine. Happy birthday day! Love Ian xcxcxc.

up the hills and down the dales we go 16 07 2010

I though I might be able to load a blog entry yesterday but failed. Perhaps today I will succeed, so...

We have spent the day walking up and down hills and much of our time has been in the rain. My camera decided to go on strike at the start of the day and I have sort of sorted it..... well it has lasted very well for a cheap camera. It was the cheapest in Tesco that looked like it might last the trip. It has been regularly soaked, dropped stuffed in pockets and used in every situation you could imagine and, apart from being too wide angled for most things and determined to flash at the slightest opportunity and occasionally refusing to take a picture without being coaxed, it has been great. In fact, for my style of digital visual sampling it has been pretty good. The very wide angle lens means I cannot do certain landscape photos (anything further than a short distance away disappears into a flat featureless horizon), but I can photograph buildings at close range and do other similar things. Sometimes it is not too good at reading the light (hence the flash photography) and it does slower exposures than I had wanted (causing blurring), but I just want to point and snap and the manual setting would be a nightmare for that.... I take well over a hundred pictures a day and often over 200).

Today was filled with all sorts of wonderful images that have not been captured on my camera. These include deep lush green valleys with small fields divided by dry stone walls and edged with fences made of wire and large single stones similar to ancient standing stones. Grey clouds lay in shelves across the tops of these valleys, shedding drizzle and occasional heavy rain onto the deep set paths with overhanging trees and high banks lined with bushes and flowers.The villages have been full of moss covered dry-stone buildings with rounded corners and dark slates with rounded edges, small round stone windows and slit windows with no glass in them (like the bathroom we used last night), Everywhere we encountered the dire aroma of cows shit which is particularly strong in this area and we walked down streets of uneven cobbles or large slabs of stone irregularly spattered with cow droppings. The cows are delightful creatures as they lumber along the roads or lanes from fields to milking parlours and back, but the smell is something that should be edited out of the experience.

We walked through Portomarin with its white houses perched above the bridge on the edge of a lovely long lake snaking through the deep valley. The bridge crosses the lake and leads the pilgrims to a grand staircase of 46 deep steps which takes you to the entrance to the town.we had a brief, light lunch there before heading on to our night stop in Ventas de Narin which is basically a few houses stock to the edge of a main road. A modern simple place and a good one to stop at as it will mean we can leapfrog the next main stopping point on the Camino and avoid (hopefully) most of the crowds.

Of course, the walk meant that we did over 31 Kms today and it seemed to be mainly up hill, so it was a punishing walk with full packs, etc. David and Christina are real stars dealing with this sort of walking – one day they are in Leicester, the next they are marching up mountains with us, handling extreme temperatures, rain and wind, the odd experience of different refugios each night and long steady climbs over steep, windy paths with extremely varied surfaces. Today we have walked on tarmac, cobbles, stone slabs, sandy paths and a wide variety of stony ones, along paths that were actually mountain streams and others that were basically medieval stone paths that have been broken up into a type of linear quarry that can only be describes as a path because it takes you from A to B. So, they deserve a huge thank you for being prepared to deal with such things and more just to spend time with us as we do our final plod towards Santiago. What is also amazing is that they seem to be enjoying the experience as much as we are. I would prefer to think that this proves that we really are not mad rather than proving that mad people like us also have mad friends....

So, now it is time for our supper and I think we will have a large, ice cold, dry sherry as an aperitif before we sit down to our pilgrim menu.

I have pleaded with D&C and Alison to refrain from counting down the days, hours miles and kilometres as we head to Santiago. It was a shock to discover just how little time is left and I don’t want to spend it looking beyond today (or at the very most the next day). But in Galicia they have placed a special stone every half a km along the path so it is difficult to avoid seeing that there are only 80 something kms left!!!! Ho hum....

A failed quick note from another internet free zone 16 07 2010

Since La Faba I have had basically no time to write. We have covered the route well and dealt with really hot sun and cold wet weather, we have been in a variety of Refugios, experienced the World Cup final on a terrace by a river and walked through beautiful mountains, fabulous valleys and exotic, medieval villages. There are villages with working farms and we have walked down through them dodging cow poo and the odd herd of cattle being driven along by men in traditional farmers’ clothes assisted by over eager dogs of various sorts.

We keep meeting lots of people along the way including a lovely French man called Michel and an American from North Carolina called George. We also encountered an artist from Toronto we met on our second night in Spain and enjoyed some time catching up with him during our visit to La Faba. He is into Latin American dance amongst other things and I have promised to send him the details of my (newly discovered) half cousin who runs a dance studio/school in Toronto.

Of course, we have also been seeing Sharon and Harvey from Canada, too. The last time we saw them was on the day when David lost his hat, then Christina lost hers - but we realised her was missing in time for David to trot back through the town and get it for her.

We said hello to Sharon and Harvey as we waited on a busy road out of that small town then watched two magnificent horses walking elegantly past us, also on the way to Santiago.

That was the day Alison fell over.

But I am doing this quick intro because the last several days have been a bit scrappy as far as wring has been concerned. I have written a few poems and am working on a couple of really exciting concepts. But this blog has been difficult to get going with such a different routine – four people walking is different from two and our daily rhythm has been changed so we are finding it difficult to get things done in the same way (or at all). My little note book is filling up aster than ever and my computer is feeling a bit neglected.

Today we walked through from Triacastella, past Sarria to a little place about 4 or 5 Kms beyond (sorry if I can’t add in the name before sending this), and we are perched on the side of a lovely wide valley looking back at the mountains. The municipal albergue was full so we walked past it and are staying in a very nice little Hostal/refugio which is more expensive but is very nice. Hopefully I will be able to link up with their internet connection but now we are about to go to the church for Mass and thren go to dinner.

La Faba tonight – OK! 12 07 2010

Strangely, I have had very little time to write since we arrived in Rabanal. Partly through spending time with our good friends Dougald and Betty and partly because of the arrival of our other good friends David and Christina.

So, we have spent a lot of time talking and all sorts of things and not much on the usual things we do during our time on the Camino and this includes writing my blog – sorry!

So, we spent a lovely couple of nights in Rabanal with Betty and Dougald in a seriously good Refugio with the biggest garden ever and with all sorts of good things besides. We enjoyed their company and that of many others too. We had some good food and a lovely mass on the Sunday (which was said by a lo9vely French priest, translated into English by a Canadian woman who originates from Brittany, then translated into Spanish by another woman ... and the readings were also done in German, read by a young man with a German Bible. We had the Mass in the garden.

That night, David and Christina arrived and we joined in a bit of a sing song led by some young Americans, Canadians and assorted other nationalities, sat around drinking Malt Whisky (thank you David) and chatted until Betty gently but firmly asked us to settle downh for the night (Refugios are places where everyone goes to bed early!!

We then walked a fair distance as the sun grew increasingly hot and strong. It was a tough start for D&C and, with a pretty heavy pack it became clear that it was going to take a considerable amount out of Christina which was a silly price for her to pay just to come walking with us. So, I suggested that it would be better if she had her pack sent on to the night stop rather than carrying it the whole way. We did that the next day and this proved really valuable. Especially since it was even hotter and longer and more punishing.... It is not the walking that can do the damage but the heat, the sun and the weight on our Backs and legs. Today we were going to climb even higher and longer so we did it again. This time we had to pick the bag up before the end of the walk and so she had to carry it up one of the steepest climbs on the Camino (to La Faba). Hopefully we will have it taken the whole way....

So, now we are in a seriously beautiful location on the top of a wooded ridge in the middle of the mountains. The refugio is really nice and the whole thing is proving to be a lovely experience.

We need the good environment because we had a hard time yesterday (well, Alison did) and today needed to end well.

Yesterday was one of those odd days. We took a long time getting out of the city we stayed in as the signposts were difficult to find and we were directed wrongly, etc. So, when we reached a place where we could sit down and have a drink we took the opportunity. It ended up being a sort of shop/restaurant/museum/bodega and they served us a glass of free wine each for being pilgrims. They also gave us each a large slice of Spanish sausage and potato pie which was very, very nice. We then decided to have a beer there so we ordered the drinks and those came with more large slices of pie ... which was all very nice and took care of our lunch for us.

However, on the way out of the last place (about 5kms short of our night stop) Alison tripped up, fell over and hit the side of her head badly on a wall. This was very scary and very messy as the blood just poured freely! Eventually we helped her sort it out and we walked up the hill in the hottest part of the day to find that the first refugio was full so we went to the second one a bit further along and managed to get ourselves places to sleep. Happily, she has no concussion though she does have a very sore head and it is painful to talk and eat. I confess it scared the life out of me....

So, today’s walk was tough for us all but harder still for Alison and she did what she is always doing – she handled it with grace and strength and led the way to the refugio. Tonight we rest!

Some thoughts ... 08 07 2010

I have heard a few people talking about the mystery of the Camino and how special it is, etc and then they get a bus passed the bits they think are ugly. The Camino, to them, seems to be this place filled with nature and beauty and ancient buildings: a place where real life should not intrude. We have also met those who spend all their time planning and aiming to see or experience everything. They meet others and swap information. They sit down with people who have done it before and write down the names of restaurants you can’t miss and types of wine that you need to try, etc.

Come to think of it, there is a lot of correlation between these two groups. There is a powerful acquisitiveness emanating from a few of them too – they must consume the maximum number of experiences from the Camino, etc. I can understand some of it, especially from those who have travelled half way across the world to be here and will never be able to return. I can see that those who have been preparing for this for so long will not want to miss anything if at all possible. All of this is quite natural and it is probably also related to the sort of books they have read about the Camino, the sorts of people they have talked with before coming and the sorts of travel/guide books they have obtained to help them through.

Sadly, there have been times when I could have screamed when the only place I have been able to sit down had a group of them with their books out, loudly swapping and proclaiming the unbridled delights of “that little restaurant that still retains its medieval character and serves utterly authentic octopus on cute little wooden platters”, etc. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to be told even indirectly what is ahead of me in so much detail. As it is, this part of the Camino is too full of information for my liking and it is getting me down (sorry if this sounds a bit gripy).

Strangely, we have gone for a very long time not really knowing what to expect when we arrive at the place we hope to settle down in for the night. We have often taken the risk of not booking anywhere in France where everyone seems to book well ahead. We have had good detail on the route (too much at times) but nothing about what is at the other end. Now there are lots of places and we have to choose where we are going to go. Plus, there are the realities that face anyone who is coming to the end of their trip. We have a deadline that is coming ever closer and we are encountering more and more pilgrims as we go. So places fill up quickly and decisions about where we are going to stay and why are becoming critical.

Having said all of that, if we had been able to have the option we would have still done this bit totally on trust. If we had been in a position (financially) to risk things and if we had just a bit more time to do it in we would have continued to walk in trust. We would have just got up in the morning and walked until we thought it was time to stop and then looked around to see where we could stay for the night. The less you have in the way of guides and the more flexibility you have in terms of time and finances would allow you to do this in a more satisfying way. But there again, I suppose that we don’t really mind. We are doing things basically at our pace anyway and we have spent so long on the road that we can handle the oddities of this part of the walk. I am just a little fed up of the touristic, high-consumption focussed elements that invade my inner peace. So, sorry about the gripe, I am feeling better already!

By the way, the bits of the route through the dirty parts of towns, through the council estate equivalents and the factories and busy roads, are all part of the richness of the Camino. Don’t reject or ignore them. The fossilised remains of a medieval village will hide the hard work, the poverty and the tough lives they held and that were the backdrop of earlier pilgrim’s journeys. Don’t be fooled by the flower filled fields – they are working environments, not rural theme parks - and those rugged little hills covered in thorn bushes by the side of the road are waste heaps from a mining industry that has only recently died. And everyone who waves at us and wishes us a good Camino as we walk are passing good will to us and taking some away from us, too. We are passing good will through a living community and the places where that good will is most needed will sometimes be in the dirty and grimy places that are not so pretty to walk through.

Of course, for us, all of this just means that we need to return to Spain and spend some “real” time here. Walking the Camino may mean that we will have spent a month in this wonderful country but we travel every day, we say hello and good bye to so many people and don’t stay long enough to do more. Next on the list for us is that we will learn Spanish, then we will come back and live here for a while – this is a new addition to our world plan but one we welcome with happy hearts!

And sorry to all who need to approach the Camino differently – I am not being proscriptive or even critical, really. I am just finding it hard to deal with that sort of approach when so much is already chipping away at me.... and we only have a few more days to go before it all stops, so I am a bit fragile.

I have been doing some work linking a few of my poems to pictures I have taken on the way. They sort of look like poetry/picture posters. One of them is about a dream I had that I was about to stop doing this. The poem seems to work quite well with a long, straight road disappearing into a dour, cloud filled sky. Ho hum... I should get out more!

Leon, Leon, so much to answer for...

Leon is another beautiful Spanish city. Again, it is different not only in character but in size and feel. The cathedral is stunning with a number of superb works of art but the building is a Gothic masterpiece in its own right with the whole of the top half of the walls filled with beautiful windows. We were stunned by it and the city needs to be explored in full at a later date.

The trail to Leon has been hot and pretty much flat but there has a been a variety of different elements to the landscape and the mountains have been a frequent companion on the horizon. As with other regions in Northern Spain, water has been a special thing with very fast flowing rivers with some good bridges crossing them and with more irrigation systems taking fast, clear cold water across the landscape in special canals, channels and concrete conduits designed to funnel it across the fields, down pipes and up through to other fields. All of this exclusively using gravity and the occasional judicious widening and narrowing of channels and employing specially designed sumps. The systems also leak from time to time forming mini streams along paths and narrow, dark pools along the sides of the road.

The Albergues have all been quite different although many of those occupying them have been the same people that we have been walking with and meeting from time to time each day as we do our camino. Most are Spanish and French, next are the Italians with a small handful of Germans and Dutch and then a smattering of others including some Canadians and Americans, a couple of Australians and a tiny number of Brits.

I have come to the conclusion that the idea of a communal meal is mostly a better idea than it is a reality. The people running the show really have to be able to do it properly to ensure that it works well and most of those who do it fall short by some way. The Spaniards (men, that is) are more about show than anything and the American women who have done it just don’t seem comfortable with the whole thing. Usually the choices made about what to do are not good, the volume of food is not right and its distribution is flawed and, sadly, sometimes they don’t even provide wine! The most recent one failed on a number of fronts partly because of the absence of wine, partly because the salad dressing ran out after the first small helping and then the traditional garlic soup was a problem. Both the wine and the soup had some origins in not getting enough supplies for the number of people who arrived at the place. They had expected around 15 and 32 turned up. So instead of getting more wine they just didn’t offer any and they bulked up the soup with more bread but had very little garlic or sausage to flavour it with. The final coupe de gras was that the local version of the soup requires a number of eggs to be broken into it and stirred around just before serving. This was fine for me but for a number of others (including Alison) it made the main dish pretty much inedible (I had hers) as some of the yoke had set but none of the white and this is not to everyone’s taste.

So some people walked twenty odd kms in unshaded hot sun, had a couple of bowls of lettuce with a few bits of tomato and some fly-caressed bread washed down by tepid water and a small apple or orange, then got up the next morning and walked a further 5 kms before they could get breakfast. This is not a particularly good way to treat pilgrims but the place was donativo (you paid as much as you could afford/thought the place was worth) and I’m sure they got a good amount from each of us despite the limited grub. Oh, of course, we had all taken part in preparing parts of it but we had no way of knowing what the whole thing was going to be until it arrived – we chopped vegetables, etc. in shifts, set the tables and so on. I knew that it was not enough garlic for the soup but didn’t know that the soup was it – the only thing in town.

The Albergues have all been quite different en route to here. We stayed in a very nice one with small rooms housing no more than 5 beds (not bunks) in each and there was a very nice set of gardens, a good bar/restaurant with good simple food, and a nice roof terrace, too. The showers and other facilities were fine too. Then we were in an old adobe building which was attractive but the social space was very limited and the communal meal was not brill and, even for the Camino, the facilities were limited (2 showers and 1 loo for the men and the same for the women). Then we were in a larger place with large dorms and slightly more facilities but the kitchen dining room was small and full of flies – even the pleasant courtyard area in the centre of the building complex suffered from the flies but the town was nice and we had a good pilgrim menu meal next door (despite the portions being too small – quality vs quantity). Then the place in Leon was interesting. A large refugio which was part of the convent right in the heart of the city. Large but comfortable dorms, small kitchen dining area but with no cooking facilities and breakfast included (bread, spreads and coffee/tea/hot choc). We had a nice set of salads for tea as there are lots of good supermarkets, covered market, etc in Leon. Now we are in a slightly down at heel municipal Albergue in a small village which has a very busy road right through it and a bigger motorway running parallel to it (all the traffic going through here is avoiding the toll payment on the motorway). The old and creaky bunk beds are all in one big room and, as this was probably a school the dorm looks like the school hall. 3 showers and 3 loos per gender and about 20 of us here tonight. The kitchen dining room is small but OK. 26km plus to get here but that makes tomorrow a bit shorter which is good because I think we are going up hill for a change – wow!

Is this the real Camino or the Camino Real? Some notes from a pair of wandering pilgrims.

2010-07-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

Flies and more flies 05 07 2010

We are in Mansilla de las Mulas and, just like yesterday, there are flies everywhere ... grrrr. Mulas means mules and this was a major place for selling them in the middle ages through to quite recently. The mules have gone but they left their flies.

First time with the internet for many many days and the thing did not work until a short time ago. We have worked out that we will probably have to leave Santiago earlier than we had wanted because of available travel. We will go by bus all the way (a day and a half or so on the bus, folks).

I have not had a chance to write stuff for a little while – except for these bits - so I have put them together so that there is at least a flavour of what is happening so far. By the way Alison is fine, her sandals are working well and I only have one foot of pain to deal with now..... Wow!!!!

Perhaps Leon and beyond will be easier for the internet.

I am trying to convince people that the English for Buen Camino is either Toodle Pip! Or What Ho! Some success so will persist.

What Ho! (the nooo)

Say a little prayer for 04 07 2010

Today we were awake before five as the Italian guy next to us set his alarm to quarter to five and got up at five.

We didn’t have any breakfast as Alison did not want to eat so early so we set off after six and walked. It was a glorious morning with the sun about to rise and the birds in full song. A bright star hung from below the crescent moon and the hint of pink in the sky just managed to blot out the dazzling display of stars that had filled the night sky.

We ate our packs of biscuits for breakfast washed down with some water from the spring at last night’s Albergue and continued walking hoping one of the villages on the way would have a place open for breakfast. Of course, our guide (unlike most of the other guides) does not tell us where such places are.

Eventually at Sahaguin we found a place open and went in. The food was very limited so we each had a little cake and some coffee and left. At a shop across the road from a much better cafe around the corner (where most of the pilgrims were gathering as they had read about the place in their guides) we bought some tins of pate, some bread and tomatoes and peaches. After squirreling them away in our bags we headed off again and made the village before our allotted night stop at just after half past eleven so we stopped at the bar there and I made us some lunch with bread and pate while Alison chatted to an American friend who was worried that she would not be able to get to Mass today as it was Sunday. We pointed out the little Chapel across the road and she went off to find out where the nearest Mass was. She came back to say it was at midday so we rushed the food and beer and dashed off to the little church of St Rock.

It was very hot and stuffy in the church and by the latter part of the service Alison was turning very pale and could not stand up. Luckily, the service finished and I managed to get her out of the church before she completely stopped being able to function. She just sat with her head between her knees – first on the bench outside the church and then on the ground while I tried to find a way to help her recover.

I went off in search of the Albergue which was poorly signposted and was briefly described in the guide book but gave no clues as to its whereabouts (the street name is most helpful when you either have a street map or are in a place where they have the names of the street on the ends or at least somewhere on the street).

I found the place and ran back to Alison fearing that she might have passed out in my absence but she was unchanged, on the ground with her head between her knees.

Eventually we walked slowly to the Albergue with Alison saying she was probably OK now and me saying great, so let’s see if we can get to this Albergue and then we can decide whether to stay there of go on. I didn’t want to even contemplate seeing Alison walking to the next town. Thankfully, the place was as nice as it looked and when Alison sat in the cool of the reception area she had to admit that it would be for the best for us to stay her tonight.

Since then I have sorted out some things, had a shower, washed our things and have written this while Alison has been lying on the bed, unable to get up.

We will see how things are tomorrow......

Just one little note about the service: This was a Eucharistic service run by the parishioners who did it very well, were deeply devout, sang hymns and parts of the service and fed themselves spiritually despite the absence of a priest. Contrast this with the fact that we have been to several Masses in Spain held within the Cathedrals and they have all had several priests all concelebrating. I think the minimum I have seen is one main celebrant and five other priests taking part in the Mass. The same is often true in both the UK and France. In fact in France we were put up by a lovely priest just north of Chartres and he was looking after over 30 parishes on his own. We stayed an extra night in Chartres that weekend and went to Mass in the Cathedral and there were several priests involved in that Mass, too. This has been bugging me a lot over the last few months and while Alison was sitting outside the chapel feeling rough she commented on the contrast, saying it did pose some pretty serious questions. Ho hum!

Party time 03 07 2010

We are sitting in a shaded spot in the garden watching the mother cat (of at least five kittens) wandering around impatiently waiting for food. She is hungry and a little harassed and worn out by the high level of feeding she is doing.

We can hear something going on in the bar/lounge where the TV is so we are assuming it is football and are keeping out of it. Alison is checking tomorrow’s route and I am writing this and we are both thinking of Kirsty, her birthday and her BBQ. We know that both her sisters intend to be there to help and that it should be a really great day but we are too far away to know or do anything about it. So we are thinking and praying and hoping all will work out and be really good.....

We hope that no messages on Facebook mean good news rather than bad!

Lots of love and happy birthday Kirsty!

Carrion people 02 07 2010

Michael is a young German from Potsdam who was in the refugio last night. He is now in his early thirties and works in a kindergarten to make money and spends much of the rest of his time as a spiritual advisor. He spends his time helping people to reconnect with God. He wants people to begin to feel things in their heart again and when he tells me this he thumps his chest with his clenched fist to emphasise the importance of this. He is not tall but is broadly built with light hair, tattooed arms and he goes around smiling a lot and emitting a huge amount of positive energy.

He told me that he was in prison when he was a teenager and emphasises that he was not guilty but despite this they had put him in prison. While there he was told by an older man that he needed to read the Bible and connect with God. It was not something he was willing to do but, despite this reluctance he decided to make a pact with God. He said that if God would get him out he would do his best to work on God’s side. Shortly after the promise his life changed. They reviewed his case and chucked him out of prison so Michael started off on a journey to find out what God wanted him to do.

After a time as a Christian he left Germany and landed up in London where he spent more than three years with the Hare Krishna group, or the Hindus as he calls them. He spent a lot of that time in the big house they have which was donated by George Harrison. So he speaks English very well and has a simple openness and fierce intensity that makes him quite a character to meet and get to know.

We all have God the Father and the Mother Earth as our parents, he said, and this makes us all one big family of brothers and sisters. We are not step brothers and sisters and nor are we distant cousins. The sooner we realise this, the closer to realising global peace we will be.

We hope to meet up with him again as we walk to Santiago.

Earlier, we had made a quick meal in the albergue (onions, garlic, lardons, tomatoes, pimento and pasta) and had a glass of wine from our bottle. We then washed up and reserved the rest of the wine for the end of the evening. Then off we went to Mass which was to be followed by a classical guitar concert especially for pilgrims.

The Mass was OK and was accompanied by the guitarist playing some simple classical music.

The Concert was performed by a young Uruguayan man who was very good despite a number of little problems with rhythm and fluffed passages – much of what he played was without reading music...... All told it was a refreshing interlude and we all welcomed it enormously. After the first three pieces the rain came down and began to pound noisily on the church roof but even that did not cause much of a problem and soon died away again.

The priest was obviously very happy with all of this. The church was clearly still very active and there were newly produced hymn books with a wide range of new as well as a few old hymns in. Clearly, the priest and the congregation sang at Masses and the priest’s note at the beginning of the book did emphasise the importance of music and song as ways of adding much to worship. So, when he finished the Mass he did all the things necessary to clear the altar, etc and then rushed eagerly to take a front seat place that had been reserved for him.

There was a pilgrim Blessing at the end of the concert and we were all given multilingual booklets for the service. Alison read the Gospel in English and we spoke the rest in Spanish. At the very end we all sang a Compostella song which was written (and recorded) by the priest. He had a bit of a cough all the way through the evening and when he went around shaking our hands after the blessing I said to him that we would pray for him during the walk and he gave me a couple of big hugs. I had not really appreciated just how large the priest was until then. Well over six feet in height and built to match. I think he was showing his gratitude and not trying to grush the life out of me, so I am praying for him.

On reflection, we think the reason why we queued up was mainly because the refugio didn’t open until a couple of hours after most people had arrived in town so the crush was on. We walked to Terradillion today (a bit further away but still got there before half twelve) and arrived in a very nice albergue which has beds rather than bunk beds and has very nice gardens, terraces, etc. We had no difficulty getting in and sorted. Of course, we ignored the other Albergue just outside the village – that one was more modern and you could see it from the path. You could also see the swimming pool in its grounds. We wanted to be in the village not half a km out of it on the wrong side. We also thought that most of the young people would be attracted by the pool (along with the family with three kids) so we left it as a lure to all who were easily seduced!

Must say, people seem to be getting up earlier and earlier.... most are up and dressed between half five and six which means alarms go off before five. This is all hugely unnecessary as most people are still sitting around when we eventually get ready to leave. So they wake us up, rush around and disturb us constantly then, when we get up, get dressed and packed and go to find our boots we discover these people still sitting around chatting, having breakfast, etc. They then rush off, try to overtake us, then stop for a long early morning snack/coffee at the first place they find open. Their desire to stop and eat/drink does not diminish as the day goes on, either. This is why we get to the final place in the first cohort of walkers. We don’t stop much and we don’t stay long!

Weather is hot and sunny, but it comes with a cool wind and some pretty powerful afternoon or evening rainstorms. My Feet still hurt but I am living in hope that things will get better! Ho hum.

Ready steady GO

Our first day on the Camino for almost a week and we have found the experience interesting. For a start, we have not spent so long away from the Camino or from walking since we started this thing back in April (well March if you include Student Cross). Also, we have dumped various things in the UK and brought other thongs back. So, the weight is not that much different – just a few kilos lighter for me and a bit more space in the bag for Alison. But what we brought back has made another difference. I left my boots and brought my walking shoes which seems to be making a difference, ‘though I will have to wait a few days to see if this is a true difference as I had a false start with my boots where the change was perhaps as good as a rest but the end result was continuingly sore feet.....

Alison brought back a new pair of sandals fro walking in and she tried them out today. Her legs are a bit more tired than usual and her feet are a bit more painful. Yes, this is by no means a valid test as too many variables have been changed but the over all prognosis, regardless of complexities, is that the sandals work and will get better rather than worse.

This is the first time since Roncevalles that we have queued up to get into a refugio. A couple of times you sit around and wait your turn to be booked in but here, despite the fact that there are around 60 beds available, we were queuing to get a place and it felt like we had to in order to ensure we had a bed for the night. After a shower and something to eat we are relaxing, writing, etc and people are being turned away at the door because the place is full.

We will have to wait to see if this is a new trend or if it is a function of where you go. Today is Carrion and there are other albergues but this is the cheapest and is the municipal one so it is the one to get full first, I suppose.

We got up in Fromista at six and were out of the door by just after seven. We walked for just over 20 kms and got here just before eleven, ‘though we did stop for coffee and a croissant at one point and to sort clothes, etc at another. The going, as they say, was good all the way with a slight rise for the last few Kms. Tonight we will sort out our meal then go to the Mass followed by a special guitar recital in the same church. Then we will return to the albergue and finish off our wine before settling for the night.

The marks on the sheets indicate that some sort of blood sucking insects have been on the prowl on these beds recently but we are going to assume that all is well until we actually know it to be otherwise – you can’t live your life being dictated to by your fears. I know this statement is rich coming from me when I am a severe dental phobic, but I can talk about all else in this light...... So I am sitting on the top bunk writing this and hoping that the evidence is positive, even if I have been bitten on the elbow by something (I think that something flying did that biting).

We are still working the practicalities out of starting a series of camino routes across Britain (possibly linked at some point to the Santiago routes but primarily going to key UK pilgrim sites – Iona, Lindisfarne and Walsingham to name but three. I think the first will be to Iona and that Scotland is ideal for starting such a thing for a whole long list of reasons, so I am thinking about organising and marketing as well as route planning, etc. Watch this space! And expect to find a route and guide book out shortly!

Castro and co 24 06 2010

I will have to write elsewhere about Castro Jeriz and tell the whole story, I have written a couple of poems linked to the place and to the people and will probably write some more. The annual Fiesta was beginning as we arrived and we have been encountering bits of it during our stay but we are not of the little town and it is not for us and we are in this sort of limbo world as a result. It manages to bring home to you the unreality of the Camino and demonstrates that our reality is something else.

The shops were shut but all the bars were open and full. We went to the bar nearest the Alberque while we waited for it to open and the place had this enormous black log about forty feet long or more stretching from just by the front door and into the wall at the other end of the bar. On closer inspection it seemed to be the lever for a gigantic press for either olives or grapes. We went there twice and I never got around to asking more about it.... The place also had a very good (large) local painting of people working on digging and lighting a fire in a long trench as others prepared a whole pig for roasting. People were doing all sorts of other things, the weather was pretty cold and the hills had that winter crispness of focus that comes from a dry, cold day. The whole scene looked so familiar tome that I felt that I must surely have been there and I kept looking at the faces of people thinking that somehow they looked like people I knew.

This is the place where the hospitalier makes the paella in a dish on an open fire in the garden and where we get wakened up in the morning by Gregorian chant music and him dressed up as a monk with a lantern on a staff, etc.

I didn’t get enough paella or wine so beware where you sit in one of these things and you will not be left hungry and thirsty at the end of the meal. Ho hum.

We love you because 23 06 2010

It’s official. Even the wonderful Spanish language cannot raise country and western music above trite, musically challenged drivel. Sitting in the bar in Hornillos del Camino drinking beer from a frozen glass with the radio on and the music playing I am trying to tap at the keys while Alison writes in her note book. The room is small with a high ceiling, stairs to the next floor by the front door and the telephone booth under the stairs in constant use by pilgrims and locals. Beyond the bar and the ‘phone booth is a small restaurant where we hope to have a pilgrim menu meal.

It looks like they do both lentils and beans with sausages as starters. They are also served in Burgos and are particularly nice.

A note on food in this area - The pilgrim menu is a simple set meal with wine and bread which is served early as most Spaniards don’t eat until late and pilgrim hostels close around ten pm. If you are lucky there will be a choice and we have been lucky in a reasonable number of places and only been ripped off in a couple. In Burgos we had two very nice meals – one very simple and the other a bit more sophisticated but both enjoyable.

I thought of my dad when we had the peas and ham as a starter in Burgos on our first night there. My dad loved a supper dish of hot peas and vinegar which was your tinned peas and not the frozen sort, though he might have liked that too. If he had been served it with bits of ham in there too, he would have loved it even more. I added some wine vinegar to mine in homage to dad.

The other thing of note which needs to be mentioned (over and above all of the other lovely things including the fantastic hams and other meats) is the black pudding of the area. They have a wide range of different types and they all seem to be brilliant although we will have to come back with time and money to confirm this conjecture. The ones we have had are all really great....

After here is Castro Jeriz and then Fromista before we return to the UK fro a brief interlude to attend Dominique’s (our middle daughter’s) graduation at Durham.

It is such a wei8rd thing to do we don’t know how to approach it so we are just going to go with the flow and see what happens. One of our many blessings (but a HUGE blessing, it must be said) is that our good friend Mike Lagrue will be collecting us from the airport and ferrying us around during our trip to the UK. If that does not sound much let me assure you that it is an enormously kind and wonderfiul thing to do and we are so much in his debt! We arrive at Stanstead and he picks us up, ferries us to New Malden, we sort ourselves out then in the evening he picks us up and we go and collect Dominique who has just started her Teach First training in Central London and we drive up to Durham. Sleep in Dom’s house when we eventually get there. Do the business in Durham and after the graduation meal in the evening Mike collects us and drives us all back to London. Then the next day he takes Alison and I back to Stanstead. I am researching how you get people the Papal Knighthood – he deserves it more than any one else I can think of and he would appreciate the humour of getting it, too. I will think of better ways to thank him....

So, now we are going in to have something to eat.... I’m hungry!!!

On the high plains of Spain in the sun and the wind thinking of you all, you all

2010-06-22T09:28:00.001-07:00

Gothic confections 22 06 2010

Burgos is an attractive city. It was cold on the way in but today has been sunny and generally warm (when you are out of the wind that is).

We arrived and bumped into a woman (hi Deidre) we have not seen the crossing from St Jean to Roncevalles – she is a lovely Irish Canadian (born and brought up in Ireland, moved to Canada). She pointed us to the new municipal refugio which is just behind the cathedral, is beautifully presented and brand new. Extremely good in many ways but, like so many other places it does lack some things.

For example our dorm had ten rows of bunks (4 individual beds to a row) and each bunk was a good width with comfortable mattresses. The bunks were separated by a column of lockers so Alison and I were top and bottom and the people next door were separated by the lockers. Each row has a wall separating it from the next so when you get into bed you are open on one side and have a wall with a light and socket on your other side (and a wall head and foot. If you sit up on the top bunk you see the lines of bunks and can wave to your neighbours in the rows beyond). I hope that is all clear....

So, a margin of privacy in a hostel is unusual and welcome. What was not so good was the row of four showers and two loos for all of us to share. Oh, and climbing the narrow ladder to the top bunk was torture!

Two other things. There was not a kitchen. On the ground floor there were some tables and benches fixed to the floor and although they looked good they were not particularly nice to sit at and it felt like one of those places you go to eat your packed lunch at a museum. In the same space were 4 pay as you go internet units, a couple of microwaves and two washing machines and tumble driers. All a bit limited for the few hundred pilgrims who can stay there at any one time.

The second thing was that when we arrived we handed over our pilgrim passports, paid our money and were led off by one of the workers there. He stopped us at the place where you take your boots off and we then stacked them in the large racks provided before we were marched off up stairs to be allocated our beds. It did feel a bit like going to a prison. I was half expecting him to tell us to strip and shower!

Having said all of this it was a very good place. The point is not that these short comings were really significant or that we were in any way being mistreated or short changed. The place was really nice, the facilities were better than many places we have been so far and it was four Euros fifty each for the night. The point is partly that it is amazing what can be achieved with even the minimum of services and partly that the process is different from most other things in our lives. We got the things we needed and we all found space for each other. We did not complain or try to get some extra service for ourselves. We bumped into lots of people we have not seen for a while and exchanged news, we had a good night’s sleep and didn’t even complain when people set their alarms for half five when the doors don’t open until half six (and we wanted a lie in to at least seven, which didn’t happen).

It also makes you more aware of the things you miss and don’t miss. It shows you what it might be like if you have to live like this for longer than just a pilgrimage and it lets you see why people will get ratty from time to time and fed up of being so limited in terms of personal choice and personal space. If you can have that revealed in such a wonderful new resource as the Burgos Municipal Albergue then it is something worth taking note of.

So we had a rest day today and are staying in a small one star hotel in the centre of town for our second night. This meant we could put our backs down somewhere safe and not have to get our sleeping bags out to claim our beds, etc. We have walked all over the place (and not covered half of what we would like to see. We also went to the big supermarket we checked out on our way into town and bought some essentials....

One of the high lights has been the cathedral. I first wanted to see this place when I was a student in 1973 and bought a Geographical Magazine with the church on the cover. It has been much cleaned up and so on since then but the whole thing is quite astounding in so many ways. We paid E2.50 (the pilgrim rate) to get in and as we walked around the cathedral part the section of the church still functioning as a sacred worship space the monks/priests were singing plain chant there and it was being piped throughout the place, so start your visit as soon as the place opens, folks.

It took us the best part of three hours to go around and we popped out as if it had taken 5 minutes. Stunning art, stunning spaces, fantastic stone and wood work, fascinating historical displays. Must go back and do it properly some time.

We went to the front to photograph it and realised that we had not gone into the church part – we always visit the church and give thanks but had failed to do it the day before. So we went in and did that and prayed for all sorts of things and people close to our hearts. The second chapel we went to had the amazing crucifix with Christ in the cross wearing an extraordinary sort of skirt. On the way out a priest came rushing up to me and asked me to stop. He opened the door of the confessional and I though that he had sussed me out (quite astutely) as being a sinner in need of such help. But no, he just wanted us to have little prayer card/leaflets on the Crucifix which included a pilgrim prayer – he had sussed us out as pilgrims!

We then went looking for a present of some pilgrim tat for our friend, Mike, and found a shop across the square that looked the business. We were just on the verge of selecting a suitable thing when Alison’s phone started to ring and guess what.... Yes, it was Mike himself! So we had a nice chat in the sunshine by the cathedral steps.

Anyway, here we are, in a bar in Burgos, drinking beer and coffee (me and Alison in that order) and taking advantage of the wifi to put this little package together so I better stop. Our task will be to find a cafe without the world cup blaring in it. Yes, Burgos does seem to have the bug more than most places. And yes we need to find one that has fewer smokers as the public spaces seem to be full of them. Ho hum, I still prefer the strange beehive type sound from a telly playing the world cup than I do having smokers all around me. One way or another, I am certain we will have a lovely evening.

I hope you have the same too!!!

Show me the way.... 20/06/2010

Just a jumble of different things for the moment.

We were in a private refugio last night and it was cold!! It was designed for hot, hot weather and everyone seemed a bit confused (they have a swimming pool on the garden but people didn’t even want to go out and say hello to the bunny rabbit on the lawn or hang their clothes out.

We shared a dorm with about a dozen Spanish people in a walking group. We passed them on the way that day and we were not sure if they were just a weekend walking group or pilgrims. So, now we know that some Spaniards (mainly, but not exclusively men) are extremely loud and do not stop being loud even when they are asleep (ditto as previous comment). They were lovely and full of high spirits but when they got up this morning it was a bit like bedlam (a mixture of whispering and shouting, tiptoeing around and slamming doors, roars of laughter and loud shhhing, etc.) while trying to get up early without disturbing the rest of the people in the room....

The meal was good but there was not enough of it (fish soup, roast chicken and potatoes with salad and crème caramel) and I managed to break a tooth on the salad.... I am still trying to work out how I will recover from that and so my nerves are a bit shot now. (for those who don’t know, I have a pathological terror of dentists and dentistry)

Today’s walk was another new landscape with wonderful oak forests and wide open sweeping hillsides, and although we did do a bit of climbing up hills it was nothing like the profile shown on the guide. But that is not a surprise. If you want a good, useful and practical guide to the Camino do not (I repeat DO NOT) buy the Brierley guide.

[at this point I have deleted the comments on the Brierley guide as they were not kind] the text continues...

......, but, after being so annoyed by the French guide we must confess we miss it so. At least it was informative.

The best one we have seen so far (Guide that is) is the one published by Dodo. They have sketch maps that actually give you useful information which is pretty accurate, their information about places and accommodation is reliable and up to date and it does not try to be a sort of middle aged, middle class English Yoda (although I do prefer Yoda’s approach to English).
So, there you are, I was trying not to gripe about anything and have found myself rubbishing our guide book (well, thank your lucky stars that I restrained myself, folks!) – just buy the Miam Miam Dodo guide and stop worrying.

Anyway, you could almost walk this without a guide because it is basically so well signposted, there are so many information guide boards on the route and every refugio has tons of leaflets and info about the next places. All of the people who run the refugios also know the route very well and can give you loads more info. Oh, and if you are a teeny wee bit worried after all of that just go into the kitchen or the local bar or the dining room and sit down with some pilgrims who look OK and start chatting to them and agree to walk with them for a day or two. It is just so simple when every little place has at least one refugio and where everyone wants to help you. We walked just slightly off the route (about ten feet actually) n the direction of a supermarket the other day and a car hooted at us. The driver then wound down the window and told us we should be on the other side of the road for the Camino and even wanted us to walk across in front of him so we would be sure of going the right way. Yesterday a woman walked us through a small town because there were some road works and she was worried we might get lost.... Only rubbish English guides get you lost on this Camino, folks!

So, now we are in another private refugio – it is a private “Network” place. We have found that they are actually extremely well run, clean and good value for money. They are also smaller with smaller rooms and many have things like individual lockers (which are really important if you are walking on your own as it means you do not have to take all of your belongings with you into the showers).

We are one day away from Burgos and everyone is telling us to get a bus so we can avoid having to walk through the industrial/commercial part of the city and we are wondering why they want us to do this. What is this obsession with hating cities and related things. We like urban walking as well as rural walks and find factories interesting as well as wanting to get to a really good, big supermarket. We would hate to get the bus and watch a fantastic large supermarket zip by us as we headed for the centre of town. Please take note, it is cheaper to shop in a hyper market than it is to shop in a small “supermarket” in the centre of a large city. If you don’t believe me try it at home! So we will walk, walk, walk tomorrow and if we see a bus after the super market we might get it then.

Tonight we will have paella, then tortilla and pudding as part of the night’s deal and tomorrow we hope for slightly better weather. It was lots of large clouds sweeping across a bright blue sky with large dark clouds of mist and rain in several directions as we walked. The wind was cold and gusty and the temperature was pretty low. No complaints, especially as it did not rain and I suspected that it might. Also, it is better to walk in cooler rather than hotter conditions, especially when you are walking up hill.

Still managing to avoid most of the World Cup and wondering where we might go to escape the Olympics when they invade our home town in a couple of years time. The Spanish seem to be extremely laid back about the whole football thing (only interested in their own matches, it seems). Ho hum....

Walking on the same old path again 19 06 2010

Today was another day of textures and colours. We walk around sweeping curves in hills and new vistas open out with corn fields gashed red with poppies and walk along between different types of grain fields giving us the soft yellows of ripe rye and the deep blue greens of barley each edged with wild flowers in reds, yellows and blues. Textures, colours and sweeping valleys of curves and sudden changes of angle punctuated our day. And, as with yesterday, the sky helps to give some scale to the landscape showing us just how large this country is. Massive white clouds drift along the sides of the valleys in slow squadrons patrolling the upper reaches and casting chequered shadows that travel along the fields and over the edges of the valleys. Even the motorway and the parts of the roads still being built look small here.

Starting in Santo Domingo we did this journey arriving in Belorado (which sounds like the name used for a cheap brand of cigarettes or naff frozen foods) in time to book into the albergue, do tomorrow’s shopping (tomorrow is Sunday) and have lunch in a local bar – beer and Tapas. Now, after a shower and washing clothes, etc. we are catching up on writing and things.

In addition to the scenery, we have been meeting up with and spending time listening to people we have not seen for a little while and we have encountered other people – some who are distinctly odd. We met Richard, the Scot who is walking wearing a kilt in a little village on top of a hill (the hill was Rioja Alta and the village was Ciruena). On the side of the hill was a posh golf course and beside that was a distinctly grim series of blocks of flats and houses. It was a major tourist development without any shops and with a large “club” area with two swimming pools, children’s play area and a high fence around it. Most of the flats were unoccupied and many were for sale. As we walked through the development we passed along further undeveloped streets with empty plots and weeds breaking up the surface of the roads and taking over the pavements. We felt that people who had bought into that grim development were now firmly located in what we used to say to our children was the “serves you right department”. It looked like it had grown and floundered on the basis of a high level of greed and low level of sense....

Anyway, in the little village of Ciruena we found a bar and headed there for a well deserved drink. At a table outside was Richard talking to a Spanish pilgrim. We went inside to sit while drinking our beer then joined them outside to make our sandwich and chat. We had not seen him since the day we entered Pamplona. He told us several stories about the people he had met and things he has seen and we shared some of ours. As we chatted another person we had not seen since leaving St Jean appeared. Anne, who had set off from St Jean on her bike the day we left for the high pass walked up to us with walking shoes on her feet and a rucksack on her back. We walked into Santo Dominica together and listened to her story then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening with her (she stayed in the same refugio as us too).

Before giving a short outline of her tale I must share the following incident with you.

On the way towards Rioja Alta (but before we had even started to climb the not very steep hill) we were walking along one of the relatively well kept but still coarsely surfaced paths that make up many sections of the Spanish Camino. It was warm but overcast with a light breeze and we kept looking back for signs of cyclists as they tend to come in small groups and approach you quite quickly and silently giving you no warning that they are there. Usually they just give a short shout of “Hola” or “Buen Camino” just before they are on your back and you have to jump out of their way or have them skidding into your back – which is a very unpleasant experience.

I looked back and saw both a cyclist and a car behind it some way back. I warned Alison and kept monitoring them by glancing back. They went past a small group of walkers, then a couple and still the bike was just a head of the car and I thought both what a shame it must be for the cyclist being harassed by a car like that and also thought the cyclist must be either an idiot who cannot work out how to stop or a pain in the butt for blocking the car in that way.

Alison and I stood off the path to let them past (she was going to take her fleece off so it seemed like a good time to stop anyway) and we watched in awe as a quite good looking woman in possibly her forties cycled past us. She was wearing very expensive clothes and riding a very posh bike. She was cycling slowly and seemed very pleased to have us watching her as she went by. The car behind her was driven by a fit, very well dressed man of similar or slightly older age driving brand new top of the range Mercedes with cream leather interior, etc. He was accompanying her as she wobbled stylishly along the path.

A few hundred metres on the path began to climb at a gentle angle as it reached the latter stages of the valley we were walking along. She stopped the bike and to car stopped behind her. The man go out and they stood together for a few minutes before she climbed back on the bike and he ran behind her for a good hundred feet or so pushing her until she was going slowly but steadily up the hill.

Despite their distinct lack of speed and the open aspect of the camino at this point they were long gone when we reached the top of that valley some five minutes after them (the path out of the valley continued up the side of the next and on along the side of the golf course and we could see up it for more than a kilometre when we reached to top). Perhaps she had done her designated exercise for the day or had become sufficiently bored with it to want to stop. Whatever the reason, they had taken up the bike and left a la merc before the real hill climbing began.

Look out in the papers and magazines to see if any famous woman claims that she has recently cycled the camino – it might have been her.

Contrast this with Anne’s story.

Anne walked the Camino 9 years ago and decided, as she had a bike, to spend some time cycling the Camino revisiting places she had enjoyed and checking out new places. With seven weeks to do this in she though it seemed feasible to cycle to Santiago and return to St Jean in time to go back on the transport she had booked.

She was thoroughly looking forward to the experience and was only worried a bit about the problem of being able to watch the World Cup while doing the Camino (Refugios all seemed to close too early for the games).

She soon found that cycling was not as good as she had hoped.

Firstly, the guide she was using was pretty out of date. Add to this the fact that the country road she was hoping to use was on the way to being replaced by a major motorway and you begin to see her peoblems.

She would start from a place and soon discover that the route she was hoping to take soon developed into a large roundabout with all the exits going onto major high ways. When the old road existed it was so busy it soon became too dangerous to use on a bike. She asked various people for advice (including the police) and they all said the same thing. Either cycle on the camino itself or risk the busy road (but only if it was still the old road – she could not cycle on the motorway, even she wanted to...).

Cycling on the Camino was not really an option for Anne. There are very many stretches of it that are incredibly steep, muddy, uneven, filled with boulders and very twisty (not to mention heavily encroached on by all sorts of trees and bushes. Ths is all great stuff for a strong, experienced All Terrain Biker with the right sort of equipment. For Anne it was not an option – Anne is very petite, she has a standard woman’s road bike and only basic experience with no idea of to cycle such routes.

She then discovered that many of the standard refugios are not particularly welcoming to cyclists. Many refuse cyclists and others say cyclist can come in if there are spaces left after 7pm in the evening (Refuios in Spain are not allowed, by Law, to refuse any pilgrim help after 7 pm in the evening)

She found this deeply upsetting and another aspect of the journey that was destructive to both her morale and her enjoyment of the pilgrimage.

By the time she had done two or three days she was beginning to wish she had never started and within another day she was ready to completely break down.

She managed to find a good refugion in Logrono that welcomed bikers and the woman who ran the place was extremely supportive and helpful. She talked it through with Anne and let her stay an extra day. Anne walked around the town distraught trying to work out what to do. She had seven weeks to do the Camino and get back to St Jean for her transport home but she just could not face another day on the road. She moved from place to place finding herself crying and in despair. She went to a church hoping to find some clue and found the reading for the day was one about the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears. This made her cry even more as she wondered what the story might mean for her.

She went to the pilgrims’ information bureau at the start of the bridge over the river leading into Logrono. The pounding water below seemed to be washing away her hope rather than feeding her strength and, when she asked for help in the bureau the really nice man behind the counter only confirmed her worst fears. He really wanted to help (the bureau is a great place, by the way – clean, well designed, brand new and peopled by really good staff) but the simple solution was that she needed to seek the help of hospitaliers in each refugio she stopped at. They would be able to guide her along the route safely, pointing out the best local options for her on the way. The solution only seemed to make her prospects worse.

Eventually, she found herself at the door of an outdoor pursuits shop and she walked through the entrance and into the walkers’ department. There she bought a rucksack and a pair of walking boots.

When she returned to the refugio the lady there threw her arms around Anne and congratulated her on her decision. The bike and any un-needed equipment could stay at the refugio until Anne returned for it in a few weeks time. She sent Anne to the bus station to find out options for getting her nd the bike back to St Jean and everything just fell into place.

So, now Anne is walking to Santiago and is so much happier she just cannot believe how happy she is. She had made a mistake and had been given the chance to correct it before it destroyed her and now she was enjoying everything except, perhaps, the awful performance of the England team. But she knew there was nothing she could do about that.

I keep thinking of the contrast between the woman on the bike with the Mercedes following her and Anne who is no longer on her bike. I keep getting new thoughts of what it all means and I keep thinking that it is all part of that rich, heady concoction that is the Camino.

I just have a few minutes before lights go out so here is something for the blog....... Argh!!!

2010-06-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

Here I am sitting in Spain

I have a few things for this blog but I will add them on to the end of this.

Today we got up and Alison was beginning to have a migraine so we took things a bit easy. We were slow in getting ourselves ready and it was closer to 8 than 7 when we left the refuge. We walked from Viana to Logrono and stopped for a coffee before heading through to a Pharmacy to buy ibuprofen (the smallest they had was 600mg tablets!) and then found a supermarket on the outskirts of town just by the camino. There we bought some essentials and lunch (some ham, a large tomato and bread).

We stopped at Navarette for lunch and then a beer at a bar and arrived in Ventosa quite late for us at about 4pm. The albergue (I should start calling them that, now) is a lovely Spanish house that has been beautifully restored with a nice garden and good washing facilities, excellent kitchen etc. Phew, it feels like unbridled luxury after the last couple of days ... and it has wifi so I will be posting this.

The past couple of days have seen us in pretty wonderful but odd places.

2 nights ago we were in Villamayor de Monjardin which is a wonderful little village half way up a small mountain with a beautiful little Romanesque church where we shared prayers with the woman who ran the parish Albergue there and where we spent time wondering over a fantastic crucifix from the 12th Century which is truly a masterpiece. Carved in wood then covered in silver it is exquisite and took our breath away.

Montjardin was the simplest of places and we all slept in one large room on a platform with a variety of different types of mattresses for us to choose from. But it had a shower, the place was cold but clean and the welcome was genuine.

In Viana the Albergue was also next to the church but this was a much grander church with a massive baroque altar piece that dominated to huge church. The Albergue had two rooms with mattresses on the floor and we shared in the preparation of the evening meal then went to Mass next door while the Hostalieres cooked the food which we then shared on our return. Mass was lovely with a priest who took obvious pleasure in having pilgrims as guests and he blessed us individually at the end of the service. He also spoke to each of us and had obviously worked at being able to converse with pilgrims from a number of different countries. He also took the time to share the sign of peace with everyone in the church....

After a lovely meal we went to bed very tired.

The thing about yesterday was that it was the coldest and wettest day we have had in Spain and the paths were also the worst we have experienced here. Usually the paths are pretty good and a number of them have been paved or surfaced in some way but yesterday the claggy mud clung to our boots and formed slippery tracks down steep narrow paths and through puddle ridden lanes between sodden nut and fruit trees. The Albergue had radiators but the Hospitalieres did not know how to put the heating on and seemed convinced that it was probably best not to try and find out how to make it work. So we arrived wet and left wet the next day (today) which was the only drawback to the place, really.

In both places, as with every place we have gone through and stayed at so far, the people have been wonderful, full of their own great stories about their travels and keen to find out about yours. I am gathering a long and varied set of stories and am nurturing them as I walk along. We have been meeting some of the same people in each place we stay at and encountering others as we go from village to village so now we have a little travelling community that we are part of. A sort of tiny moving village or a caravan of pilgrims sharing nights and swapping lives in different places each night.

No doubt the rooms with mattresses are the closest we will get to both the experience of homeless people and also the nearest thing we will find to the sort of experience medieval pilgrims will have had. The inns of the time often just had a series of straw mattresses or just straw on the floor to sleep on. Some people might have found places with smaller rooms and others will have slept on the benches in the tavern near where the fire was kept alight all night. As we walk we discover different levels of comfort, individual experiences of communal and private hospitality and meals either shared at a long table or in a small bar or restaurant where other pilgrims are also eating the pilgrim menu. On the road, although we may only pass some and be passed by others, there is a gentle camaraderie that can be expressed in conversation or in a simple “Buen camino!”. Many people (as was the case in France, too) wish us this or give us some other greeting which is telling us that they recognise us as pilgrims and wish us a good journey. It lightens the load and adds power to your step, it really does.

So, today we were a little under the weather and, although we covered around the 30km again it took a while and we were not sure if we were going to do it at first. My feet seemed to be determined not to settle into the boots today and Alison was feeling pretty rough. The camera had been put in the little bag we use for ‘phones, passports, etc when we have stopped for the night and I had packed the thing away in the bottom of my sack without realising it was there. So, because we had other things to deal with I left it where it was.

As a result we missed taking pictures of Viana. I had not taken any on the wy in because it was too wet and the camera was having tantrums (shorting out and telling me the batteries were dead, etc) so we have none of the aubergue which is on the top couple of floors of a tsall building next to the crumbling facade of the church. I missed photographing the two storks nesting on a high wall above the roofs of the town and the beautiful plaza with its colonnaded sides and the various modern and ancient statues within the centre of the town. I also missed the way out through the medieval streets with their overhanging balconies and eccentrically edged walls. The banks of vineyards and huddles of olive and nut trees we passed as we climbed out and over the side of the valley heading towards the higher mountain valleys filled with clouds and rain. The entrance to the next town, Logrono began with a walk by the raging river whose weir had disappeared under the torrent of brown water tumbling from under its tall stone bridge. The islands below the weir were also swamped with the powerful torrent and, as we crossed over the bridge we watched logs being swept through its arches and dragged under the brown water by large whirlpools. The sound of the river tumbling down through the valley was impressive.

Logrono is somewhere we will revisit. Its medieval streets and fine buildings are also filled with lovely shops, bars and restaurants and the place had a great atmosphere. As we left the town we walked along a series of little parks out around a large lake and then over the terraced hillside filled with vineyards and small orchards up past fields of poppies that would have made an impressionist painter salivate and up to enjoy our lunch in a little hilltop village before stopping to have a beer with a young German girl we have walked the last few days with (Hello Vera!) and a couple of young Norwegian guys walking with a young German who were sitting enjoying a beer and Vera’s company. They are all in the albergue here tonight adding their energy to the place.

And now, after having a lovely meal in a little restaurant in the village Alison has gone to bed and I am just finishing off this little note before sending it out and going to bed as well (Lights out at 10pm folks!!!).

I am still processing this whole thing, still meeting people and enjoying the journey with Alison. So much to write about, so much to do, so much still to look forward to - can there be a better description of happiness?

Now for a quick set of notes and a little rant – sorry for any repetition, it is just I will not have time to edit this before I have to send it out.

Snoring and the art of letting go – plus a rant 14/06/2010

Monday and it is Puente la Reina at the municipal refuge. Last 2 nights (Saturday and Sunday) were spent in a little hotel in Pamplona and before that we were in a little private refuge where the people in our room should have entered themselves as the Camino Snoring team in the next Olympics. In fact, I think that I spent part of the night convinced that I had worked out a way of harnessing the enormous power contained within these snores to help solve the world’s energy crisis. One of these days, instead of an alien race using us as power cells (as in the Matrix) we will just put little contraptions on snorers’ heads at night and the energy they release will keep our light’s burning and our industries working.

Ideas like this are why we are walking to Santiago....

One of the things we end up discovering is that we are able to accept the least and not expect anything more. This may seem like a good thing if you are not doing it yourself. From our point of view it means that the effects of any hardships we face are reduced considerably as we do not expect anything more and accept what we are allowed for that day.

Ah, true humility, I hear you say. Ah, you are finding harmony and acceptance, you are living life more simply – if only we could all do that!

Well, think of the story of the snoring I have just given in a relatively light fashion. Now consider this.

We stayed 2 nights in Pamplona in a small hotel (a lovely room on the fourth (top) floor with 3 other rooms on the same level). The first night there was loud music in the large plaza a short distance away which stopped about 10pm and we didn’t mind. It felt like we were in a city! Then, our last night was marked by a musical interlude. A short time after settling down for the night (we were getting up at 6 and leaving by 7 at the latest) someone started to play short interludes of music. God knows what they were doing but it was short, loud phrases of music. Much of it was the same phrase repeated. Sometimes it progressed but mostly it just repeated and repeated with small variations of length. It was like someone or a small group, endlessly rehearsing the same intro.

It kept me awake for a while but I managed to settle down and I kept succeeding in ignoring it for a while then it would become more intrusive until it woke me up again. Alison closed the windows hoping it was from outside but it was from within the hotel (probably on the same floor as us).

Eventually, I asked Alison what the time was (thinking it was around midnight by then). It was 3am!!! I got up and went to the door, opened it and shouted “SSHHOOOSHH!”. It paused then continued. I went to the loo then flushed it and headed for the door again, intent on wandering down the corridor in the nude, banging on the door and telling them to stop. But the noise ended as I opened the door so I went back to bed.

The point is not that I have become more tolerant. We were paying good money to enjoy a restful time in a nice place and this was not acceptable. I should have stopped it shortly after it started. NOT at 3 am. I have learned to accept the minimum standard and to expect it even when I am paying for something better.

Translate this into real terms.

A homeless person is quickly stripped of the normal set of expectations, values and so on and becomes someone whose standards have been lowered to an unacceptable level but they are not aware of it and when people give them rubbish two things happen; the homeless person accepts it gratefully and uncritically and the person offering it interprets this as an acceptable level to serve/treat the homeless person. So suddenly you don’t need to treat these people the same way as you would other people, you don’t need to apply the same standards, they don’t want decent things, they don’t like or understand them, they can’t appreciate them, etc. It’s trap that is very dangerous for both sides.

Of course, this also applies in our society to people of different classes – our society is designed so the people at the top think that they somehow deserve/have earned their place and that the people at the bottom are happy there, don’t know/want any better, wouldn’t know what to do with something better, etc., So you can design an economy and a social system that takes advantage of this view and it allows you to maintain status at one level at the price of denying it to other levels of society and you have a situation where the people at the top feel justified and vindicated by the “proof” of their situations and other peoples’ as if it was all natural and based on some sort of measure of merit.
Just think... from being kept up at night by snoring people, to being kept up by some weird music to a criticism of the socio economic (class) situation in the UK. What a surprise. I actually have a lot more on this elsewhere.... but I won’t bore you any more......

One final point which relates to this. I heard that the new minister in charge of destroying our higher education system has said that students are a burden on the tax payer........

A BURDEN ON THE TAX PAYER????

Our education system is an investment that society makes in the future of the country and we should be investing very heavily indeed if we want to be even a half decent, half successful country in the future. To not invest would be a massively stupid mistake. Investing in this way is the wisest way to spend our taxes, Idiot!

Of course, what he is planning is a two or three tier higher education system where the rich and a small hand full of lucky people enjoy decent higher education and the rest will do 2 year (mainly “vocational”) degrees without holidays in a cut down university (Tesco Uni Plc) near their home. This was Thatcher’s dream in the early 80’s along with charging fees (what ever happened to that idea?)!

Anyway, what is a burden on the tax payer is not just spending our taxes paying moronic politicians like him. There are PUBLIC SCHOOLS, for example ETON that enjoy charitable status. We, the tax payers, subsidise PUBLIC SCHOOLS!!! They are a burden on the tax payer. If we want to cut back on spending on education shouldn’t they be first on the list?

And of course, many private health organisations also enjoy charity status. If you want to cut back on health spending let’s stop using tax payers money to subsidise private health care.

I could go on but perhaps you can all add something to the list and perhaps someone can start a FACEBOOK page on this.

My standards are too low now for anyone to listen to what I have to say anymore.

Sorry about the rant.......

News from over the mountains

2010-06-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

We are now pilgrims who are walking with, past and towards other pilgrims and it is amazing. We know so many by sight and have had all sorts of conversations with so many, too. Interestingly, we are still just two people walking the Camino and we are walking it at our pace and in our own way. It just means we are not alone on the road for much of the time, which is strange, and we are staying in large refuges with large numbers of people.

Last night, after walking over from France (see notes below), we stayed in a place called Roncesvalles. The refuge holds at least 120 people in a very large building (all in one room) with three rows of bunk beds the full length of the building, the beds grouped in fours so Alison and I were on two bottom bunks sleeping next to each other, which was nice. There were three loos, two sinks and two showers for the men and the same for the women so things could be a bit busy at times. Across the road was the monastery that owns and runs the refuge (with the help of volunteer hospitaliers). On either side of the monastery are two hotel/bars with pilgrim menus and the monastery has a pilgrim mass at 8pm.

So, you arrive and wait until 4pm for the monastery people to register you, accept your money and stamp your credenciales. While you are waiting you have a drink in the hotel/bar and buy a couple of pilgrim meals for later on in the evening. – the 7pm sitting if you are going to mass and the 8.30 if not. Then, after registering with the monastery, you go over, are given your bed and you can settle down.

At 7pm you go and have your pilgrim meal (which is a bit of a rip off), go to Mass and go back to bed. Lights out at 10pm and lights on again at 6am.

Tonight we are in a small private refuge in a place called Zubibi which was a decent 20 odd kms from our last stop. We got here just after 12 midday and have settled in well. The internet actually works and we are going to eat here having bought some bits and pieces in a little shop.

The pilgrim menu is more elaborate in the hotel here but it is 11 Euros (compared with 9 last night) and the refuge is 10 Euros, which is a couple more than the municipal one. But this is smaller with only 8 people to a room and INTERNET)so we will eat here and relax. We are also here because the next stop would make tomorrow’s walk to Pamplona really short and we wanted to space things out a bit better.

A few of notes on walking over the mountain and about being in Spain.

• Leaving from St Jean was wonderful. We liked the place and liked the experience.
• On the way out we were graced with a beautiful rainbow which basically heralded us into the mountains.
• The walk up was not as hard as we had expected but that was because it had been talked up a lot by so many and we, although we may not look it, are now very seasoned walkers who just put our heads down and do the business.
• What was hard was the wind. We encountered serious, no VERY serious, wind as we walked towards Spain. People were being blown over and injured. Alison was actually blown off her feet at one point and we spent the hardest bits either standing waiting for the wind to die down so we could continue, or walking with our arms linked so we could keep each other on the path – and some of those paths are proper mountain paths with very steep, long drops on one side.
• At one point the wind changed direction for us and literally blew us up and over one of the parts of the path – we enjoyed this wonderful gift and couldn’t stop laughing for some time.
• Just when we really needed something to eat and a place to rest we saw a tiny mountain hut (stone built) and we walked around it to find some shelter. The wind seemed to get worse at each turn as we went around the building. Then someone tapped on the window and opened the door when we returned to the front. It was a tiny emergency mountain refuge so we sat in it eating our food and listening to the wind hammering at the walls and door.... fantastic. We are sharing the room here with the German woman who opened the door for us and a French man who welcomed us in, too.
• We are not tuned to Spanish yet and with such a multitude of different nationalities to walk with (in our room are a German woman, a French man, an Australian couple and an Italian couple) we are finding it an interesting challenge. We have a French/Spanish phrase book and are trying to say things in Spanish whenever we enter a bar or shop or what have you. We say, “Hola” to everyone we meet, which is also great!
• Spanish cars have an “E” instead of the French “F” and this is also weird (I keep looking and thinking why have they added another line to the F or wondering where the FR and NCH bits are. But we will get used to that. All the notices are in Spanish and that helps.
• Spain is clearly a different place as soon as you start to walk through the villages. The houses are different, the streets are different and so are the people. It is dramatic to experience such a change just by passing an imaginary line on the ground. Actually, it was a cattle grid that constituted the border and we did not need passports or have to deal with customs, etc. In fact it didn’t even say “Welcome to Spain!” when we passed the line. Instead, there was a great big stone which told us we were now in the Navarre Region which is a very important, proud and historic region – welcome!
• Our rest day in Pamplona (the capital of the Navarre Region) will help us tune in a bit more, but we are loving the country and its people and hope to fall in love with the language as well!

End of notes, now for our tea, so I will post this and we will eat. One thing... it is pretty cold at the moment (Alison is suffering...) but I’m sure it will warm up soon.

....... Going to bed now after an amazing discussion with an artist from Toronto who is reworking the Wagner Ring cycle or rather deconstructing it and allowing it to reconstruct itself in a complex but elegant way..... sweet dreams.

fair set for Spain

2010-06-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

At the foot of the mountain pass 09 06 2010

Wow! We are in St Jean and resting in the refuge. We walked with more people than we have seen since Student Cross today and the refuge is big but everyone is friendly and helpful. We know what to expect in some respects over the next day or two and have more advice for the days to come.

Tomorrow consists of us walking over a mountain pass that is just over 4,700 ft high and then down the other side. We then arrive in a place which consists of only a few buildings. On one side of the road is a monastery with a restaurant/bar either side of it. On the other side of the road is a large building. You queue up then go into the monastery, pay for your night’s stay then go over the road to the building which has one large room with 120 beds and a couple of showers. You sort yourself out, cross to one of the restaurants and show them your pilgrim passport, ask for the pilgrim menu and pay 8 Euros then they tell you when to come back. Food is served between 6 and 8 then back to the hostel to sleep. Oh, and if you want to go to the pilgrim Mass at the monastery you find out when it is, tell the restaurant and they will fit you in before the Mass starts (we will do this).

So, we have gone around St Jean, bought food for tonight, etc and even bought a couple of hiker’s sticks as tomorrow we go up then down quite steeply (6hrs up and 2 down) and with packs on it might be good to have something to help stabilise us as we go. So, 7 Euros each seemed like a good price to pay for that little bit of extra help.

Interestingly, the man at the pilgrim bureau told us that numbers are actually down this year rather than up. It would appear that a combination of factors might be the cause. The economies of various countries may be one, the fact that everyone has been saying how busy it is going to be might be another and the weather might be an additional one. Yes, it did rain for most of the day today but it was not cold and the views, even with clouds and mists, were spectacular. We cannot believe that we are actually in St Jean and tomorrow we will be in Spain! I keep worrying that something might happen and we won’t be able to do it.

I have a big blister on the side of my big toe (right foot) and was wearing flip flops when we went back to speak to the people at the pilgrim advice place and I kept my feet well under the table in case someone looked at them and said, “Sorry, we don’t allow people with such bad feet to go walking in the mountains, it’s too dangerous!”

Well, they missed their chance and I will be heading off tomorrow just like everyone else. They can’t stop me now ... Haaaa haaa ha

The weather forecast does not look great for the next few days but it won’t matter, really. We are just happy to be here and still doing this.

Next stop Spain!!!!

Ultrea!

(PS the pilgrim bureau has a couple of computers connected to the internet so I will put this and the last couple of blogs on a stick and try and up load it soon, Cheers!)

Mountains so green 08 06 2010

We love the Pyrenees because they are so beautiful and part of the reason for their beauty is their setting. They are huge mountains but they are a new range and have not been seriously glaciated and their foot hills are not scoured and stripped by ice age glaciers as the uplands were in much of the UK. So, the milder weather, the moisture from the Atlantic/Bay of Biscay and the thicker soil mean the place is very green and fertile. And then the mountains loom over these hills drawing you towards their misty peaks with their occasional remnants of snow and strange shapes and ominous bulk. Add the good beer, cider and wine, the great food and welcome and the French/Basque/Spanish culture and you have a heady concoction worth savouring.

We, as with the rest of this trip, will simply pass through enjoying glances and brief encounters but will return to sample it all in more detail later.

Today we walked through this lovely land, climbing up the considerable hills and trudging back down them as we drew closer and closer to the fabulous mountains. We had expected it to rain but it began grey and grew warmer and sunnier as the day went on. We stopped at a small town called St Palais to buy some lunch and walked on to the place called Gibraltar where three of the routes join into one Camino for the last day and a half’s walk. We had bought a half kilo of strawberries and had put half the packet in a small plastic box we have so we ate the rest as we headed toward this mythical place.

Our map gave us no clue as to where the other routes actually joined us but we knew that we would see the new, conjoined route on the other side of the valley as we descended towards the “Stele de Gibraltar” which would mark the joining point. We saw the path climbing steeply up the next hill but there was no one walking on it. We sat down on the Stele, which is a funny sort of stone marker with a large stone base, and began to eat our lunch of bread and Rillettes when we saw our firts pilgrims from another route. Two Belgian men who waved to us from a path about 20 metres further down the hill. After 5 minutes they reappeared and asked us if we were sitting on the Stele and we said we were. They took some photos of it and said good bye.

We met them resting at theb top of the next hill. We also met about half a dozen other pilgrims. By the time we arrived in Osterbat where we are staying the night we had encountered a few more and saw lots as we sat in the bar drinking a pression. Now, we are in a Chambre D’Hote just over a Km past the village looking at the weather closing in - black clouds are tumbling off the mountains and filling up the wide sky above the great valley we are on the edge of. It is a large farm with one of its barns converted to take pilgrims and provide a very large dining room. We are in the main house in a room on the ground floor with a sort of conservatory with large windows opening out to the view down the valley looking west. There are at least another 20 pilgrims staying here!

We go in for dinner in about 10 minutes so just a couple of other things before I put this away (there is no internet here, either).

Tomorrow we walk to St Jean Pied de Port and that is our last place in France. We took a copy of all of the maps and texts of the route from Vezelay to there and have been throwing the used ones away each night, so tomorrow night we throw away the last of the Voie de Vezelay papers and begin the Camino Frances.

In just over two months we have been on one pilgrimage made of several parts. One was the walk from Walsingham to Willesden and then on through London to Portsmouth. This had its own character and special moments/experiences that we will never forget. Then we entered France and walked completely openly, seeking assistance from parishes and finding all sorts of new experiences as we grew familiar with the country, its language and peoples. Pilgrims on a route of our own with new places every day and no knowledge of what the night would bring us. Then we entered Vezelay with the wonderful welcome of our friends (Betty and Dougald) and began a new type of pilgrimage; one that was being walked by others and was in some ways very established but still a melange (as the French would say) of unknowns and new experiences. We grew deeply familiar with the route’s guides and their weird style of writing and route planning. We became even more intimately entwined with the French, there land and the heart beats of their society. I have been dreaming in a mixture of English and French since about Chartres...

We have wlaked along eating wild strawberries, we have munched on handfuls of cherries from the trees, we have seen and heard so many different birds, insects and other creatures (French frogs make very loud, weird noises, by the way) and we have walked through glorious forests of all kinds (some for more than 30 km at a time), by huge rivers and lakes, across high ridges and through all kinds of landscapes and towns. Great people, great food and a great deal of things to reflect on

And now we will be entering a new pilgrimage in a new country where we do not know the language, where the new guide is in English (Quoi?) and there are lots of folks to meet, etc....

Just a footnote to this – we had a very good, large but simple meal here and the host sang a variety of songs and had us all join in both during and after the meal. There was a large glass of the local Muscat sweet wine as an aperitif and copious amounts of red wine during the meal so we all had a great time .. food, wine and song. I will post the details of the place which is just 1 km outside Osterbat on the chemin to St Jean.

Sauveterre and all that – we hoped to publish this on 07/06/2010 but couldn’t!

We have a very brief opportunity to connect with the internet and I have been busy writing other things so have not put anything together for the blog for the last few days so let’s do a summary!!!!

The last blog was in a place where we stayed in a convent (Saint Sever). It is also where a version of the Pamplona style bull run takes place in early summer (we are just missing it, actually). So, they block of the streets, send in young bulls and let the local men have some fun being gored by therm. Lovely...

Next was Hagetmau (looks like a German name but is pronounced Hah-jey-mow). Another place with a bull ring and more Spanish/Basque influences. Good place with a lot to see and take in but we were busy sorting ourselves out with the key to the refuge at one end of the town and the refuge at the other. We had it to ourselves (apart from the ghosts) and it was fine – Oh and we bought some flip flops for me, so I am a much happier bunny in the evenings (no longer have to wear the boots all the time!

The walking is getting harder again as we move into the foothills of the Pyrenees so when we arrived in Orthez (which also has a bull ring) we were tired and had spent the whole day in the rain (with thunder and lightning – Alison even put her umbrella away). We stayed in the pilgrim refuge located in a 13th century building where the guy who wrote the original guidebook actually stayed, too... in the 13th century, of course. We shared the place with a pleasant German man who was walking from Seville, via Santiago, to Vezelay. There was also a second German man who was extremely grumpy and quite unpleasant most of the time. He was walking to St Tropez and was staying for 2 nights because he had been severely sunburnt the day before (when it was sunny rather than rainy). It was Monday, we had no food and the shops were all shut so we ended up eating in a little restaurant round the corner (one of only 2 or three open that night).

More hard walking in hillier and prettier country but this time just lots of mist then lots of sun with mist on the horizon. So, we have had hints of the mountains but no more than dark grey outlines. We know they are there – we can read maps, read guide books and we saw them when we were here last, two years ago. So we are in a pilgrim Gite where we are staying in a large house with a similar sort of dream like quality to one I wrote about earlier but this one is closer to my actual dreams with mountains nearby and more characteristics that are similar. Still not any of the places of my dreams, though. The walls on the first floor and on some of landings are covered in material stretched over a wooden frame (as used to be done in the 18th century) so it looks like wallpaper but when you touch the walls there is nothing behind the material, it is the original stretched fabric house!!!

Anyway, we are located in Sauveterre de Bearne and last time we were here we were camping below the medieval town next to the river. We walked over a little bridge at the campsite and walked around the island then. Now we are on the south bank of the river and our room looks out over the river and the same island.

Tomorrow we walk to Osterbat and on the way we join with two of the other routes towards St Jean Pied de Port where we all head up the mountain and into Spain. So, just about lunch time we will walk down a hillside on our own and will look towards a path on the opposite side of the valley. There we will see several other walkers all walking up the valley towards Osterbat. They will be the other pilgrims from the other routes. So tonight is our last night as fairly solitary pilgrims. Tomorrow begins a new type of pilgrimage with much larger refuges, many more people and a mountain range to deal with to boot! Oh, and in a couple of days, as we walk over this large mountain we will cross a line and find ourselves walking on Spanish soil. Another stage in the walk, another set of experiences and lots of new things to get to grips with.

Yes, we are completely without any real idea of what this new stage will be like and we will try to walk into it with open hearts and minds and just see what it brings us. For every pilgrim walking the Vezelay route there are tons more on the other routes (well the Puy route, really). So, when we have been walking with one or two others on the way and with an occasional glut of up to 6 or 7 of us in one place at one time, there will be dozens at every stop from tomorrow and, after Saint Jean Pied de Port, another order of magnitude will kick in... Phew! Weird when you think that we have spent over 2 months walking mainly on our own and have often found ourselves to be the only people in a refuge.

Lots and lots and lots (04/06/2010)

2010-06-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

Hello again folks ..... the wifi works in this cafe!!!!!

We are in a VERY basic refuge in St Sever (in the convent) and we had a beer in the local bar around the corner which said it had wifi so I have just pulled together some of the older and some of the latest stuff into one file so that we can up load it if the wifi really does exist and works, etc....

Again, totally unedited and a bit on the rambling sid rumpold style but we are sort of living in odd places with odd bunches of people and try to get things done as and when at the moment – and there is not a lot of chance to do as much as you want, etc.

So, sorry in advance but it does give you some idea of the latest bit.... more to follow when possible

PS we had a lovely dinner in Mont de Marsant yesterday and had great news that Ken (Alison’s dad) had returned home that day and is being looked after by Amy (Alison’s mum) so things are definitely looking up for him now – phew!!!

Here’s the rest of the stuff I could muster 

Philippe was our hospitaliere in Rocquefort and he was lovely. (02/06/2010)

That didn’t stop me from having a couple of difficult moments before things settled down. Partly, it was because I was tired and hungry and had put together a scenario in my mind that he simply blew apart by being there and offering hospitality – yes, you have to work at being given hospitality as well as sharing it.... I knew this but it still takes a few minutes, sometimes.

So, I tried to communicate with him and offer my help. But he didn’t understand me at first, which really added to my difficulties, and he didn’t want my help to prepare the meal, which also made it hard.

I realised later on that he had not understood me because he thought I was Dutch and was listening to me as if I was trying to communicate to him that way. He actually understands more Dutch than he understands English so he was listening in a different way and was not hearing my French as if I was speaking English. Although that seems weird, I can assure you it is quite significant. Once he understood where I was “speaking” from he was able to get his head around what I was saying and that really helped.

So we sat together in a very well kept refuge and had a really nice meal provided by Philippe. We started with Cassis and white wine which is a standard drink across France and can be seen drunk by me from Normandy to the Mediterranean in Bar/tabacs everywhere. It was lovely and also interesting to watch the reactions of the Dutch man and German woman we were sharing the refuge with.

We then had some very nice duck pate with bread and Philippe had cooked some home grown onions, some local potatoes and some local, free range eggs as a large omelette for us to share with some salad, his own dressing, and more bread. The eggs were so fresh and so good that the colour of the yolks almost looked artificial. I would have needed to add turmeric or saffron to the omelette to make it as yellow as it was! It tasted great but, and this is only an addition rather than a correction, it would have been even better with some garlic.... and even with a fresh herb as well. But the simple solution was great and served everyone, regardless.

The conversation was good, too and we were able to enjoy a relaxed meal despite my initial dark feelings. Phew, even the simplest of things can be hard.... I had hoped for some simple salads, perhaps a bit of rillette and bread and some ice cold white wine because of spending so long thinking about it during the walk. But this was good and we ended up talking to other people, too, which is always good and was something I had expected to be hard simply because it had been hard the night before with the same people, but when you add a third party it is often a lot easier to get things going when you are all struggling and, despite our best efforts, it had been a bit difficult the previous couple of nights.

Does that all make sense?

Ho hum, and tonight we arrived after a longer day to find ourselves all cramped into two small rooms with two Dutch men in the best room and us sharing with the Dutch man and German woman. We settled down and got ourselves clean, washed stuff and checked out the shops, restaurants, etc. It is our Wedding anniversary (27th) and we thought it might be nice to eat out if we could.

On our return the hospitalier sorted us out a separate room. OK so it is still bunk beds and we are in a room just big enough to fit the beds (makes Dominique’s room spacious...) it is still a huge luxury! We can dress/undress without worry, share private space together, read/write/wake up/pack and so on without having to worry about our fellow travellers!!! In our world that adds up to a great deal. Add in the times for switching lights off and on and the closing of windows and you have pretty much sorted out an authentically private space...... just one or two things also needed but those will have to wait....grrrrrr.

So our evening in Mont de Marsand has been great – we found a really good little restaurant, we like the town (despite the presence of a Bull Ring – it used for more things and less for the bull fights, apparently) and it feels really good. It is a really good, busy small city with traffic to prove the point and we are situated on one of its busiest roads. We will come back!

Toodle oodle oooo

Ou est le tom tom? (02/06/2010)

Today we walked along more and more old railway lines and crossed over unfinished motorways. We also struggled with the stupid updates to an already silly set of route instructions BUT we moved from the Gironde to the Landes regions and the sign posting suddenly improved enormously!

It is amazing how important good signage can be on a walk like this. Especially when we are using these French route instructions and when there is a massive motorway cutting up our route in unpredictable ways.

Let me explain. Our French guide has led us to gain a wonderful new set of French words for things like paths, road conditions and features you might encounter on the way. All well and good but the style is, at best, annoying, often quite unreliable or astonishingly vague at crucial moments or mind numbingly detailed in ways that make your heart sink when it is a long and hard day.

So, for example, we are walking along a series of country paths and roads and we will need to keep an eye on when we have to turn from one path to the next. We will get endlessly detailed information about all of the junctions that we should ignore – the turning on the left with the old house marked 1840 and the disused telephone box next to the small road named Rue de Villion .. do not turn left here, keep on forwards – is the sort of instruction you get endlessly. It may be helpful to have the distance marked against each of these but the detail can be enormous and you may turn down one of them if you read it wrongly (turn right and keep on going can be remarkably similar in French, especially when it is pissing with rain and you are tired and hungry). But that is not all – the important turning will be shortly after several of these in a row and will consist of a turning on the right after 200m. So, no detail for that one and it can be any one of the next three turnings on the right that all fall within the next 200m – as it stands, 200m in this context is basically more than 50m and less than half a Km. So, good signing at this point really can help ease the pain of a well seasoned traveller!!!

Dusty old roses (01/06/20120)

Walking to Captieux we spent a lot of time on a disused railway line. Someone had taken the lines and the sleepers away but had not levelled out the path se we were constantly walking on an irregular surface with the bumps and furrows just the wrong distance apart for any sort of normal person’s steps. This is a tiring experience.

It was also overcast and mainly damp but the line was long and straight with forest ether side for most of the way so we were relatively sheltered, too.

We got onto the line after eamdering across the country side trying to follow the new changes made to the route to take into account the new motorway that is being built in the area. The changes on the Amis de St Jacques site led us a merry dance along different minor roads and paths and we ended up avoiding part of the way as the path was basically covered in knee deep dense grass and weeds and the mist was hanging over it like a nasty dark cloud. Instead we ended up walking along a very busy N road with thundering lorries and high speed cars whipping up a nice spray for us to enjoy so, when we saw a sign pointing us towards the old railway line we knew we had to take it.

By the time we reached Captieux we were happy to accept most sorts of accommodation. As it was, we ended up in the only hotel in town. The town, by the way, is full of parked lorries and other lorries seem to pass through it in all directions. When the new motorway is finished Captieux may end up a quiet little dusty afterthought and the remaining cafes, shops and so on will probably start to dwindle away. As it was, we ended up in the pilgrim room which had twin beds – identical twins as they both sagged in the same way and were equally hard. But the place was clean, the towels were big, the food in the evening and the breakfast were included and the TV worked.

On the TV we saw the riots in Paris and other cities following something that had happened in the middle east then watched part of a live debate in the French parliament where everyone was talking about justice and fair play, dealing with the unacceptable actions of a repressive state on what was humanitarian aid and so on. So we went out and bought an evening paper and sat in the bar/tabac across the road drinking pression and reading about the Israeli commando attacks on a flotilla of ships.

If we had not gone on this pilgrimage I had been planning to get involved in acting as a peace worker in Palestine (well, one of the people who act as a mixture of passive witnesses and so on in order to try to minimise the level and types of attacks the Israelis seem to constantly wish to inflict on the Palestinians. I could just as easily have been there as here, I suppose, and will have to think about this a bit more. When I recover from this I will do that.....

So it was strange picking up this news in such an obscure place. The world seems to be still ticking along (like a time bomb....) as we walk along the misty roads of southern France. Weird to think it is only about a week to go before we reach Spain!

On the way out of Captieux I noticed some roses in a hedge. They had once been white but were now a dirty sandy colour. The land all around here is very sandy and so fine that when it dires the wind can fill the air with the dust. Hence the dusty roses.

And all that Bazas (01/06/2010)

We visited Bazas two years ago on a hot July day as we worked our way back along the road towards Sauveterre de Bearne. This time we walked in through the medieval pilgrim gate and up to the place before the cathedral. It is a special place with its high facade looking a bit like the entrance to the basilica in Vezelay but larger and without the narthex – sorry, you have to know both to understand what that really means, I suppose.

It is the Cathedral of John the Baptist and there are some amazing paintings inside the building as well as the medieval carvings on the facade. The place is long and wide and lined with a number of arcades and so, after finding out about the refuge and its location, we sat at a bar shaded by one of these arcades and looked at the church happily with our feet slowly beginning to throb and our stomachs rumbling (we needed to get something to eat).

What was very strange was the fact that we walked around looking for a place to eat (everything closed) and for a bakers that would be open in the morning for our next loaf of bread and for some breakfast (we ended up with croissants) then went to the small supermarket (8 a 8) for the night’s food and we encountered an old man who was begging and passed a few other people who looked pretty much like homeless men close to where we had encountered the old man. In such a small and quite isolated place this seemed a surprise, somehow and was quite disconcerting. They were all a bit desperate looking and the old man was pretty aggressive when I told him I had no money to give him.

The refuge was quite odd, too. It was in the old boys’ school a short distance from the centre of town and its windows overlooked the side of the cathedral. It consisted of two rooms at the top of the building. One had the kitchen whci was basically a work surface with a two ring electric hob, a kettle and a coffee maker and a few random pots and enough plates and bowls for 4 people. In the same room on the opposite wall was a toilet, a sink and a shower cubicle. A three panel screen was available for privacy purposes. In the room next door were two sets of bunk beds and a table with 4 chairs.

We shared the place with a Dutch man and a German woman of similar age to me. She has done the Camino 4 times or more and is heading towards the northern route by the coast in Spain. He is walking for a bit longer then turns off to Lourdes. He comes froma town about 30 kms from the place Renee comes from but we are now 2 or 3 days behind Renee and may only see him when we connect with his blog at some time in the future....

Bazas is worth a bit of time on your journey south but go there during the week, and not on Sunday or Monday!

La Reole and the lion hearted eagle.... (30/05/2010)

When we were in La Reole my oldest friend Peter rang us hoping to be able to connect with us as we passed near his new home (Peter and Jackie live in Cahors, which is on another Camino route).As I talked with him we walked through the town looking for somewhere to eat. It was Sunday and virtually the whole place was closed but we walked along with the sky just edging towards rain yet keeping us hopeful and with some amazing old buildings emerging around each corner. One we passed was on the edge of the street named after Richard the lion heart and turned out to be the oldest Hotel de Ville in France. Then we walked up to the church and found that besides the church was this amazing old building that house the order that lived there and the passage which led between the church and what looked like the cloisters was not only lovely, it led to a sort of platform (in stone, of course) which looked out over the river Garonne some distance below us. Stairs led down to a large garden area with further steps leading down to the esplanade by the river. As I talked I watched a huge dark brown bird of prey with wings edged in very light feathers wheeling below us across the river and back, then around the trees down near the bridge. A wonderful sight etched against the dark green river.

We then walked back into the passage way and walked along another passage which led down the side of the church and ended in a reception area serving what must have been the concert hall. Lots of people had just come out to enjoy a glass of wine and various canpes, etc and we were seriously tempted to join them as we were very hungry but I was still on the ‘phone so we left there and eventually found a pizza restaurant which was open.

I could still picture the bird of prey the next day as we walked down those steps and ended up walking along the bank of the river towards the suspension bridge. Its ghost still wheeled above us as we walked out of the town in the vague morning mists.

Houses in a dream or two (31/05/2010)

Yesterday we walked from Ste Ferme to La Reole and we seemed to go higher and higher with each stage of the journey but it was OK. We walked at 5km per hour and did the 20 Km in just under 4 hours (and that was with a stop, too) but the weather was all over the place and we walked on some pretty grim paths as well as some OK ones.

In La Reole we stayed at a Chambre d’Hote where the man running it gave us the room at a standard rate and the breakfast for free. The house was on the edge of the medieval bit of the town just next to the hospital and when we arrived it looked like some sort of unremarkable house apart from some flowers in hanging pots outside a couple of windows and the door. In fact it was those that suggested to me that the house was where we might be staying...

We discovered how large the house was when we entered it. It reminded me a bit of a type of house I encounter in my dreams. Strangely, we had a conversation about such places when we were going to have a meal with Pauline and her two friends Karen and Jane. In the car Karen said that she often dreamed about a large house in her dreams. Although my dreams and hers will not be the same, there were similarities in what she said and so I was able to refresh my memories regarding my own dreams during our stay and was quite non-plussed to find that we were in a sort of dream like house on the first night away from Pauline’s. I must stress that this is not a “dreamy” house or a house that is like a dream but a house of the sort that can quite often feature in my dreams.

This one was much larger than it appeared to be at first notice from the outside. It was wide enough to actually have six windows across it on the first floor but it was also much deeper than you would have expected, too. The entrance led you to a large hall with a wide staircase swerving up to the next floor and there were several doors leading off in different directions and glimpses of rooms leading to other rooms as you stood in the centre of the hall. On the left hand side was a front room with a large pool table (possibly a billiards table as this is a very popular game in France, especially weith someone as old as our host was. There were also two large shotguns hanging on the wall casually between a couple of doors. The place was full of pictures, furniture and nick nacks which made the whole place “busier” in visual terms and compressed the space a little visually but also made you aware of the size and variety of spaces that were contained within the building.

In the morning we went to have breakfast and walked down the stairs. We turned to our right past the billiard room, past another room and below the landing behind the stairs were other rooms leading you further back into the building. We walked through one of these and past a vast living area to our right and another room which was a huge kitchen then entered a room that had a sloping roof (with several sky lights) stretching across the whole width of the back of the house. It was very large with a space for several tables, a fire place with arm chairs wither side of it, a large table with a huge TV in it and other areas, too. Several doors led out to the gardens on the back on either side. Goodness knows what was beyond the first section of the gardens at the back. As we ate we could hear sounds coming from other doors that led back into the house beyond where we were sitting – places where other people lived... places where other rooms led to other rooms, leading to a maze of unknown proportions deep into the bowels of the town, perhaps....
Upstairs was the same – several doors leading off each part of the landing and hints that beyond some doors were several rooms and corridors leading into other parts of the house. Strange place.

I will write about other parts of La Reole in another thing as I am now in Bazas and the place we are staying is somewhere we are sharing with a German woman and a Dutch man and the whole thing is a little bit disruptive so it is difficult to do everything i want to do and I need to get myself sorted before we decide to get ready for bed or it will all become very difficult. This is one of the problems with living in this sort of situation – we have to work around each other and we are all wanting to get up by 6 in the morning and have all walked for around 30 Kms today and expect to have to walk that again tomorrow.....

Suffice to say that I have bloody sore feet and am still trying to work out a better regime where I can actually walk without my little toes erupting into pain and blisters ... for a change... As it is, every day is a bright kaleidoscope of pain from my two little toes (and a cluster of blisters on my left inner heel, of course) and at times they just seem to balloon up into little balls that somehow cannot be put into bearably comfortable locations within my boots, so I walk along trying my best not to hobble while I try to force them back into a workable position to keep going. Eventually they comply and I can get the Kms done with some semblance of bearability.... Grrr it will sort itself out again soon but I just want it to work out sooner than it seems to want to.

Anyway, that is for tomorrow and now it is time to do things out before people finish sorting themselves out.

Weeding, water and wood-smoke - and the bells, the bells! (29/05/2010)

We did a lot of checking on the internet yesterday (I cannot connect this computer to Pauline’s internet but we can use her computer and I will transfer some files over and up load them shortly – if you are reading this it is probably because I have done that....duh..). Anyway, we looked at the internet and worked out how we might get back to the UK if we need to (if Alison’s dad is getting worse and we need to be back home) and we realised that if we walk today as planned we will end up in a small town in rural France with no means of getting anywhere except by walking or phoning up Pauline to come and collect us again. So we are with Pauline for another day – very big thank yous to Pauline!!!

The small town we were heading to had no bus service, no train service and no taxis and the nearest town with any of those was another day’s walk away. So we are here doing gardening, washing more clothes and airing/cleaning out our rucksacks and other belongings so that they are all sorted and ready for the next bit of the walk (or the journey home).

Our contingency plan is to get to Bordeaux, hire a car, drive it to Paris and drop it off there then jump on the Eurostar to Londres and hey presto we will be home. We know where the trains and buses are, where and when they go to Bordeaux and which company to use to hire the car. We also are keeping an eye on the availability of seats on the Eurostar bit too. For very many reasons we are hoping we will not need to use the contingency plan and although news from Alison’s mum sounds good, we are waiting for corroboration before we step deeper into rural France and make it very difficult for ourselves if the situation does go downhill for Alison’s dad....

So the agonies of not walking and not getting the journey done, the anxiety of being in the same place for more than a night or two (even a lovely place like this with lovely people for company) and the frustrations and difficulties surrounding the whole affair are leaving us in need of some sort of alternative regular activity. Hence we have washed the wood smoke smells out of our things (sleeping bags and silk liners, for example), we have aired everything we can including our rucksacks and bivvy bags and we have dug up and weeded part of Pauline’s garden (and will do more later). We may even get a swim in her pool because the weather has begun to improve a little and this may be the only day for a few days when the weather will be this nice. Forecasts for the next couple of days or so suggest rain and I am thinking that diving into a cool pool will be a very nice thing to do even if tomorrow sees us walking through the rain yet again. Despite staying at several campsites with pools we have not been able to have a swim and none of the pools have been open. The French seem to think that you can only use the pool during the high season and even recent hot spells have not been enough to convince them to open the pools earlier!

One weird thing I have begun to notice is how unsettling it is to hear the same church bells for more than a day or so. During our walk we have encountered many, many churches and have heard them ring the morning, mid-day and evening Angelus. Each church has its own distinctive style of doing this and their bells are all different in some way or another. Hearing the evening and morning one is quite common (7pm then 7 am we will hear when we stay in one of the many refuges and other places located next door to the church) but then we will hear a different mid day one and the evening is spent in a new place, etc. Even on rest days we are only ever going to hear one mid day Angelus from the same church.

Here at Pauline and Ian’s house we are next door to the local church and it has rung its second mid day angelus and I am beginning to get a bit disoriented.

Ho hum..........

Woodlands and their ups and downs (29/05/2010)

There are a lot of birds in France; I think I have mentioned this in the past. So much so that we have, from time to time seen dead/squashed song birds of various sorts (all of the small and brightly coloured sorts) as road kill along the way. This took a bit of getting used to because I swear I have ever seen a small bird in Britain as road kill. Lots of pheasants and a few other biggish birds (smallest being pigeons) but no smaller birds. I was thinking about this because we have been walking through many more areas with woods set aside for hunting and I recalled the overhead conversations about how the French shoot almost anything and I imagined that these were just collateral damage... but it is just the law of numbers. France has more wild birds of all sorts (apart from birds of prey) than much of the UK.

The previous day’s walk was spent crossing a landscape of mostly forests and the occasional village. The first stage of forests were a mixture of mushroom and hunting reserves and gradually became more hunting than anything. Of course there were the regular etangs man-made lakes) too. The French cannot resist damning up their local small rivers and streams to create small lakes so they can get a bit of serious fishing done alongside the shooting.

Gradually the paths got steeper and steeper on our way through these wooded areas and then, when it cleared for a bit and the vineyards began to appear in larger and larger forms the hills began to take on serious proportions. Our last major climb was pretty vertical but, thankfully it was on a reasonable surface. After a lot of winding paths and the occasional large tractor blocking our way we eventually arrived at the route down to Ste Foy and the Dordogne river. 34km of walking generally up was turned into a single, steep, very rugged drop through the woods. We thanked God that it had not been seriously raining for some time as the route would have been impossible (impassable) with added running water and mud. Usually such descents are compensated by stunning views but these were well hidden by the dense woodland covering the steep slopes.

The town was dusty and busy and we decided to enter it immediately and make our way to the church rather than take any detours suggested by the guide. So, on we trudged dreaming of cold beer and a sit down wondering if Pauline had found her way there yet when we walked towards the steps of the church and she emerged from its door looking just as surprised to see us as we were to see her.

Fretwork and worry (28/05/2010)

This rest day has been quite stressful in the sense that I have been worrying about Alison, her father and mother and the rest of the family and Alison has been worrying too..... Just to explain – Alison’s dad had a serious operation a couple of weeks ago and he is still not well; partly because it was a tough operation and partly because he is 89. So I worry about how Alison is coping with the worrying about this, I am worried about her mother who has been coping with the situation on a daily basis back in England and also concerned about the rest of the family, too. Of course, Alison has these worries and more to deal with.

So, it makes sense for the day to be stressful, but that is not the whole reason why it has been so difficult. Another reason is because it has been so easy and comfortable!

Yes, we are in Pauline and Ian’s French home and there are two other guests, Karen and Jane, and we have had a great time talking, eating, relaxing, getting washing done, and checking out stuff on the internet, etc. But we have hardly walked any distance at all and even on our rest days we usually have to walk around a lot looking for shops that sell the things we need, finding Laundromats, buying food, etc... and we have done none of that sort of thing. Staying two nights in a place and not even walking a few times around the town somehow feels like there is a seriously important thing missing from our lives. I am edgy and uncomfortable wondering how to cope with the immobility and the relaxed security of it all. Where is the pain? Where are the uncertainties? When shall we worry about the weather and wonder at the lack of places to sit or go to the toilet? I’ve been to the loo several times more today that I have on any day since I left Walsingham..... What’s going on?

At least my feet still hurt – that’s something to cling onto. Phew, I thought I was going mad there for a bit but now I know everything will be alright.

Now I can get back to worrying about the important things like Alison, her father, mother and the family....

on the road again, again, again

2010-05-29T14:16:00.000-07:00

As the song says.... on the road again...

We are so glad to hear that Alison’s dad has started to make real progress and is looking well after such a bad period. We can now head on towards Santiago keeping Ken and Amy in our thoughts along the way and keeping an eye on the texts and Facebook messages but plodding hard towards Spain.

My feet might complain but the rest of me is glad to be going again (and Alison feels that way too!)

Thanks to Pauline for the open house and wonderful welcome, thanks to our girls and to Martin for information and support and thanks to all for good will, prayers and encouragement. Normal service is being resumed as soon as possible.

Hur hur hurrrr

Oh and here is one of the several blog entries I have written in the past couple of days. I thought they were all on the memory stick but this is all I have and my computer is now switched off, it is late and Bert Janch is playing on the stereo and everyone has gone to bed and so I need to stop this and settle down too. So I will add more as soon as I can but for now I better send this off. Good night Bert, good night folks and good night everyone else.

Fretwork and worry (28/05/2010)

This rest day has been quite stressful in the sense that I have been worrying about Alison, her father and mother and the rest of the family and Alison has been worrying too..... Just to explain – Alison’s dad had a serious operation a couple of weeks ago and he is still not well; partly because it was a tough operation and partly because he is 89. So I worry about how Alison is coping with the worrying about this, I am worried about her mother who has been coping with the situation on a daily basis back in England and also concerned about the rest of the family, too. Of course, Alison has these worries and more to deal with.

So, it makes sense for the day to be stressful, but that is not the whole reason why it has been so difficult. Another reason is because it has been so easy and comfortable!

Yes, we are in Pauline and Ian’s French home and there are two other guests, Karen and Jane, and we have had a great time talking, eating, relaxing, getting washing done, and checking out stuff on the internet, etc. But we have hardly walked any distance at all and even on our rest days we usually have to walk around a lot looking for shops that sell the things we need, finding Laundromats, buying food, etc... and we have done none of that sort of thing. Staying two nights in a place and not even walking a few times around the town somehow feels like there is a seriously important thing missing from our lives. I am edgy and uncomfortable wondering how to cope with the immobility and the relaxed security of it all. Where is the pain? Where are the uncertainties? When shall we worry about the weather and wonder at the lack of places to sit or go to the toilet? I’ve been to the loo several times more today that I have on any day since I left Walsingham..... What’s going on?

At least my feet still hurt – that’s something to cling onto. Phew, I thought I was going mad there for a bit but now I know everything will be alright.

Now I can get back to worrying about the important things like Alison, her father, mother and the family.....

The big P

2010-05-24T13:03:00.001-07:00

24/05/2010

Perigueux is a lovely medieval city perched on what looks like an escarpment overlooking the river. We are in a hotel just across the bridge from the city and just below the Cathedral. Pilgrims get a free tour of the cloisters and stuff so we were treated to a fast circuit of the cloisters in high speed French which I understood more of than I had expected to – weird!

We have talked a lot about the nature of story telling in the context of Matthew’s Gospel (and other texts) and how the story emerges from a series of characters driving along the narrative using different angles and commenting from different points of view. Perhaps the basic framework was used to also tell the story as a spoken narrative with the storyteller’s own asides (of course, said the storyteller, as I stood there listening to Jesus this man came up to me and I had to explain this point to him before his donkey would get off my foot, etc....). Lots odf ideas and thoughts to process on this.

We also talked a lot about the nature of hospitality and the difference between being given or even buying hospitality and being allowed to take part in the process.

Sometimes we can help make food or clean up but a lot of the time, if the food is being provided or if there is a hospitalier on site, you are told not to do anything – even doing some of the cleaning up before leaving, etc. Then, in ones without a hospitalier you have the freedom to make your own food and take responsibility for keeping the place clean, etc. Everyone takes part and gets the job done quickly and it feels right to do this and leave the place as you found it.

Although being served is great, being involved in a community of shared service/responsibility can also be really good. This can extend into people’s own private space, too, but it is all related to what people are comfortable with and the like. But it is also related to issues of cost and what you get for payment and other value related things.

Which has lead us back to discussions we have been having about value systems in today’s world and about the corruption of values, how they are conceived, measured and applied. That whole area of debate needs to be revisited – tout de suite.

So, now we are in a small, steamy hotel room in Perigueux checking the weather and thinking it is moving from seriously hot (it was 30 degrees C at 5.30pm today) and dry but will be thunderstorms and rainy for the coming several days as far as we can see.

I append mots jotted for the most recent of days and hope to sort out more as we go. No editing, no serious critical reviews ... just blurbs. But when the internet is only available from time to time and we are in so many different types of places with so many different types of situations it is all a bit of a blur for us – sorry folks,

Your vagabonds or marching on their footsore way, thinking of you all....

The truffle ruffle (23/05/2010)

We arrived in Sorge to find cars everywhere, parked in difficult and impractical places. We expected to see a market in the square (there was a classic car fair in the previous village and it is/was Pentecost) but it was actually the boys and the girls having their First Holy Communion in the church. Everyone was dressed up and the children were beautifully attired too. The girls were in a variety of dresses that seem to flow and were made of off-white/cream silk. The boys seemed to be in varying get ups with stylish waistcoats and open necked shirts.

We passed them and headed for the Refuge which was open and looked really good. The temperature was at its highest level as we got here just after 12 noon so walking into the building was superb with its shade and cool. The floors are tiled and the ceiling is very high, supported by massive wooden beams. But we could not come in yet as they were preparing the place so we left our bags, took our lunch with us and went off to find somewhere in the shade.

Sorge is the capital of the truffle (yesterday Thiviers claimed to be the capital of Foie Gras) and it looks like this is where they hold regular sales of the stuff, etc. They also have a truffle museum and a hotel named the Auberge de la Truffe. We had lunch sitting on a bench in the shade, had beer in the truffle hotel (where the beer came with a dish of freshly shelled walnuts) and walked back to the refuge where we were warmly welcomed and found ourselves to be the only guests tonight as the other two people due to get here had ‘phoned up to say that they had been overcome by the heat and were making plans to stay elsewhere this night.

Today was the hottest day yet and we had set off early in order to get the walking done before the day got too hot and we had to spend too much time walking in the sun. There were lots of hills, walnut trees, some cherry trees (with sweet fruit on them) and we saw our first vineyard (Yeh!) and we even saw a farm’s-worth of pigs, too. The wildlife seems to get more exotic as we move further south but the countryside that we find it in does not seem to be changing much yet. So we have more lizards, the birds and especially the insects are getting more colourful and yet the landscape is straight out of an 18th Century painting by Constable or a Capability Brown scene manufactured for a large country estate in Buckinhamshire.

The best thing, though has been walking into the church next door to the refuge and discovering that the stations of the cross, the altar and all of the associated furniture and the tabernacle have all been designed by an amazing artist (who also did the stained glass windows) They are worth visiting this place if nothing else. Forget the truffles and get into the art of the place!!! They bare an inspiration to me and add to my conviction that I will produce at least one set of “Ways of the Cross” in wood on my return but now I will have to make all of the furniture for the altar in the same style, too!!!

I think the artist (M Riche) was also the person who designed the windows in the cathedral in Nevers, too (so similar in style and spirit).

Our Hospitalier has been wonderful, too, of course, feeding us and providing us with great accommodation. As I said, the building is ancient – probably part of the collection of buildings constructed next to the church to serve the large house located besides the church facing out onto the small square at its front. This building had been a garage in the past and I suspect it had been part of the stable yard as it has a large set of windows that fill the hole that used to be big enough to drive a large carriage into and the other door is big enough for a stable door.

Anyway, I must toodle off - perhaps tomorrow I will be able to send some of this stuff., Last night I put together some stuff at the campsite but the Wifi failed me. I will try again in Perigueux. More unstructured nonsense on its way at some time in the near future!

Night sounds on a camp site – crickets, toads, teenagers, wind chimes 22/05/2010

Typical sort of thing... we are in a campsite tonight sharing a tiny “cabin” with two Dutch pilgrims and everything is a bit cramped. We have wifi but only if I go down to a place next to the camp office but this has no night so I am typing by the light of the screen, feeling the mosquitoes nibbling at my legs.

The day was not long. We walked a slightly shorter day yesterday and added some distance to today but it was still only 24 km or so. The sun was pretty relentless and the route took us along old Napoleonic roads and through tiny hamlets which were all very nice except that there was nowhere to stop so we arrived in our night stop just after lunch time having no stop for lunch and little rest en route. We then ended up doing all of our organisational things (washing, etc) and shopping and then spent the evening having dinner with our new Dutch friends which leaves me here trying to catch up and Alison heading for bed. Ho hum...

I’m going to stop before my legs are eaten down to the bone and just add some very recent stuff. Will add more and so on when I am somewhere a bit more conducive to doing this sort of thing. Toodle pip! Oh, and on a personal note I just want to say that we are both thinking lots about Jim and Elizabeth – they know what I mean...

Love from a moonlit France and sorry this is all so ad hoc and with no time to check what I am putting up...

Piglets and poo 21/05/2010

Today we were walking towards our evening stop at St Pierre de Frugie and Alison had to stop because she had something in her boot – on rough tracks you often kick up twigs and stones that work their way down the back of your boots.

We were on a deeply rutted sunken path in the middle of a small forest with the trees towering over us on the high banks by the side of the path. As she leaned on me to get her shoe off we heard deep rumbling, grunting sounds from just a few feet away on the other side of the high bank. Something moved against the trees near us and more rumbling growling sounds kept emerging from the undergrowth. Alison finished sorting her boot and we moved on. As we did so I held the camera over the bank and took a few ‘photos. Looking at them later there is nothing to see but we were very close to a wild boar.

Then, an hour later, Alison and I were coming to a sharp turn in the forest path. Alison had slowed down because the thing in her shoe had just re-emerged at her heel and she was thinking of stopping to sort it. We were looking out for somewhere to stop when I turned the corner and there by the edge of the path, in a large pool of water, was a massive wild boar. It had been quietly wallowing in the water and mud but when it realised I was right next to it the thing just leaped out of the pool and crashed away through the undergrowth. As Alison gave out a scream of surprise it turned immediately and rushed off at right angles to her disappearing into the depths of the woods.

We were both shocked by this. The thing was big bodied, low and powerful with a very broad body and it moved so fast if it had decided to charge us we would not have had time to evade it. Later in the bar at St Pierre I started to tell the story and the bar man knew exactly what I was going to say as soon as I started. “It was a wild boar – yes, they are very common in this area and can be extremely dangerous. Just don’t corner them and never go near their young. There are stories of nursing mothers killing someone every year around here.”

So, if we see little piglets on the path in front of us as we walk along a forest path we will immediately turn and walk speedily in the other direction!

P is for Paella 21/05/2010

Sitting in the bar at St Pierre was interesting and full of things that will keep that place in my mind for a long time.

It is run by and English couple and there were several English people there when we first went in for a drink at the end of our walk and when we went in to have our dinner there in the evening. Eating there was our only real option as the shop in the village was a very posh shop of the sort that sells gourmet foods to a predominantly tourist market (cheapest wine was about 8 Euros, small jars of Bison Pate for 6 Euros, jam for 10, etc...) Even if we could afford such things we would never buy them from such a place given a choice. And our choice was paella at the English bar so that’s what we did. Makes a change from buying food and cooking it at the refugio (though that can be very nice too, see yesterday...).

Memories I will hold include: Alison wanting a Gin and Tonic so we both had one and they bumped up the price of the dinner by a considerable amount (they were GOOD); very good and copious amounts of paella – very nice and filling; the Kinks music continuously being played in the background squeezing out old memories and thoughts; lovely conversation with Alison as the sun went lower in the sky; overhearing weird bits of conversation between ex-pat Brits; hearing the sad news about Jim’s father dying and wishing him and Elizabeth all the best ... doubly sad because it may mean that Elizabeth will not be able to join us on this trip; considering the possibility of taking the band on a summer tour of the Dordogne, convinced that they would be very popular (a series of gigs at village fetes are being planned); walking back through the pretty village with Alison feeling tired, full, a bit sad and almost ready to think about tomorrow.

Look away now all vegetarians and squeamish peoples 20/05/2010

Flavignac has a great refuge across the road from the church. It is also a great little place with a good Boulangerie, a nice little general shop, a very odd Presse that sold everything as well as papers, and the usual pharmacy, flower shops, hairdressers, etc. It also has a great butchers!!!

We needed to have some food and went out to hunt it down. We knew we had some Puy lentils in the refuge and some mustard dressing in the fridge.... Went into the genral store and looked at things. Possible sausages or other meat but not particularly good and pricey. Some vegetables looked OK. We left and went down to the butchers. For some time we have been talking about having form liver for tea but when you share places with others it may not be possible to cook what you want so we have refrained from getting liver. In Flavignac we had the lovely little refuge all to our selves so when we saw the liver in the butchers we had to have some.

She said it was calves’ liver and we said OK we’ll have four slices. It came to over 8 Euros!!!! That is a small fortune to us for one ingredient in our tea but we paid it and left. We bought an onion and a tomato in the shop along with a bottle of plonk Corbiers), some bread and pain au raisin in the bakers and went home.

I cooked the lentils with a bit of garlic and parsley until they were tender then drained and put them to one side. I cut off a bit of the onion and roughly chopped it, chopped the tomato and mixed them together with dressing and extra vinegar, some pepper and parsley. I used this to dress the lentils and put them to one side again.
The rest of the onion was thinly sliced and a couple of cloves of garlic were added to this as I fried them, browning them off, then I added the liver and quickly cooked it, finishing it with a bit of pepper and red wine.

That all sounds good if you like liver but I must tell you now that the liver was not worth 8+ Euros.... It was worth much more than that. It was the best liver either of us have ever had. It really did just melt in the mouth. It was not mushy or in any way without texture. It had the lot - flavour, texture, character, colour smell and any other characteristic that makes a food good, it had it in shovelfuls! Move over goose liver, this beats the best hands down!

Of course, we have been walking through beef country for about two weeks and know that this is where calves are reared in the fields by their mothers and that the cattle are extremely well looked after. It is the place where we went for a meal with some other pilgrims, including a French man (Yves) and he got into a heated discussion about the colour and character of different types of French beef which ended in the waiter going away, using his I-phone to search the internet and come back with a photograph of the particular type of cattle they had been arguing about. We got our copious amounts of wine with the meal for free, by the way. And, yes, I had the best steak I have had in France (and for a long time) in that restaurant which was on an 11 Euro, 3 course menu.

So, when in France, buy local when you can and get your butcher to serve you what is best locally. Our butcher there (the butcher was a woman by the way) was very pleased that we were choosing her best liver and guaranteed that it was very fresh (I could tell that when I took it out of its wrappings and placed it in the pan.

Such culinary delights will draw me back to this place more than once in the future. Yes, folks, I am still a sad old carnivore but I’m sure that that gorgeous liver did me a power of good!!!

Limoges calling ...... is anyone there?

2010-05-19T09:35:00.001-07:00

We have not had the internet for several days and so there is a lot I could load.
Below are a couple of the things I was going to put up but was not able to do so. We are now in Limoges on a proper break (2 nights/1 day) for some rest and re-organisation as we have not really had such a stop since Chartres (almost 650 Kms away. Our other rests have been taking time out to shop and shorten the distance to the next stop by public transport to keep on track.

Last night we searched for a hotel and found an Etap behind the station which promised free WiFi but it is one of those scrappy services and is only available in the room where the breakfasts are served so I am writing this in a hurry so we can go down and do the uploading and check out details for the route ahead.

The last few days have been very interesting. Cluis to Crozant was a strange mixture of walking down very (and I mean VERY) steep paths and scrambling up (yes, almost VERTICAL) paths and ending up going on the east side of the lac rather than the west – adding time and distance to the day. Crozant was a beautiful place full of references to the impressionist painters who once stayed there.

Then, La Souterainne was spent in a beautiful house owned by a couple of English people who are doing it up. The food and company were excellent and the room was great (but cold). The walking had been pretty good but my feet have been suffering pretty badly with blisters between toes, etc as a result of the stupid boots, etc..

Benevent l’Abbey was in a small refuge (as mentioned below) and we met, two French men as well as the French, German and Dutch person we have been encountering on a regular basis. It was also where we encountered a man from Leeds (Darren) who was staying there as a permanent guest – his ex-partner and two children live near by and this is the best he can do at the moment – we keep him and his family in our prayers, too. There were other English there. The woman running the place lived up the road and ran a Gite/Chambre d’Hotes and a bar down the road was run by an English couple (he brewed some of the beer served there, too) and when we went to sample the beer we met some other English living near by. You can get fish and chips there, too, from time to time... They all seemed happy with living in France, even if they were a bit bemused by the French way of doing things from time to time.

Billages was another good walk where we ended up in a sort of Gite/CH where the lady who ran it used to be a top designer/ceramicist for various companies and now did some consulting while doing her own thing in a rambling set of ex-farm buildings. She made us great food, plied us with drink and we generally had a lovely (but cold) evening. These places will be great in the French summer – which had not arrived by the time of writing this.

St Leonard de Noblat was a municipal refuge and the man who looked after it looked after us really well, we had a great evening and Renee, the Dutch man of the group we have been regularily sharing places in the evenings, cooked us onion souple, Michel, the man who lived in St Leonard plied us with chips and other things and Yves/Bernard also provided copious wine, bread etc, too. Sadly, they are now ahead of us and we may miss seeing Yves again this time ‘round as he is only going from Vezelay to somewhere beyond Perigueux this time. Yves is a very experienced pilgrim who has done many of the routes to Santiago and is a really good bloke too. We may catch up with Renee and Bernard so we look forward to that, too.

Now, in Limoges I sit at the room’s little desk with the window open and a view of the station tower which is very impressive. A good city with lots to see and do but we have stuck to (yesterday) getting new boots for me and then me wearing them in last night and today while we wandered around and did other essential shopping. And, of course, we have spent a lot of time here too, resting our weary bones.

Final note, I have not got as much that I want to put on because I have spent quite a bit of time writing poetry and will load some of that separately at a later date, and because I have been writing about things that will form a different section of the blog (reflections). One of the things we have been reflecting on is the fact that we have been in France for over a month now and we have some odd things to say about the experience.

One of the key ones is that we have been looking forward to living in France in order to become more attuned to the country and its people. However, this particular jaunt has been different from anything most people will experience. We are both right there in the streets and (often) in the homes of the French and we spend most of our time hearing and talking (badly in my case) French. Yet we are in a different lce virtually every night (and all the way through the day, too. So we are not experiencing the same place and the same people over a long period. We are outside French society as much as any foreigner can be much of the time and, although we are welcomed most places and people know and understand pilgrimage in a way that they don’t in the UK, it is still an eccentric experience. It both enables us to be part of the place and be outside of it at the same time and this is an experience we are reflecting on and processing in all sorts of ways....

OK, so I will stop, append a couple of other bits and use my nice new boots to walk down to the breakfast room where I can do some computer-type things, including loading this up. Hopefully the sun which is now shining will start to warm up our way and dry those soggy paths for us!

A tout a l’heure

Exit Crozant (14.05.2010)

After a pretty long day’s walk our night in Crozant was just what we needed. The hotel was there just as we passd the sign for the town and it was in a beautiful location. Stay in the Hotel du Lac at Crozant, folks, the place is spotless, the people running it are both lovely and professional, the accommodation was good and so was the food. The bar and restaurant look out onto fantastic views of the river, the bridge with the ruins of the castle towering above and high cliffs clad in a variety of deciduous trees. The river curves on beyond the hotel one way and curves past the lower part of town on to the lac in the other direction. At the jetty and landing area in front of the hotel you can jump on a boat and take a trip up the lac or rent boats/kayaks and do your own exploring.

So, when we left this morning, knowing we had a slightly shorter and easier day, we were aiming to take our time but still get int5o La Souterraine by about 4pm so we could find accommodation. We were looking to either stay with one order of sisters or perhaps go to the campsite and stay there.

The owner of the hotel did not know the camp site but was able to tell us that the centre commercial which would have provided us with food, etc for camping was on the other side of the town – which put us off the campsite but then we thought we might buy stuff in the centre then go out afterwards (it’s a couple of Km outside the town on the wrong side for us...)... We revised our route so we walked the first part a la pilgrim, then we walked on the road and avoided some of the potentially wet bits. Then back on the pilgrim way into La Souterraine (the earlier route we had chosen had gone closer to the camp site).

We arrived and walked to the church. After a prayer Alison wanted to walk around so we did that rather than head off in search of the nuns. It was OK as a church but, was were about to leave a man who had just arrived at the table next to the exit called to us and asked if we were pilgrims. We stopped and said yes and he asked if we needed our credencials stamped and we said we did so he got out the stamp and we got out our pilgrim passports and he did the stamps as he asked us where we were staying that night. When we said we didn’t know he told us to go to the English place and gave us a leaflet.

We are now in a lovely en suite room at the top of a beautiful late 18th century town house in its own garden (for 20 Euros!!!) and there is a dinner and breakfast for reasonable amounts too! We can use the last of our cash here and Alison gets paid tomorrow!

Phew, if we had not asked the man at the hotel this morning, if he had gone to the campsite, if we had not bothered going to the church, if we had not stayed to look at the church, if we had not bumped into the little man with is stamp and talked to him.....

12/05/2010

Today is our first day without rain (apart from some light drizzle) so my feet have been reasonably dry for the first time for a while. I have developed a blister on my left little toe and there are several other parts of my feet where blisters are seeking residence ‘though they have been convinced to stay away up ‘till now. So, I am counting my blessings and thinking that I might be able to get to Limoges (about 150 km from here) without having to replace my boots.

My boots, are the problem. Cracks appeared in the top of both boots near the end of the tongue/laces. Water started to leak in and this seemed to cause a major failure of the waterproofing of the boots. We bought some waterproofing spray in Nevers and that was great for about a day and a half. I also filled the cracks with the rubber glue you use to repair things like air beds. This helped for a very short time, too. But my feet have an inconvenient susceptibility to forming blisters when wet, so it has not been good recently from that point of view.

Still, despite the rain, the walking has been good and the countryside has been very interesting. Despite walking through some notable wine regions we have not seen a single vineyard since leaving Vezelay. This in itself is weird. We walked part of the route signposted as the scenic route through the region passing the main “Vignobles” and we saw lots of cattle, a few sheep, some chicken and horses, various varieties of grain and some rape but the only vines were in people’s gardens and draped across their houses.

Weirdly, we walked through lots of places that could have been south of Edinburgh with similar style farms built in sandstone around a large cobbled courtyard and then we moved on to more lush countryside with more trees, small fields and a strong feeling that we were walking through some old fashioned English country scenery. A Few vineyards would have helped dispel the déjà vous feelings we were having though the “Auberge de Maplethorpe” we passed yesterday did help confuse rather than resolve the situation.

Today we are resting for the night in a refugio in Cluis in a little “place” behind the church. It has a room downstairs with a little table, chairs, a sink, 2 gas rings, ‘fridge, microwave and tumble drier (yippee!!) There is a double futon downstairs where Alison and I are sleeping and up stairs there are 2 sets of bunk beds where two men and two women are sleeping tonight. At the bottom of the stairs is a shower and a loo. So for a contribution (suggested at 7 Euros but pay as little or as much as you can afford) you can stay a night here if you are a pilgrim.

I keep thinking that we need to rethink things like accommodation in the UK. On one side, for pilgrims where we set up a series of pilgrim routes across the country and get refugios started to support walkers on these routes. It also leads us to thnk that local communities could provide simple facilities such as these for more pressing needs. We have long talked about how we could prevent much of the homelessness that occurs in our country. If someone was about to find him or herself homeless that night (due to a relationship break down or something) such a place could provide emergency accommodation and ensure that the person had access to immediate advice at the place where they were staying. The idea would be that no one would need spend more than a few days there at most. What ever their situation, they would be helped to sort things out fast and the period where homelessness kicks in and alienation begins would be avoided.

Each local community could have such a place attached to a village hall/parish hall or some other building, looked after by a team of volunteers and an outreach/advice worker could be assigned to a set of refugios, ready to go where and possibly even when needed. It would be about trying to avoid making a crisis out of a temporary problem and avert a short term difficulty becoming a long term problem.

The sun is burning through the clouds as I write....

2010-05-06T09:54:00.000-07:00

Just got into Nevers and have the chance to add something so here are a few snapshots.... more later!!!

End of the first phase (02 05 2010)

Arriving in Vezelay was wonderful...... Dougald and Betty walked out to meet us and walked the last bit with us and we walked up to the Basilica where the woman stamped our pilgrim passports and made quite a big thing of it when she realised how far we had come. We walked around and found our place for the night in the Franciscan pilgrim hostel up near the church and then we had dinner with Betty and Dougald to celebrate (thank you B and D!). then we went back and sorted ourselves out for the night.

Of course, it rained on the way in and it poured down in the evening. We actually watched it come in from the high viewpoint afforded by our dormitory window. Currently it is too dark to know what the weather will be like tomorrow and we have no access to a forecast.

In the morning we will get up and receive a blessing from the Franciscan friar before setting off. Hopefully the shop will be open and we will be able to buy some supplies for the day. Monday is a pretty difficult day in France if you want to go shopping as most places are shut and those that open only stay open for a short while. Also, the villages we are going to pass through look like they are mainly free of any such facilities so we will just have to see what happens.

Another day, another set of surprises. We hope that it is a bit more predictable than it has been as we will be walking with Betty and Dougald and we don’t want our first (or any) day ending up like some of the ones we have been experiencing recently!

The weather turned as we approached Vezelay. (04/05/10)

We had been expecting it for some time but it didn’t rain until we were virtually in sight of the town. Then it waited until we were in Vezelay and sorting ourselves out before it really started to rain. Thankfully, by the morning it was calmer and the rain was mostly very light. So, our first day out of the town was overcast, windy and cool with a steady dampness that imitated rain from time to time.

On the second leg of our journey towards Nevers we expected rain all the time we were walking and experienced much colder winds, but the rain never came. Then, some time after we had settled ourselves in the refugio, the rain began to fall and it pretty much continued to pour until well into the night.

At time of writing, we are getting ready to settle down for the night and everyone has sorted themselves out. The toilet is across the square, past the other side of the town hall where we are staying.

Our hope is that the rain will run out by the morning but, if it does not, at least we will be heading for a reasonably comfortable night tomorrow and will, hopefully, be able to dry things before setting out the next day.

We now have the lights out and I am writing in torch light while Alison reads by her torch. Not sure I can be bothered doing much more in this situation so might seek out my notepad and pen and use them before reading the Gospel and going to sleep......

The place we are staying – a room on the side of the Mairie, which also contains the school, is large enough to hold one set of bunk beds, a small table, some chairs, cupboards and work surfaces including a sink and cooking hob, a paraffin heater and a shower, is brilliant. There is another room at the other end of the building with space for more people to sleep in. There is food available to buy very cheaply – and wine, and the only thing missing is a toilet located within the building. But that is a minor issue when everything else is so good.

Wet road walking (05/05/2010)

In the shade of your hat, your sheltering hood, inside the sealed skin of waterproofs the muffled stride and steady drone of rain is interrupted by the careless swooping spray of cars and driving wave of water from the side-sweeping roar of lorries.

It is often hard to talk, the ideas you have are intruded on by visiting vehicles and passing close calls. The cattle watch and sometimes follow as you pass the fields, the sheep huddle on steaming piles of dung, their newly shorn backs shivering from the cold and rain. Lifted by a shared packet of little biscuits or the sweet/sour French sweets tightly wrapped in clear cellophane, we walk and share broken conversations while feeling for leaks in jackets and the effects of steadily dampening feet. Light jokes and snatches of song punctuate the silence as we climb the next hill before we stop to drink water under a tree and review the route on our maps and texts.

Thinking of dry clothes, hot coffee and weight free feet – better together than on our own. Better with a purpose and a place to head for.

Music therapy

Sitting on the bed in a truckers’ hotel in Premery after walking through heavy rain with everything drying I have put some of Alison’s MP3 player music on the mini-laptop and I have been doing things (mainly trying to dry my leaky boots) while Bob Dylan has been singing to us.

Now we are playing our daughter’s band (well the only four tracks that we have of her music) as I sit and do some writing/collecting some of the most recent bits and bobs onto one file for publishing.

The music in my head needs recharging so this is all good. We have also listened to a bit of Jake Thackray’s stuff and will listen to a bit more later. Dominique has stopped singing and we now have a bit of David Bowie asking if there is life on Mars. Not sure about that but wonder just how much life is left in the French countryside sometimes when we are looking for places to stop and to stay. Just checked the updates on the French Amis des Pelerins website and it is scary what seems to have been scored out rather than added in....

The music will help but the options for night stops are not as good as we had expected and in some cases seem to be declining as we go. Ho hum.... look at those pilgrims go, it’s the best selling show... is there life on....

And now.... (06/05/2010)

We are staying in a lovely house on the edge of Nevers with two people who have walked the Camino and host pilgrims. They have just 'phoned up and booked our next stop south of here and are making food as we get ourselves clean, etc. Their house is beautiful!

We walked through deep, misted valleys and along the side of busy roads for part of today and ended up emerging from the clouds into the suburbs of Nevers as the sun pushed the grey away for a brief while.

All in good spirits, we are praying that things go well in the elections, that our proxy votes work and that we will eventually return to a country that has avoided a Tory landslide..... Bon courage to you all, we miss you but are happy pressing on, even if my boots do leak (because even if they do, we still end up finding places full of hospitality, warmth and heaters that dry what needs to get dry, etc.... This is the nature of walking the Camino and of being pilgrims.

Happy days!

PS none of the above has been edited (again) so sorry for the messiness of it all. Things just go as they go, and we fit in what we can.

At the crossroads I sit, with your voice in my heart and your image burned into my soul

2010-05-01T23:16:00.000-07:00

I offer you all my apologies for failing to be able to up-load things for the last few days.

Alison has, from time to time, been able to do Facebook things and once I might have been able to do something but the wifi facilities in some places are just terrible – do not buy those wifi services from Logis hotels (with little things like a credit card and a scratch-off password) and avoid the free versions(also with Logis) which involve going on to some second rate service brokered by an internet site to get access – they are awful and often don’t work when you try to do anything more than search or do basic emails on them.

Anyway, I will up load some other stuff later. For the moment, I just want to reflect on the weirdness and wonderful nature of this world.

We have been travelling through France without knowing where we would end up each night and without knowing what the day would bring.

So, we have arrived at so many places hoping to be able to stay in, for example, a camp site, only to find the campsite closed or we have expected to find a hotel only to discover that all of the hotels there closed long ago. Each time, we have had a different experience when trying to find our night stop.

Once, as you know, we ended up walking and walking until we were not able to walk anymore and then we ended up in a strange and quite scary situation where we set camp (illegally) in a wooded area between a sports hall, TGV main line track and a noisy road. Other times we have walked beyond our night stop to find campsites in other towns or where the campsite was in a strange farm (where we were kept awake all night by the singing of a nightingale) and then, on another occasion, we arrived at our night stop and, after searching and searching found there was no where for us to stay. The next place was about 14 km further on and so the tourist information place booked us a bed - but would not order us a taxi to take us there as it was too far away and she did not think a taxi would take us so far. So we ended up walking a further 9 kilometres to the place where we would meet the taxi. We then discovered that the taxi had driven all the way from the place we had walked from any way....? So we missed being able to have a meal in order to walk there for what reason????

Despite this, mostly, something both deeply interesting and something enlightening has occurred as a result of these detours/diversions.

I will write more about these anon, but just want to express our delight springing from our most recent experience.

Contrary to so many other nights, we actually booked this evening’s bed a few days before. We searched the internet for a place to stay on the night before walking into Vezelay because we expected to have been camping for the previous 3 nights and wanted somewhere to rest before doing the final stretch there. We also had to decide the final night’s location so we would have a reasonable day’s walk but wanted to try to avoid a very long last day. After much discussion we focused on Mailly le Chateau and found a Chambre d’Hote that fitted the bill there which, miraculously, was run by a person who had been inspired by the Camino and had named her establishment “el Camino” as a result.

Alison emailed her and said, “if there is a problem please text me". We received no text so assumed everything was OK.

Then we arrived at there to find it a lot quieter than we had expected and wandered around the place admiring it (the village is mainly set on the edge of the cliff looking down on the river valley) but failing to find the night stop. So, we went down to the lower part of the village nearest the river and almost immediately found it. The owner and her friend welcomed us with great fanfare and we settled in feeling very thankful that the place existed. Given our previous experiences, we had begun to wonder exactly where we were going to end up sleeping tonight. We had even considered the (not unlikely) possibility that the reason why we had not received any text was because there was no longer anywhere called the “el Camino” in the town.

So, it was wonderful to be greeted so well, to enjoy such good company and such good conversation with the people there (the owner and her two friends, husband and wife).

But it was even more extraordinary in the end.

Our hostess, during a discussion based on cheese and the accompaniments for it explained in an aside that her friend could speak Spanish because her parents had been Spanish and had escaped Franco’s regime during the Civil War. They had, she added, crossed the Pyrenees and remained in France. Alison, warming to the story said that we loved the Pyrenees, and added that we had been on holiday a few times to a house in the foothills of the Pyrenees in a place called... and I could see our hostess saying in French, “don’t say it’s called...” and Alison said “Chalabre” and everyone fell about in amazement as that is where the Spanish couple had settled and where the friend had been born and brought up.

I was deeply disappointed that I didn’t have the Chalabre pictures with me on the computer – I have the text of my book based there (called “Redemption Song”) but had not added the supporting files with all of the pictures, maps, etc. but it was just one of those wonderful moments when the world seems so ridiculously small and when we, as human beings discover that we are just a large family.

So, I will stop and leave you with the idea that we are all connected in some way, we are all part of a greater commune, there is more that binds us together than that keeps us apart and we should always seek to find those connections. It is what art and music often accomplish when they work, it is what literature expresses and explores and it is what we discover every time we share food, drink and company. So why is it so easy to forget this universal truth ... and why do some people seek to deny it or destroy our connections?

I will go to sleep now and ponder these questions..... good night world!

Work in progress

2010-04-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

In Chartres we did a major wash of clothes at a local laundrette, which took a little time and was an education in itself.

It was also the source of a poem, as a man stood around the outside the launderette begging. The whole manner of his begging and the familiarity of the person gradually nagged this poem out of me. It is based on the man but is about other people I have known – clearly, I know nothing of the actual man in question....

It is a first draught – clearly a work in progress and may end up nothing like its present form – sorry of it seems to ramble....

By the Launderette, he stood

Across from the old house
with its carved wooden statue
worn and ragged with six hundred years of wear,
I watch as below it he walks the width of the street
his casual jacket and scarf
failing to hide the desperation
raging through him;
his knee trembles
when he stops in one place for long

So he walks, and leans against a wall
he steps casually across the road
and stops a stranger for some change.
His almost debonair looks
are soon stripped away
by that pleading voice
needing that handout of loose cash

It’s only a few Euros, he says
That’s all I need, you know!

And the old lady who passes
remembers him when he sat in a pram
his mother a skinny young thing
not of an age to really know
as her son’s young face
eagerly accepted the attention of strangers.

She does not give him money
but gently pats his shoulder
as she has done
for most of his life.
If he could remember, or even notice
he would call her Aunt Hettie
though she is no one’s aunt
and anyway, she is resigned to his vagueness
and unseeing looks.

It’s Saturday morning
and the market is buzzing;
people are walking up the hill
with empty baskets and full purses
but little of this cash goes to him
as he hides his trembles
and glances into the launderette
where I sit watching him.
His blank stare shows me
he has my measure – I will not give him cash
but he does not see me as a friend,
and when I walk out
he is not looking
he does not hear me
does not recognise me
or remember who I am
that we walked to school together
twenty years or so ago.

It’s just the drumming in the veins
and the pounding in his brow
that keeps him going, now.
Nothing else can get in the way
and, until that thing is sorted
that hunger is reduced,
we are just binary to him
A yes, or a no.

I shake his limp hand
as he looses interest
and crosses to someone
who really is a stranger.

A walk on the wild side

2010-04-26T08:44:00.001-07:00

I didn’t get the chance to post my last blog – various things got in the way, then I tried to do it in the morning before setting off and ended up doing other things instead.... that was Sunday morning. We had re-thought our route because of the problems with traffic on certain types of road and because of the lack of facilities in so many of the villages across Northern France (which we expected to be repeated in the rest of the places we walked through to Vezelay).

It was all a bit fraught but we thought we had it cracked and had built in some flexibility, too.

So, we set off from Chartre a little bit later than intended (9.30am) and headed down the D939 knowing from experience that roads of this level are pretty quiet on Sundays – no lorries and only light general traffic. We made good progress and stopped at Sours for coffee in a great Bar/Tabac which we recommend highly – it is one of a series of villages walked through and possibly stopped at by the 1946 pilgrims.

Expecting the other villages to be similar we happily treaded the Sunday road, but each place after Sours was empty of shops, bar/tabacs and any commercial life. A couple of the churches were open and we could see where the 1946 pilgrims may have stopped en route to and including their night stop at Ouarville but we had our food by the road side as there were not even seats/benches in some of the places we went through! The weather was good, the traffic very light and the going was fine but by the time we got to Ouarville we were ready to stop and there was no where to stay, no presbytere, or even a camp site.

We walked on to Gouillons where we had an address for the presbytere but the priest no longer lived there. We tried ‘phoning for a taxi to take us to Angerville where we were confident that there were hotels and none of them responded... they were all on answer machines, so we walked on, checking each new village as we entered it. At Baudreville, a well advertised hotel was now very much out of business, and there was nothing in Arnouville. The blackberry had packed in around Gouillons and we still kept walking....

Remember, our intended day had been from Chartres to Ouarville (28kms) with a fall back plan of an extra 5km to Gouillons if there was nothing in Ouarville – 33kms is really enough. We walked to Angerville, which was another 13 or so kms, so our day ended with over 46kms under our belt by the time we entered the town!

It was after 9 pm by the time we reached Angerville, the light was beginning to disappear from the sky as we approached and our hearts were lifted as we got closer and closer. It was clearly much larger than any of the places we had stopped at on the way and it was right next to a major intersection of the D2020, so that should also help. OK, so it was Sunday night in France but we have succeeded in smaller places than this.

Nothing was open apart from an empty donner kebab cafe and a pizza cafe/take away. The only hotel we could find in the centre of town was dark and locked shut. So we went to the pizza place and asked. The young woman who was standing outside confidently pointed us to the hotel we had already tried. She then shrugged her shoulders and said that was it, there were no more hotels. No, there was not a camp site either, she said then went in to ask her mother who was running the pizza place (we could hear her asking her mother if there was anything they could do and her mother saying no). The men hanging around the place all joined in to give advice. No there were no hotels, the nearest was in Etampes another 20km away, no we should not try to walk there in the dark, it would be too dangerous (we had worked that one out for ourselves....), no there were to taxis working on Sunday night and no, there were no places to put up a tent.

Then one of the men asked if we would camp in a forest and we said yes, of course. He described a complicated route to us and we set off with a couple of cans of fizzy drinks from the shop and the rough idea of where the forest might be.

After walking down several roads and being tempted by a quaint little passage way with trees and hedges dotted along it we eventually found what might pass as a forest in the town of Angerville. It was a course bit of land with trees behind the swimming pool/sports complex.

In the dark, we pitched the tent (for the first time) put all our precious items in the tent and stuffed the remaining ruck sacks in one of the bivvy bags for the night.

The land was close to the very busy road, next to a place where teenagers continued to make a heck of a scary noise (shouting, screaming, chanting and so on) until almost 1.30 in the morning.... oh and the TGV main line to the south west was about 30 feet away, too. It was a long night.

Today, we hoped for better things, got up by 6 and struck camp. We were in a crummy bar/tabac in Angerville centre by around half seven and set off at half past eight. Angerville’s saving grace (as with most places) was its Boulangerie – we bought a good baggette and for breakfast a couple of delicious pain au raisins!

Out on the D6 which turned into the D22 when we changed Departements, we walked until 3.30 when we arrived in Pithiviers where we decided we needed a proper rest so we are in the hotel there (Le Relais de la Poste) in a big room, large enough to hang the tent over the wardrobe to dry it off properly and hang all our washing and other things out, too.

We did another 27 km today. Well over 73 kms in two days is enough for anyone!!!

However, we are well, we were safe dry and OK in the tent, and we coped with it all without major incidents.... we have the stamina and determination to get through even difficult things like this and see the blessings that they can bring.

(Blessings included: we are now further on than we had expected and we had been worried about that; the taxi thing would have been very expensive and fruitless so it was good it didn’t happen – and we now know how to call French numbers using the mobile; we needed to try the tent and now know how easy to use it is, reliable and totally brill it is too; we know we can go on for much longer if we need to; we have been assured that even when it looks very bleak it seldom is anywhere near as bad as you think it is...etc etc)

Tick tock, let’s all walk....

2010-04-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

We thought we heard a cuckoo this morning but when we stopped and waited for the traffic to subside we could not hear anything. That’s the way with things as you walk. You pass by things, catch glimpses and so on, but generally speaking, you have to keep on walking.

The limitations of our maps was apparent before we started from Honfleur (well, before we left the UK really, but we could not see what we could do. French maps are even more expensive than UK ones and cover less area per map, so we were going to have to spend quite a lot on them.... so we checked out the routes on Google maps, printed off detailed routes in text and had a cut up road map as our basic guide. We also go a local area map from the Tourist information Office as additional help to navigate out of Honfgleur.

All were pretty useless. We walked on pretty major roads to begin with and benefitted from the Sunday lack of traffic. We also came off the roads when possible and took some respite in small towns. But Monday’s traffic was a major jump in scale so we navigated off the main road and blagged our way across the network of minor roads guestimating where to take the next turning and generally doing a pretty good job of it.

In Bernay, we sought out a shop with maps and bought a couple of maps suitable for cyclists – they cover bigger areas than the walkers’ maps and are just so much better than anything we have seen while not being OS level detail. We will be changing the route for tomorrow as the night stop we were planning looks too quiet and empty to be worth risking given our small but growing knowledge of what is suitable and what is not. So, Conches en Ouche – here we come! Despite being a few miles further along the way and, if we use the minor roads we plan to use, even more miles away again... It might be a 25 mile or so day tomorrow, so it’s an early night and an early start.

Today, as we reflected on the beauty of the places we pass through and remarked on the very attractive timbered housing so prevalent in the area (and, where the buildings don’t have thatch, how elaborate the slate tiling is) we also noted how the buildings seem to be in quite randomly placed positions within quite large plots making up the farm yard. It is as if the original pattern of these places has become obscured over time, leaving them informally dotted across the area close to the main farmhouse. It emphasised the way that the landscapes we pass through tend to obscure their history behind a veneer of modern farming images or quaint dilapidated/restored houses/farms/villages/etc... The quaintness hiding the squalor of the homes families had to live in even in the very recent past, the neatness hiding the chaos of harsh farm working practices, the rolling landscapes obscuring the industrial uses that originally scarred and blighted them.

Sorry if this seems a bit negative in terms of images, but they are there to illustrate a point. I could also say the wide, open fields of corn and rape that stretch for miles across the landscape hide the many centuries of human scale farming which employed and fed many hundreds of local workers and their families who now have to live in crowded cities chasing the Euro and a newer, better life.

But, along with these images and thoughts we also considered the fact that when we first started walking the fields had been only recently ploughed and prepared, some had been sewn and were beginning to show rows of seedlings which gave the fields a thin haze of green when looked at from a shallow angle as you walked along looking at the rising fields from a sunken path. The hedgerows were still dark apart from the black thorn blossoms and the late spring flowers.

By the time we were nearing London, the rape was beginning to show the first signs of yellow flowers rising above the thick green foliage hugging the heavy clay soils. Other plants were no longer seedlings and were colouring the patchwork of fields with different shades of green. Trees were beginning to show early leaves adding another tinge of green to the landscape.

In the byways of Surrey and Sussex we saw whole hillsides covered in the early yellows of rape as the flowers began to form a layer above the blanket of green. Different trees were starting to add to the range of greens and more blossoms were coming into their own with wild splashes of white, cream and yellow set off occasionally by pale pinks and the remnants of blankets of wild spring flowers. The heathlands had the gorse, too, with their cocoanut scent and spikes and the horse chestnuts had their leaves almost out, each one looking like green clenched fists ready and waiting to punch the cold spring out of the way.

But, now that we are in France and continue moving steadily southwards, everything is becoming more advanced in growth, with fewer trees without leaves and more plants beginning to take on their spring and early summer clothes. Each day we get further south and further along the line of natural growth.

And, by the time we begin to reach the final stages of our journey, there will be fields empty of their produce and farmers working hard to harvest crops before the summer storms ruin them. Our path will have taken us from one end of the cycle to the other.

Tick tock, tick tock, nature’s clock is ticking along and we are all just pilgrims plodding along, keeping in time......

Travelogue/monologue/sleeplikealog

2010-04-18T09:56:00.001-07:00

NB Remember to check out the previous blog, too!!!

This was written last night before I switched off the light and went to bed...

“This is our first night in France. The crossing was good even if we did get up very early and wait quite a long time to get on the boat... none of it was difficult or even taxing. In fact it was very easy. Then we arrived and strolled through quite, sunny streets until we reached the bus station where we asked for the next bus to Honfleur and were given tickets for a bus which left just a few minutes after we boarded it. The next bus was due to leave several hours later.

More good fortune, we had a good lunch and set off for the main Catholic church (which is stunningly beautiful) and could not find a priest. I pushed a reluctant Alison into coming with me to find the presbytery and rang the door bell despite her misgivings. The priest was pleased to stamp our “passports” and we managed to say that we were looking for somewhere to stay and to tell him that we were happy to sleep on a church hall floor – and he showed us great hospitality, chatted to us, offered us refreshments and phoned up parishioners who had walked the Camino before getting a lovely lady to drive us to the parish centre, which was less than 5 minutes walk from where we were, gave us the keys and bottles of water, biscuits etc and said we could come back and have showers, too!

Now, we are in one of the meeting rooms, I am writing while Alison sleeps and we are preparing ourselves for the first day’s walking in France. Goodness knows what we can expect – we have pages cut out from a road atlas and the text of a route printed out from Google maps routes (for walking) which takes you along the main roads, so we will be playing things by ear as we go (and may resort to reading sign pposts and looking things up on google maps using Alison’s blackberry – we don’t know when I will next be able to post a blog as we have no wi-fi and my dongle would cost a fortune in France.....”

Now we are in an overpriced hotel room where the restaurant is closed, the nearest place to eat is five or six miles away and there are no shops, etc open in this village until tomorrow.... but there is wifi, hot water and a soft bed so we cannot complain.

Today we walked along the edge of some major roads (see our previous post for the details) but the traffic was very light and we were not troubled with very bad walking surfaces or bad weather; in fact the weather has been hot and sunny (earlier on it was cold and sunny for a while) with a heat haze on the surface of the road. The morning began with rough edged, wide main roads then we walked on a very pretty route which steadily climbed the length of a valley for the rest of the morning. Our rest stop was on a bench behind a church with some bread and saucison then an apple washed down with water. Not sure what we will do tonight – probably the last bit of bread and sausage and some chocolate, etc.

Tomorrow we head for a larger town and hope that there will be some kind people or some very cheap accommodation (otherwise we will seek out a campsite and try out our little tent (2 berth, under 1 kilo in weight, very simple). The packs are a little heavier now (silly us) and we have had a two day break, so today was a bit heavy going, especially with the long straight hot road in the afternoon. Still, another (almost) 20 miles done and we both continue to be safe and well and are now resting comfortably!!!

No problems.....

cands 14 | Author Crossandshell | free Mobile GPS Tracking Service

2010-04-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

cands 14 | Author Crossandshell | free Mobile GPS Tracking Service

This location shows our route on the first day in France. Look on this website and you should be able to find all of our days walked. (Days 12 and 13 were spent looking for and buying a tent and other things then going across to France.)I will try to get this onto the side feed of the blog....

I have also put the link on the facebook page so check there, too.

Blogs to follow soon as we have been out of range or not able to post them for other reasons and may not be in range again for another couple of days - who knows?!!

Toot toot went the little green car one day

2010-04-14T23:20:00.001-07:00

Tuesday was definitely an easier day. The wind was a little too chilly even for this time of year but the sun shone all day as we walked from Woking to Hambledon.

The distance was much shorter than we had expected and the last two miles were in a car as the woman who had offered to put us up that night just happened to drive by us as we were on the last short stretch into Hambledon. I saw this car stopping and a woman wound down the window and said, “Are you Ian?” and there we were, heading for this amazingly comfortable house with a massive annex with so much space and the chance for Alison to have a bath while I took a shower!

Back on the subject of hospitality, Louise and Simon (our hosts for Tuesday) had agreed to let us stay on the night of the 14th (which is actually Wednesday, but that was because I had miscalculated the dates for the walk!

I had not realised this until Monday so we emailed Louise asking if it was OK to be with her a day earlier. Despite a very hectic day with lots of things happening within the family, she said yes, no problem and we were made welcome at incredibly short notice!

Then, on Wednesday night our hosts have been Gerry and Ligia who agreed to put us up with not much more than a day’s notice. Gerry had been on Student Cross for the first time this year (his son went on Midland Leg last year). He picked us up from our walk and brought us home to his lovely house, we have been fed and pampered royally and are about to have breakfast before being driven back to start today’s walk.

Hospitality is an experience that is at the heart of what being human is. It demonstrates something about our nature that modern society seems eager to deny – don’t ask me why!

I will write about our walk next but just feel very grateful and seriously amazed and reassured by people’s generosity and need to think about this more and explore it while I can.... what do you think?

Frostbite becomes you; just let those extremities go

2010-04-12T23:34:00.000-07:00

Just a few notes as this place is freezing and we will need to settle down for the night and try to get warm.

Take note, the itinerary is newly updated.... and now....

You know I have been talking about hospitality and related things? Today we have been experiencing all sorts of variations on a theme.

For example, we planned a route which took us across St George’s Hill which is famous for being the place where the diggers placed themselves and where they were brutally dealt with. Not only is the irony seated in the fact that this very same hill is now THE most expensive and exclusive place to live in the London suburbs, it is also where it is so exclusive the local authority information panels referring to the Diggers and pointing out places of interest excludes that very location in order to avoid any riff raff from walking around looking at how this site has been so desecrated by the extremely wealthy. Worse than this is the fact that you are not even allowed to walk through this stupid estate!

You heard/read me correctly. This is a location where they police the place/video and scan the place and excise any unwelcome organisms from the very air of the estate – you have to live there or be some sort of work person going about your allowed duties to enter the place. Yes, this is Britain in the tewnty first century and people still think that they can get away with that!!!! I will be joining the ramblers when I come back and we will do some neat stuff regarding this.....

This route deflection alone caused us an extra almost 2 miles!

We walked through what looked like a set of ante-tank emplacements which I had presumed meant that the road was about to be excavated, and entered the estate. Within a few minutes a guard in a van arrived and asked us if we were residents. As we are plainly not residents we had to leave asap. At least the guy who told us to go was polite, didn’t ask us to retrace our steps and gave us advice on how to circumnavigate the place. Despite his role, he was quite hosipitable!

In contrast, last night our two daughters provided us with wine and food which were wonderful, their company, which was even better and as a bonus we spent time with our very bright and beautiful little grand-daughters – we will have to wait until after the walk to enjoy the company of our beloved grandson and my darling son Ewan again.... But hospitality was alive and flourishing hugely last night!

Other hospitality wiggles today include the fact that we waited for quite a while to get into the church hall – which was only difficult because we didn’t know what was happening and it was cold – but we also had a lovely priest who drove us up to the centre of town so we could do our shopping for food,and then the hall was cold (VERY cold)and sadly the priest couldn't do anything about it – we have to sleep here all night but, of course, we are weird walking pilgrim people who can cope with this??!

Despite the frustrations, we are very grateful to be able to sleep here.

Any way, end of rant reached and so let’s say toodle looo!

Oh, by the way, we walked very close to Dominique’s 6th form school and today we skirted past both Kirsty and Rosalind’s 6th form colleges...

Whow, too cold to write any more – even for me!!!

Check out the revised itinerary now!!

Simple hospitality is never simple...

2010-04-10T14:48:00.001-07:00

Well, here we are in a church hall in Barnet – basic toilets, a small side room to sleep in and keep relatively warm, a kitchen with hot water, kettle, fridge and a cooker. We have access to lots of cutlery and plates – yeh!

Of course, we popped to Waitrose just before it closed and bought a few things to eat and a bottle of wine. We are now tired but better for the food and wine, and are reflecting on the day. The morning was a pleasant jaunt through the countryside for about nine or so miles, then lunch was OK.... but the afternoon was much harder with 16 miles done without a stop (5 hours with lots and lots of hills of the steep variety) so we were more than a little foot sore on our arrival.

So what were we reflecting on? That enduring little nugget of an idea – hospitality – was the consideration of the day.

We were reflecting on the way that being a community, or part of one, inevitably involves making each other welcome and requires that you spend time together sharing food and conversation. We have been treated to a wide range of different types of hospitality so, in a short week, with very heavy physical demands being placed on us, we have had our hospitality radar raised to its highest sensitivity ratings and have found out some amazing things.

Firstly, receiving hospitality is a very nice thing to experience. It almost does not matter what the level is, the effects are still good. So, we have enjoyed professional hospitality from a country pub and a slightly run down hotel in a small town. In both cases the people who have extended their hospitality have made efforts to greet us and treat us as guests. Probably most impressive were the hotel people because, unlike the pub who were the owners/providers of hospitality, the hotel people were all straight employees, but they were very keen to make the best of what they had to offer... So, hospitality is in some measure about what you as a person are personally prepared to extend as part of the offer of hospitality.

Then there is the generosity beyond what is required and without restrictions – the couple who put us up in Downham were asked in the morning and by the evening we were being fed and treated to comfy beds, hot baths/showers and so on ... open house to complete strangers on trust.

So it is also about unconditional service to strangers. That is not an easy thing to be able to do. Not easy at all.

Then there are the family and friend offerings of hospitality that were exceedingly generous and seriously comfortable experiences. Again, unconditional hospitality but this time with love and an honest sense of generosity that stems form that love. Through a mixture of knowledge and empathy this generosity takes us into another aspect of hospitality where the familiar allows for greater degrees of comfort and where there are unspoken understandings/expectations that make everything so much easier.

So it can also be about being able to provide a space for rest and recuperation which goes beyond the simple provision of space and comforts - helping to make it a space that is more individually shaped to your needs.

All of this is just the beginnings of a view of what might be regarded as hospitality and where it might fit into the scheme of things but it does lead on from the rambling load of tittle tattle I posted yesterday..... it is part of that question of what makes you or I people fashioned in the likeness of God. What are our God like aspects or facets? What do our God-like bits look like?

Well, perhaps hospitality has something to do with all of this. Perhaps hospitality is part of the outcome of us beginning to act as people who have been created in God’s image?

Just one early idea in the collection of thoughts we might have or might explore.

Toodle oooo!

Confusion and fatigue from sleepy head himself

2010-04-09T15:16:00.000-07:00

You learn a lot on something like this.... how kind people can be, how hard it can be on the road, how difficult it is to talk to your walking companion when the weather is bad and you are trudging down a major A road on seriously uneven ground, that the way to avoid the A road into Barkway entails a long few miles hike up a quiet road and an extra couple or so miles on quaintly undulating (hilly, actually) little road, that my new “walkers trousers” chafe in the most unpleasant places after ten or so miles (and I’ve walked in them for over forty miles, and that 14 year old Oban malt whisky is actually rather nice.
You also learn that you can take liberties with sentences and have them rather elongated....
Yes, it has been a fantastic week and sorry we have not been able to write much during that time. We have stayed in a lovely pub (Dappling Duck, Great Massingham) with parishioners in Downham Market (Pam and Mike put us up with only a few hours notice), with friends (Joe and Juliette and family rescued us from a homeless Ely and pampered us in Huntingdon) and relatives (well one, but he is lovely and so is his partner, Linda) who pampered us beautifully in Newmarket ad ferried us back to our starting place today.
This Friday gave us lovely weather and hard walking but led us to Puckeridge where we had nowhere to stay and where the B&B’s and hotels had all dissolved into the ether. St Edmund’s College could not accommodate us but we did not know that until we were half way there so we sought out a hotel that was, like so many extinct things, still marked on our map and we ended up at a petrol station. A man ran it from a little booth in the midst of the petrol pumps and so we chatted to him about possibilities and he gave us a number for a taxi and a directory with some possible places to stay. Which lead us to a lovely lady taxi driver who drove us here and my first taste of Oban Malt, which is now sadly just a lovely memory. The clothes are drying on a noisy radiator which is making the room rather warm and I am thinking that the blister I have had on the side of my heel since half way through Student Cross is more of a nuisance than I had ever thought it would be but I’m damned if I will let it get the better of me.
Which brings me to where I am now.....
It is remarkably peaceful here. The double glazing is cutting out the sound of any traffic, the TV/radio is off and the noisy radiator has suddenly stopped vibrating and rumbling. Alison is drifting off at her note book as the heat reaches tropical island levels (especially with the evaporation from our damp clothes) and I am wondering if I will write the other things I want to write tonight or just leave them for another time.

Today I have been reflecting on how the landscape we have been walking through all week has been so completely changed by human activity over the years.

It has been stripped of forests, drained of water, turned from diverse environments into mono-cultures, built on, stripped of its natural resources, redeveloped to be more bio diverse, turned into playgrounds and worksites, homes and wastelands, shunned and cherished and so much more besides. And we have repeated these things over and over again until we eventually began to walk through this lovely land and remark on how nice it is.

Perhaps we are so pleased with what we have made sometimes that we don’t realise what we are thinking.

I asked someone during Student Cross the following question – “If God made you in God’s image, what do you think are your God like qualities? What defines you as someone who has been made in God’s image?”

He didn’t want to answer me and was wary of the suggestions that I made for him to agree/disagree with.

Do you think that being able to muck around with our environment makes us God like? Does being able to destroy our environment make use more like God? Perhaps it is only when we start to repair the damage that we have done that we start to show our “God-like-qualities”? Hmmmm is this more about a foray into good and evil? Nope – let’s get focused here!.

Of course, everything is relative. One of my less God-like tendencies today is that I am starting to drift off to sleep, but I do encourage mass contemplation on this big question regarding what makes you like God (in often quite small but deeply significant ways as well as in the more exceptional, big things). How will any discovery help shape the way you are living your life? Yes, such a decision could redirect you... or, at least, make a good talking point for you in odd situations.

Or, perhaps I am just rambling. We have walked well over a hundred miles in the last five days and it does seem to be having some sort of effect on me. Sleep is more seductive – my tendency to stay awake half the night seems to be disappearing!

Tomorrow we walk to Barnet where we think we have a hall to sleep in! Let’s do it!!

Winding down for the night

2010-04-05T14:53:00.000-07:00

Sitting here after a good day’s walking I feel a little bit drowsy. Admittedly, we did have an interesting walk. We had a lovely send off from our three daughters and two granddaughters as well as a small handful of friends – Dougald and Betty, Mike Lagrue and (Fr) Ray Lyons. I know others would have loved to have been there to send us off, too, but that’s the way it goes. As it was, Ray blessed us and we all hugged before Alison and I set off via the old railway line.

It rained throughout the morning and the wind was very strong and persistent.

We stopped at Sculthorpe Mill for a cup of coffee and a toilet break then headed for Helhaughton where we thought we could have lunch in the pub – the pub is now two houses poised on a road junction.... so we walked to West Raynham where the pub has disappeared without a trace!

So we ended up walking all the way to our night stop without a break or any lunch! It was a long day in terms of distance (19 miles) made shorter by the absence of any stops after the first one (about 5 miles in).

Interesting contrast with the previous week where we had a wonderful and particularly enjoyable pilgrimage with Kettering Leg of Student Cross – and where we didn’t need to worry about where we would be fed or stay the night.

The contrast serves as a pointer to the quality of the leg we walked.....

The quality of the people on the leg was fantastic and the walking/stops/buzz all added to this quality.

I am too tired to really do Kettering Leg justice so I am going to leave the blog for now and tell all about our Student Cross at a later date.

Peace to you all!

Between two birthdays

2010-03-25T09:12:00.001-07:00

Well it seems like I have almost come to the end of what I can do and it is not even near enough but that is the reality of this sort of venture.
I am the one who has been worrying. Alison keeps telling me all will be well but I cannot see that at the moment as we have damn few places assured along the way (nothing as yet in Northern France, for example.... but we are just going to do our best and trust in the good will of strangers!

Just been speaking to my old friend Roger, who was wishing us all the best and am thinking that I have been so single minded these last few weeks that I have hardly raised my head above the parapet! Well, this evening I make a selection of curries and sit down to a small feast of flavours while trying to relax knowing that tomorrow we will be heading off and that will be that.

As I contemplate the sort of food I will cook I am eager to choose the sort of things that Alison will enjoy as tomorrow is her birthday and it also strikes me that we will be starting this venture on Alison’s birthday (26th March) and basically ending it with mine (25th July).... I am not sure if that has any special significance but it is certainly worth reflecting on.

As I waited in the jewellers on our high street today I was chatting to the man who runs the shop – his son was mending Alison’s gold chain which will carry her little cross all the way to Santiago. The man mistook me for some other customer and began talking about Egypt.

After sorting out that mix up he asked where I was going – was I going on holiday - and I explained that I was going on pilgrimage. He got quite excited after I explained what that was. As a devout Muslim he was fascinated to hear that Christians did such things. “And you pray every day?” he asked. I assured him that I did and he was doubly pleased. He has been on the high street for over thirty years and one of the things that he was now able to do, now that his son was taking up the lion’s share of work, was spend a bit more time praying. He would not retire but he could now find the time to enjoy both God and his wife’s company more! “And that’s what you will be enjoying on your pilgrimage!” he exclaimed.

Which led me to think that the risks are all worth taking for such a rich return!

I am just bad at letting go – letting go of control, letting go of risk aversion, letting go of all the daily responsibilities I try to fulfil with my family (along with letting go of the guilt that I feel because I will not be there for them, etc) and letting go of the worries and so on produced by the uncertainty of the situation plus a lot more....

Tricky little situation, Ian. After tomorrow it will all be in God’s hands.

Blogs ahoy!

2010-03-18T16:55:00.000-07:00

Just a short note to direct you all to the new addition to the fold (see http://walsinghamtovezelay.blogspot.com/)or click on the "from Walsingham to Santiago de Compostela" link in the box to your right....
It will serve as the place where basic route info will be held as its main purpose is to provide you with the route itinerary.

Please note that the mileage is best estimate at time of going to "print" and in some cases we hope it is our worst estimate, too!

There are days of rest built in and these may vary according to circumstances. However, the period in Spain where we seem to be in the same spot for several days is the time when we will be making a short detour from our pilgrimage to attend our middle daughter's (Dominique's)graduation from Durham University!

Also, this is a copy from a copy of a much used and abused spreadsheet which has seen so many changes there may be a strong chance that there is an odd mistake or two in there. I will keep checking and improving as I go along, so please be patient. It will be a reliable guide for all those planning to meet/join/walk with or support us in some other way.

Keep watching this (and other) space(s) and God Bless!!!

Building Bridges (well, crossing them)

2010-03-17T00:49:00.001-07:00

Yikes, I’ve reworked the route again!
Yes, I have been worrying over the early part of the route in France and trying to find a better solution. I chose the route initially because I was going to use a GR for much of the way. Of course, GRs are designed to lead you through the best bits of the countryside rather than simply get you from A to B efficiently so I began to shave off corners, cut across land to avoid lots of windy bits, etc.
Then we decided that it would be a better idea to strike across country to Chartres instead of Paris partly because the route would be free of a lot of the heavy industrial stuff and partly because the 1946 walk went through Chartres too. That was fine but getting across the Seine early was an issue. I haven’t mentioned it on the blog but that river is a pretty big, meandering old thing with a limited number of crossings. The first two take you across at Honfleur and Tancarville. The Honfleur crossing looked impossible by foot and, although the Google maps people claimed it was possible to walk across the Tancarville one I have not been able to confirm this.
Also, the roads and paths just made it all a bit too difficult and I was beginning to wonder if we would have to get a bus across the bridge.....
After doing that research I have made a simple but very good change to the route which solves a lot of these problems!
We will be going across the Channel over night from Portsmouth to Le Havre, will have breakfast in Le Havre then get a bus to Honfleur where we will start out walk! It pretty much cuts out all of the nasty stuff, keeps us walking in lovely rural spleandour and is a bit more direct, too!
One simple bus ride at the beginning makes all the difference...phew!
Just thought I would let you know.

Six Bells a ringing

2010-03-11T09:05:00.000-08:00

I was just reflecting on the walk we did the other day.
We stopped at a pub called the Six Bells on the High Street in Brentford. We needed a stop and the Fullers sign seemed to call to us from across the road as we walked along. It was obviously a newly refurbished place and was looking well looked after with a nice smell of food cooking (the food also looked good as people across the bar were served as we waited to get a drink).
Alison was sitting in a comfortable leather arm chair as I wandered up to the bar and an old chap standing by his half pint said hello to me. He asked me if I was local and when I said I wasn’t he grinned and said he had thought so.
We got chatting as I waited and it turned out that he had been coming to the pub on and off for nearly 60 years and had actually worked in the place over a 40 year period – some of it part time and some of it full time. I asked him about what he had done and what the pub had been like and learned how the pub’s lay out had changed over the years, how it had declined and even that it had been a major international darts competition venue in the fifties and sixties. He talkked animatedly about how he had been the cellar manager for a long time here and that it had been a Fullers pub for as long as he had known the place.
He was a spritely 78 years old, keen to have a chat in his local, deaf in one ear, with a lovely sense of humour and he took delight in telling me how the refurbishments had meant that he had been able to walk through the front door to the left of the building for the first time in almost twenty years. He named the couples who had run the pub over the decades and how it had become a dirtier, less respectable place in recent years.
All of this took just a few minutes and when I had been served I said cheers to him and sat down with Alison. About five minutes later he popped across from the bar and gave Alison a boiled sweet saying that it was to help her keep up her energy for the rest of our walk. He chatted briefly to some of the other people in the bar as he finished his drink then he got ready to go, stopping briefly to wish us luck. I stood up and shook his hand and wished him all the best and he took his leave with a happy grin on his face.
Being Mr Memory Man I had forgotten his name by the time I had sat down with my pint but he reminded me so much of my dad that I found the whole encounter quite touching. Like my dad he obviously thought that you should be able to say hello to people as you pass them on the street and chat to people when you meet them in pubs and in other public places such as bus stops and Dr’s waiting rooms. The refurbished pub was not quite the sort of place he would have wanted to be but it did not take much for it to be a reasonably pleasant and friendly place despite itself. I hope he keeps on finding other people willing to chat with him on a regular basis.
It also touched a chord in me regarding the things I am writing about on the subject of pilgrimage. He is definitely someone we encountered on the way who enriched the journey for us. He did not reject us because we were strangers/aliens or outsiders. He didn’t reject us because we had backpacks and were going on a relatively long walk. These things made us appear more interesting to him. He was one brief encounter heralding many more; a glimpse of what is to come.
I look forward to meeting so many more new faces and, when we cross the Channel I just hope my French will be up to it!

Stepping out

2010-03-09T09:16:00.001-08:00

Wow! It has been a while since I was able to sit down and write a blog! Still, I have been very busy.
For example, Monday was the “full test” time for us. We packed our bags again making sure we had everything we were going to take or an equivalent and set out. Our aim was to walk for twenty miles or so and see what happened.
We walked to Kingston from New Malden then followed the Thames Path (northern side from Teddington) to Putney and then on a bit.... We also tried to swap one of our new sleeping bags as we have two right handed ones and want a left handed one so we can zip them up. We had not realised they were right/left until after we bought them. No luck sadly but might be able to sort it out before we go.
I’m afraid that it’s still work in progress to some extent. My feeble feet started to show potential signs of a blister between eighteen and twenty miles – one on the edge of the ball of the right foot ... classic pressure blister. Not sure if I should increase padding (different socks, two layers, etc.) or what. I feel that the arch on my left foot has gradually lowered and that my right foot is taking some of the strain so I will get that checked out at the docs asap. It could just be that my left foot is a bit old and does not move as well as it should... Hmm, difficult but not as bad as it looks, I think.
Alison’s backpack rubs on her hip. We encountered this a bit on the last trial and adjusted (we thought) the bag to address this. A bit more adjusting might solve this, too.
I spent today with string, lots of maps and a note book and have refined the route south from New Malden to Portsmouth. It should be a good walk!
So, we just keep plugging along, trying to prepare as much as possible while dealing with lots of life along the way.
I said to Alison that I have been too busy to even do the usual thinking about Student Cross. By now I am usually checking out the long term weather forecasts and thinking about things to prepare for the coming pilgrimage but my mind is on what follows this. I expected her to agree but it appears she has been doing all that thinking and worrying. Perhaps she is doing mine for me.
My lack of focus on the coming week of Student Cross is also unusual because we are walking a new Leg this year (well new to us; it is in effect one of the oldest Legs). So I have not checked up on the route we will take, Have no idea what the lunch and night stops are like and have not thought about music, etc. The one thing I have thought about is that we will meet two of our daughters during the week as Kettering Leg (our Leg) will meet up with Midland Leg (our daughters’ Leg) in Wisbeck and share the night stop. It will be the first time we have been on a Leg that meets up and spends the night together with another Leg for many years.
It transpires that Alison has thought about and worried about all of the above, which is OK, really. I can’t get to grips with where we will sleep for the first month or so of our walk so am happy to let the Student Cross week lift me up and carry me along (metaphorically speaking, of course). Alison is a person of stronger faith and believes that it will all work out OK in the end – we’ll do what we can and put the rest in God’s hands.
This is why we feel we can walk in solidarity with the homeless and badly housed and can spend our time reflecting on hospitality...
In the mean time, I’ll keep plugging away at things and try to toughen up the soles of my feet!
Peace to you all 

A short interlude

2010-03-04T06:38:00.000-08:00

I was going through my files shortly after saving a sponsorship form in one of my foloders and I came across this. I wrote it partly to recall an experience I had as I walked to Walsingham solo during a cold winter week a few years ago. But it is also written with one or two places in France on my mind. I expect that Alison and I will have a few mornings a bit like this one quite soon. So, here's a rough and ready little ditty for you to consider....

Quiet exit at first light

We open the door quietly
and the cool air blows gently across the path
then past us into the dark hall
where the clock loudly ticks below the wooden stairway

Morning is still emerging
from somewhere behind the old church
as we begin our walk.
The earliest birds are choosing their places
utilising centuries of accumulated practice,
and their ecstatic songs reverberate
along the quiet medieval streets.

An occasional car or van
rushes along the road
the beams from their lights
climbing walls and swinging past us
projecting a cool sense of reluctance
as the drivers make their way to work.

Each step we take increases our hunger
and the thought of coffee clings to us like the early mist
so we check the map
to estimate the location
of our possible breakfast
and then we focus on the road ahead.

We reach the path above the river valley
in time to watch the full splendour
of the sun illuminating the bank of mist below
in ridiculously beautiful colours
then we zip up our jackets as we descend
into the dull grey layer of mist
below the morning extravaganza.

Return of the natives

2010-03-04T04:07:00.001-08:00

Last night Alison and I went to a meeting in central London on setting up a co-housing project. This is where a group of like minded people get together and buy a large place together (possibly ex-industrial) and either convert it or rebuild with a view to producing a range of homes with a set of community shared facilities. So, we would share gardens and growing facilities, eco-friendly systems such as wind generators and solar panels, etc and some communal gathering, eating and work/creative spaces, etc. There would also be space for a library and some guest suits – Student Cross reunions with parties in the common room would be awesome!!! There would also be good economies of scale with regard to buying in bulk, car shares, etc.. It all sounded very interesting and we will explore it further but couldn’t do more than express our interest as we are not going to be around for a few months!
It set us thinking about our return. We know that the effect of being on the road for several months will be very interesting, to say the least. In conversation with friends who have done similar things we have heard about how you return and open your wardrobe, look at the clothes inside and wonder why you have so much – what are you going to do with all this stuff??? It also leaves you feeling like you should be on the go, moving to the next place, etc.
Part of the advice we have received suggests that we should take a couple of days to return home. “Don’t fly,” they say, “take a train, take some time and gradually work your way back into your old life.” I think we may take that advice, too. According to our timetable, we should be entering Santiago around the 20th of July so that would give us time to get home and settled before my birthday which just happens to be on St James’ Day. Of course, as this is a Jubilee year it means that St James’ Day is on a Sunday.
In reality, I expect that the effects of the walk will actually be quite profound and long lasting (hopefully not in a negative way) and that what will happen is that our already apparently simple lives will seem far too complicated and encumbered and we will seek to live more simply and possibly with far less things. Although I cannot believe that I will want to shed any of our books! Rather, I expect to fall upon them with glee having been restricted in that area due to circumstances!
So, thinking about what we will do on our return and considering co-housing projects as a way forward seem like compatible things. Of course, it is something that Alison and I have looked at in a variety of different guises over the years and I have put together a variety of different models for this. It is very gratifying (and scary) to discover that the ideas I have been playing with have been tried and tested and appear to work. The restrictions stemming from the ridiculous price of property in this country and the complete lack of government support for such ideas have put paid to a lot of efforts in the UK but in other countries the idea flourishes and grows. Perhaps if we cannot do it in London we will have to go into Europe and join a project in Paris or Amsterdam.... And perhaps we will still have regular visitors even if we do slip away for a simpler urban life in foreign climes! What Ho ... we haven’t even started the walk yet!

Testing …testing … one …two …one …two

2010-03-02T02:57:00.001-08:00

Time is drawing near and so much to do!

Still, we did carry out a little test of our equipment so far.

We packed our rucksacks with all of our gear (and some substitutes for things yet to get) and took them for a ten-mile walk along the Thames Path from Shepperton to Kingston. I planned the route so that it would be about 10 miles in total and we did it in 3½ hrs including a half hour break for lunch (we started quite late). It gave us the chance to get a feel for what we will be carrying and how the new bags feel. We did some adjustments and played around with the bags to get them just right and I think things will be fine.

Of course, we are taking what is generally regarded as two day-sacks rather than full rucksacks. The bags weigh less than a kilo each and Alison’s is a 25 litre while mine is a 35 litre sack. This means that the tight restrictions we want to have in terms of weight and numbers of things are enforced by the limitations of our bags. It was a bit scary to see (what I already knew would be the case) that my boots take up more than a quarter of the space in the bag when I have to carry them!

Such severe restrictions are important as we will be walking between 15 and 20 miles a day and will be carrying everything with us. Weight can cause pain and blisters folks! So, well distributed and properly fitted bags are vital as are the right footwear, etc.

We will do a longer trial (around the 20 mile mark) in about a week’s time and see how that works out. Of course, we have already revised our packing techniques to make things better on the next trial.

In keeping with the theme of the tests we will walk along the Thames path again, this time from Kingston towards central London. River walks are excellent for all sorts of reasons but for our trials they provide us with a number of advantages. As well as being close to us, they also provide us with a good flexibility. So, for example, we can walk to Putney and beyond from Kingston and have a wide range of places where we can stop and rest, find a good pub to have a drink or food in and there are several tube and railway stations dotted along the way if we decide we need to stop the walk at any given point.

Added bonuses include the delights of walking through parts of London that people do not seem to spend time going to or through. It seems that river (and canal) paths through urban spaces are only used by the occasional cyclist and sporadic dog walkers. You can meet one or two other “walkers” on the paths but they are mainly the exception rather than the rule. So you can enjoy excellent views, unusual encounters with familiar landmarks and lots of urban/social/natural history in relative peace while walking through fairly busy urban locations! Alison and I like urban walking just as much as rural rambles as we enjoy looking at the build environment and the juxtaposition between urban and rural aspects of the landscape. Other people’s houses and gardens can surprise and fascinate, too!

Going for a walk also helps us focus on the thing in hand. We will be centring our lives on this very thing for a few months and so it is good that we actually enjoy doing it. No doubt there will be times when this will be a chore but like most chores, once you get going with them you soon fall into a rhythm and it becomes less bothersome.

I am writing about what makes a pilgrimage a pilgrimage at the moment and so you will have noticed that I have been touching on the theme of what’s the difference between a walking holiday and a pilgrimage (that sounds like one of those jokes, doesn’t it … all suggestions for a punch line are welcome – just thought of one – one you go some where to do some walking and the other you walk to go somewhere – sorry, not that good). Anyway, one of the things I have concluded is that it may be a natural thing to experience pilgrimage i.e. pilgrimage is a natural human experience. The intention may be to simply have a good time walking from A to B but the process becomes unintentionally life changing in some way.

I was listening to an interview with the woman who led an all woman team to the South Pole recently. She described the process of going on expedition as being quite profoundly spiritual for most of the people. She said that this was mainly because they had to walk in single file and could not communicate with each other during the periods of walking. So the first week was spent thinking about what they hadn’t done at home, what they wanted to do and other practical day to day things. The second week was spent thinking about their lives; their mistakes and failures, successes and problems, their relationships and decisions, etc.. After that, they were left with the bigger questions – why are we here, what does my life mean, where should we go from here, what’s most important to me now, etc.?

OK, so that was an intense version of a “walking holiday” and they were all going for specific, idealistic reasons, so that idealism was already there. But the experience of making that shared physical journey was part of the formula and, even when you are travelling without that enforced solitude you still go through that process of working from the daily and mundane to the more profound as you get deeper into your journey. I suspect that if you are already walking with a faith-based or spiritual focus, the things you do/say and think may help you move towards the profound more quickly, too.

All I have to do now is finish my writing, get lots of other little things written, sort out night stops for all the places not yet sorted, clear up and clean out the house so we can leave it in good order and a few other million things….. Argh! I think I will be focusing a lot on the mundane for a while yet!

Joining the dots

2010-02-25T14:56:00.001-08:00

Alison had a day off work today so we spent much of it checking out the lower part of the first stage of the route (from Buntingford to New Malden) with special emphasis between Buntingford and Willesden as the route through London will not be difficult. So, we were checking out the nature of the country roads we expect to be walking and the appearance of the footpaths we hope to use.
It was a very successful day! So, now we know that we will walk much of the Ely Leg route in reverse to Ely then down the river to Cambridge and through to join the London route to Buntingford before striking South West towards Barnet then Willesden and New Malden.
So, why Willesden? Is it because one of our daughters has a boyfriend from that charming suburb of olde London Towne? Methinks this is not actually the primary reason. There is a more cunning plan afoot!
Quite simply, Willesden was a major medieval pilgrimage site with a major shrine devoted to Our Lady – not too dissimilar to Walsingham. It started a bit earlier as the date of the foundation of the Parish Church of St Mary was 938 during the reign of King Athelstan (who probably gave the church Mary related relics) and, by the time of Walsingham it was beginning to be visited as a shrine. Around the time that Walsingham obtained its mother and child statue Willesden had a black statue of the mother and child, too. Oh, and Willesden had its own holy and miraculous spring, or well, too. The name gives the game away, really – Will (a corruption of well, es (of or under) and den (or hill). The church still has the water source in its crypt, too!
When the authorities were trying to stamp out all Catholic practices in England they found the Marian cult one of the hardest things to deal with and so the Marian shrines really saw some of the harshest treatment. This become such a focussed course of action that, in the end, in 1538 the Lord Privy Seal had, amongst others, the Mary statues from Walsingham, Ipswich, Worcester and Willesden burnt at Chelsea as if they were living people. It was a very dramatic way of saying that the devotion of Mary was now dead....
During roughly that same time the Lady Chapel at Ely was stripped of its wealth, the glorious windows were destroyed and all of the carvings removed or defaced. Along with the religious bling and tat, great treasures of art were destroyed and a very English form of devotion was all but lost.
It was not until the nineteenth century that these places began to see any significant reawakening and it was the early twentieth century that saw them begin to grow again in importance. Somehow, Willesden has never risen to the significance of Walsingham but it merits considerable recognition as one of the special ancient Marian sites in England.
The point of this is not to give anyone a basic history or church history lesson (my info is too scrappy for that, anyway) but to show that the two places are connected and that walking from one to the other does have some sort of special significance. En passant, Alison and I hope to establish a basic, but logical route between Walsingham and Willesden with a view to possibly even building a regular pilgrimage between these two sites. So, it is a simple task to talk about it and a little task to develop this idea when we come back from our current pilgrimage. I will write the guide book if I can...
Of course, there is also something satisfying in making links and the ones we hope to make between the various places we will walk through will hopefully be more significant than the simple fact that we walked through them. There is a strong historical, emotional and symbolic connection between Walsingham, Ely, Cambridge and Willesden and there are a number of other sites whose links will also become obvious as we explore them, too.
I believe that you can often feel the connection between places as you walk from one to the other. And that is really the point. Today’s expedition has emphasised the joy of discovering these sorts of links and we hope to find more ways of connecting places together - through their people, food, drink, history and character.
This is yet another really good thing to look forward to! Phew!

To be a pilgrim

2010-02-24T01:18:00.000-08:00

I wrote this yesterday but had no time to load it up.......
When I was an academic I spent a bit of time helping to set up a couple of new universities in Eastern Europe during the “Velvet Revolution”. One of the people I encountered in the University based in Bratislava wrote an essay that started with this little story.…

I was walking by the riverside yesterday evening when I met my old friend Jan. I asked him what he was doing there and he looked at me, then with some confusion in his voice he said, “Can’t you see?” as he waved the fishing rod he was holding out over the water.

I asked again, “But, what are you doing?”

“I’m fishing, of course!” He answered in frustration.

“But have you caught any fish?”

“No..” he replied.

“Well then, how do you know you are fishing?”

The person who wrote this story was planning to be a publisher of Catholic materials – he is probably a publishing magnate by now – but he had lived under a hostile regime that would have arrested and imprisoned him if he had published Catholic books and pamphlets. Indeed, he had spent years secretly smuggling in materials from the Vatican and distributing them throughout Czechoslovakia.

The story was expressing his frustration and confusion as he tried to start up his new business. Nothing had happened yet and, despite all of his planning, he didn’t know whether he would ever publish a single thing. He was calling himself a Catholic publisher but….

The reason why I am writing about this now is that I was privileged to be allowed to give a sermon in a church on Sunday and one of the things I said was that Alison and I are pilgrims. I stood there at the pulpit, looking out over the congregation and used the fact that we were pilgrims to explain both why I am involved in homelessness charities and where some of my empathy with homeless and badly housed people lies.

It was not until later, when I was talking to some of the parishioners over coffee, that I began to wonder at the validity of my claim. After all, we regularly take part in pilgrimages and we are planning to go on a pilgrimage which will last longer than most, but we are not on pilgrimage as I write this, are we? I mean, I am either dashing around helping my son settle into his new flat (Hurray! Wonderful news – my son has a place of his own to live in – he deserves a place so much!!) or helping my other daughters/grand children/etc or (whenever at all possible) sitting here writing. Alison is at a board meeting today and is working ‘till close to 9pm tonight. Neither of us has had the chance to even check out last minute details of the route yet, never mind physically take part in a pilgrimage.

So, how come I can say I am a pilgrim?

Is it because I’m scruffy and carry my belongings around in a back-pack? Is it because I can bore the grin of the most tolerant of people while talking about the walk? Perhaps it is because Alison and I spend so much time thinking and working on it – even if we feel it is not nearly enough time?

The simple fact is that I think we did start our journey some time before now and we have been gradually attuning ourselves to being what can be called “pilgrims”.

On Student Cross you can turn up the night before the start of the pilgrimage to join the group, or Leg and, after a short time you become part of a group, then you walk together and become one of a group of pilgrims. Certain people (leaders/secretaries) do the organising and make sure that the pilgrimage works during the week. Having been in such roles myself, I can affirm that you start your own pilgrimage a long time before the rest of the Leg on such occasions.

Gradually, as we draw closer to the actual walk, it will become harder to distinguish between the pilgrimage and other things. Or, rather, the context will shift from one of looking from where we are to the pilgrimage to one of looking from the pilgrimage to other things! That time draws closer each day.

The story at the beginning asks how Jan knows he is fishing if he has not caught a fish. It is a very particular way of asking a question and it reveals that human beings do not need to have concrete evidence to validate many different types of truth. We know we are standing up or sitting down even when our eyes are closed. We know that the food we smell exists and whether it is likely to taste good or not even if we have not seen or tasted it. We know that friends/family are alive and well even when we cannot see them, etc.

So I know that we are pilgrims, even if we are not currently on pilgrimage. It is, amongst so many things, a state of mind, a process, an experience and a journey – and our journey is about to physically start very soon!

Touched – by the weather

2010-02-10T02:27:00.001-08:00

The clouds are moving so fast across the sky that it feels quite surreal. At times it looks like the sort of special effect that film makers use when they have someone rooted to a place while everyone moves quickly passed them on a speeded up film, or like the dramatic cloudscapes rushing across the sky to denote the passage of time. As my house is framed in the window of my study (a room at the bottom of the garden) the effect when I first started work this morning was as if my house and garden were speeding through space towards some new destination (in another galaxy?). Then the direction of the wind changed and the clouds are now moving a little more sedately from right to left (north to south). However, they are still moving faster than I have seen them for a long while.

I have just watched a bird as it tried to fly towards me high in the sky. It has been pushed from my right to my left and each time it tries to make headway it seems to get only so far and the sideways forces make it so unstable it reverts back to gliding and tacking against the wind and begins drifting further to my left. It has gone out of sight now and yet it had barely made any headway before disappearing.

Today, I am reflecting on the nature of pilgrimage for something I am writing (an article) and at the moment I am thinking about walking. Of course, people tend to say that walking gives you time to connect with the world around you as you pass through it. They often compare this with cycling and driving cars or moving along on public transport. Usually, they talk about it this way in relation to the relative speed of each mode of transport. Of course, the effect of being separated from your environment is also a factor.

I have talked about the effect of walking with others but if we just stop and think about the process of simply walking from A to B we can see that other things may also be factors.

I like the idea that everything we encounter changes us in some way – we leave something of ourselves behind and take up something from the encounter. So, the more closely we interact with a thing the more we exchange. Diving a car through a landscape may affect us emotionally and there is still some physical exchange – as a member of a family of hay fever sufferers I know that driving through areas with a high pollen count can affect all who take part in the journey, for example. But I fear that driving through a landscape results in us leaving more than we pick up!

Modes of transport such as bicycles, horses and walking certainly bring you closer to the world you are passing through. As someone who has enjoyed all three of these alternatives I can certainly see advantages in each one.

However, as I am going to be walking all the way to Santiago (I hope) it is the act of footslogging that concerns my thoughts most.

Some of my thoughts have that enthusiastic thrust of the optimist where I know that each step will be a privilege and a pleasure and other, darker thoughts lead me to worry that I might not be up to the task in some way. But all of me knows that the time spent walking through towns and country roads or paths will be time well spent. I know about the struggle to do the last few miles and of the pains that can dog you as you go. I worry about blisters and strains and I know that sometimes the environment you pass through is neither welcoming nor kind. And I know that focussing on each footstep as you trudge up a hill in the rain, dodging the heavy backwash spray of lorries as they roar past too close for comfort is far from the idyllic image of savouring the beautiful countryside as we stroll comfortably through it.

But it all adds up to one thing in the end – it is the pilgrimage we choose to take and along with the good and the easy comes the less good and the more difficult and even the down right unpleasant bits.

Which brings me back to the clouds scuddering by my window as the weather tries to pretend it is springtime in between each fresh flurry of snow. At the moment I am sitting as everything weather-wise passes me by. On the road we will be on the move each day and, depending on the direction of the winds, etc., we will either have the weather as our companion or as our passing friend. And because we will be walking, we will have the time to appreciate each of its aspects in considerable detail. So, I wonder, will we miss this intimate relationship when we return home? Will we think of ourselves as being “weather beaten” at the end or what? I know the phrase “sun kissed” but is there another expression around or should we invent one on our return?

Pilgrimage as a risk taking activity

2010-02-09T02:28:00.000-08:00

I’ve been submerged in a mixture of planning and research (as well as the usual family and work commitments, of course) and have started to feel the panic rising – not enough time to do it all, etc….

Still, there is an element in all of this that is about just letting go and letting the Spirit do some of the work. It made me think of stuff I was writing a year or so ago about “God the risk-taker” – in some respects the whole of creation is a risk with everything left to self determination and it is up to us to work out the right things to do, etc. But, of course (and although this is for those of you who believe in God, it is also something everyone might consider in some way) if we are made in God’s image, surely we too have an element of risk taking built into us. And I think we have, whatever source we believe our nature to be, it is in our nature and is part of the key to our survival as a species, that we take risks. It has its bad aspects (global warming, global economic ruin, etc) but it has huge benefits, too and is one of the keys to our success as a species.

But, of course, in order for it to work, risk taking has to be in some way enjoyable. Leaping into the unknown is something we do rather well and taking calculated risks is also a pretty good human talent. So, whether it is purely evolution or part of God’s rather open-ended plan for the universe (or our part in it), we humans are known to reach particular points where there seems to be no other option but to take another step and see where it leads us. And some of us do this with relish!

Now, this may seem a bit esoteric for such a blog as this but there is a very important point I feel I need to make (or is it an excuse?) …

On the 5th of April we finally start to put one foot in front of the other and set off on our travels. I will have done all I can to get things ready and planned but there will be gaps, there will be lots of unknowns and we will have points of destination with no guaranteed place to rest our heads, etc. We will have to rely on the good will of strangers and the fact that we can deal with what ever is presented to us. Come rain or shine, we will have to get by. We will be living in interesting times!

In contrast to this, almost all of the organised pilgrimages I have taken part in have had fully planned routes with agreed stops and so on along the way. The only exception was when I walked solo to Walsingham and relied on people putting me up along the way. During that journey I did encounter a couple or so difficult times where I faced the prospect of a night in the rain, etc. but it all worked out OK in the end and the whole experience is a precious thing that I hold near to me and treasure as a special gift. So, I expect the coming trip to be at least as good, despite the greater risks – or perhaps because of them!

I will end this ramble with a short extract from the book on the Pilgrim Cross march to Vezelay in 1946. Sorry about returning to that particular event but see what you make of this…

Fr Gerald Vann O.P. wrote a letter on the 24th May to all of the Catholic press calling for, as the book narrates, “20 or 30 strong men who would be willing to walk a distance of 300 miles through France carrying a heavy wooden cross to Vezelay where 800 years previously St. Bernard had preached the Second Crusade. No definite arrangements for food or shelter had been made in France. They were to be prepared for hunger, thirst, fatigue, insults. They could expect nothing better than a barn for shelter or even the open sky. They would be required to carry packs on their backs as well as the cross on their shoulders. To cover the expenses of those selected but unable to pay, others were asked to send donations. All this was to be done for the love of Christ and peace in the world through him.”

The letter got a huge response with too many volunteers and more money than they needed. Out of the hundred plus volunteers, Fr Vann and his compatriots chose as broad a cross section of men as they could to undertake the walk so that it would best represent the breadth and depths of character of the British public as they saw it.

Well, as a man and a woman we are a pretty good cross-section of the public (50% better than the 1946 one in some respects, anyway) and I hope we will be facing better prospects – so I better get back to that panning thing!

One final note, I wrote to the Osprey people (about the unavailability of my preferred rucksack) and they treated my query/request as an appeal letter for sponsorship, which was a minor part of the letter I sent. After a second letter they did point me to some possible stockists but no offer of equipment… ho hum! I hope for and expect more generosity on the road!

Origins and images

2010-02-05T03:31:00.000-08:00

On Thursday afternoon I collected the book “Pilgrim Cross – Vezelay Peace Pilgrimage) which was published by Blackfriars Publications in 1946, shortly after the peace pilgrimage took place.

I am on my third reading of the text and once my useless printer starts working I will scan it in (HP printers are the pits, folks, this one wants to update the drivers every day and re-install on a very regular basis, grrr).

Printer problems aside, this book is fantastic. It tells the story of the British contingent of that amazing pilgrimage to Vezelay and of what happened when everyone arrived. It is a truly moving story and the sermon by the author and instigator of the British element, Fr Gerald Vann, O.P., is also very good. The photos just knock you over as they are both extremely evocative of the time and event and are so redolent with the experience of Student Cross even today. Certainly, the pattern and experience of pilgrimage on Student Cross is directly inherited from this event.

I have a lot to reflect on and write about as a result of this but for the moment it has placed one particular dilemma in my path. The pilgrims walked from Dieppe to Vezelay taking a longer and slower path than Alison and I intend to take. However, it may be possible for us to follow part of their route and so I am about to re-assess where we are planning to walk and see how it might be changed.

Of course, if it means adding days to our route it will be difficult to justify – we have a limited time frame for all of this – but we will certainly give it a try.

Also, I must share with you this revised image of the pilgrimage. I imagined (romantically, I must admit) them emerging from the mist to see Vezelay for the first time in the morning sun. Well, they certainly entered Vezelay for the first time in the morning but my romaticism did not even come close to the real story!

This is how it happened - all of the 14 groups arrived there on the 19th July 1946 and were led to spots on the hills within sight of Vezelay. So they settled down for the night in a ring of small camps around the town. Each could see the basilica perched on the top of the hill and each waited as darkness fell. Silently, they gathered wood for a beacon fire and waited. As they held their vigil a summer storm began to gather and lightning flickered and lit up the sky. Then, at 10 pm the basilica bells rang out, a rocket was fired from the roof of the church and the building was lit up with lights and one at a time, each group fired off their rocket and lit their beacon fire. Everyone in the church and in each camp sang together the plain chant Vexilla Regis, then silence again as the lights in the church were extinguished and each group was left to spend the last night praying together on the hillside by their dying fire and their cross.

Well, what an image to deal with! What an amazing thing to have experienced!

I will stop there and get on with my work! Cheers!

Starting with an old photograph

2010-02-04T00:51:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note during these dull and drizzly days.

Alison and I were talking about the origins of the first Student Cross pilgrimage and she said that she had looked at a close-up ‘photo of the first Student Cross Pilgrims taken in 1948. Her earlier viewings of the ‘photos had been of small, blurry pictures but this had been taken for a newspaper and was obviously a publicity picture (or, rather, a picture staged by the group at the request of a photographer). Why did she know this? Well the group were walking over one of the London bridges (looks like London Bridge, actually) and that is something that never happens on any of the Student Cross routes. The first walkers left from the Catholic Church in Ely Place, Holborn and walked north. Subsequent pilgrimages did this until they set off from the Catholic Chaplaincy at Moore House in South Kensington and headed up, by tube, to Epping.

So, anyway, she was telling me that she looked at the group in all of the detail offered by such a picture and she noticed that the leader was wearing a pin stripe suit. It looked a bit odd, but it all made sense. Just after the war clothing continued to be rationed for a good few years, so an old suit was a good choice rather than you trying to buy something new. Of course, most of the pilgrims at the beginning were ex-service men so a number of them also wore fatigues left over from their days in the services.

The other things that were noticeable were the orderly way they seemed to be walking together (marching?) behind the cross and the youthfulness of so many of them. When you think what some of these young men had gone through it is somehow not surprising to me that they were willing to take up the cross and walk with it.

It made me think of the experience of walking with the cross at that time. They would have walked through some of the most damaged parts of central London and then into a section of the rest of London that was either grim because of the bombing or simply because of the deep impoverishment suffered y it since Victorian times. Farringdon and Smithfield, Clerkenwell, Old Street, Shoreditch, Kingsland Road, Dalston, Stoke Newington, Shacklewell, Stamford Hill, Tottenham, Edmonton and so on… Slums and dereliction, impoverishment and disruption … and through it all came these ex-servicemen marching along with a blooming great wooden cross singing hymns and saying the Rosary as they went!

It must have been quite a thing to behold.

It also makes me think of those who walked across war-torn Europe just a short time before them on the peace march to Vezelay. I see them in my mind, marching along those quiet Burgundian lanes that wind their way through the forests and vineyards to that ancient hill top village and I imagine hearing the sound of their feet rumbling below their song as they march along and emerge out of the heavy morning mist to see for the first time the basilica spot lit by a warm golden sun. I can only imagine what drove them to join the march – what had they seen, what had they experienced - and it helps me focus on the reasons why Alison and I are planning our own pilgrimage.

Yes, It’s good to look carefully at the past and see how the signs of the times then drove them to their actions and to remind ourselves that it is the signs of the times that should motivate our thinking today.

The special act of walking together

2010-02-02T01:57:00.000-08:00

I attended the AGM of the Confraternity of St James on Saturday (30th Jan.) and had a very enjoyable day. Two of our friends who are members had stayed over with us the night before and, as Alison went off to talk at a Las Casas Institute conference in Oxford, I went with them to the meeting.

I picked up a lot of useful advice and news regarding the route and the practicalities of pilgrimhood. I also enjoyed the real camaraderie which is ever present in any group of pilgrims and was deeply reassured by this. I also have a longer list of things to think about and consider/worry on – but that was to be expected!

Alison and I believe that there is something very special and particular about walking together. The effect of walking and talking together as you share a journey seems to be greater than the sum of all the parts (if you see what I mean) and deep friendships are often forged though this simple process.

Considering the “why” of this has led me to a couple of conclusions.

Firstly, we could simply say that the root of all human journeys is the act of walking together. It is what all animals do in family and social groups and was the only method for humans for many (hundreds of)thousands of years before we began to domesticate animals, develop wheels, build boats, etc. and persisted as the most common experience up until the 19th Century in Western cultures (though it is probably still the most common experience for a huge percentage of people even today). So, walking together is a fundamental part of our nature which has only very recently become a marginalized activity in our society.

This thought leads me to suspect that we still have a lot of hard-wiring adapted to this act of walking together that is opened up or used to its full when we share a journey on foot. Perhaps this is why walking is not only physically good for you, but is also a therapeutic thing to do.

My second idea is that the act of walking’s physical aspects may bring us together in a particular and special way. When we walk together we tend to match each other’s pace. We slow down or speed up slightly to match our walking partner and end up walking in time with them (or they with us). Our breathing begins to regulate itself and our heart begins to beat at a regular pace which matches our activity. We end up not just walking in time with each other but in harmony with each other! Heartbeats, breathing and physical movement are tuned into each other and we come closer together than we would come if we were simply sitting next to each other. What other activities end up with you matching another person’s movement, breathing and heartbeat?

Don’t answer that!

Playing music, singing and dancing together are the ones I was going to suggest!

Anyway, I found the whole day very enjoyable and am glad that Alison and I are now full members of that wonderful organisation. We also look forward to walking with many new friends over the coming months.

So much to do, but so much to look forward to as well!

You can’t always get what you want

2010-01-28T15:31:00.001-08:00

Just got back from the recording of the News Quiz at the BBC Radio Theatre – excellent panel and a very amusing evening. Thank goodness that we were both well enough to go! I have not recovered as quickly as Alison from this bug and this has caused me some difficult moments. My stomach has been rumbling like thunder moving over the plains after every (light) meal and we all know that a storm follows thunder! So, when my light lunch today heralded a new, non-celestial chorus I began to wonder if it would be wise for me to leave for the BBC.

At the very least they might have decided that my stomach was too loud for the recording studio equipment!

Happily, the storm passed and I refrained from even a snack until now (10:53pm at time of writing this bit).

I came home imagining a meal of a lovely bag of chips..... perhaps a saveloy as well, as it was too late for a bit of cod, but I decided that this would not be a wise choice for both digestive and pecuniary reasons so I sat in the kitchen wondering what to have.

It was one of those times when the kitchen seemed to have nothing available for me to eat. Admittedly, this is Thursday, and Friday is shopping day, so the cupboards were a bit lighter in available foodstuffs than usual - but that was not the real reason. It was just that when you set your heart on something it can be hard to move yourself towards a lesser alternative. Couple this with it being a bit late in the day and with hunger nagging you in an annoying way and you begin to feel that nothing will do.

Then I looked in the cupboard where we keep our various tinned goods and I saw that we had some tinned tuna and tins of chickpeas and an amusing thought occurred. Fish and chips, fish and chips, fish and chicks! Weak link, I know, but I was clutching at straws.

So I am now eating a salad of tuna and chickpeas with some onions caramelised in olive oil (from yesterday) and some left over salsa with a bit of lemon juice, white wine vinegar, pepper and Tabasco. It is a pleasing mixture.

All that this illustrates is that, as Mick Jagger tells us, you can't always get what you want, but you can get what you need (rough quote).

So, what relevance has this to the walk?

Well, firstly, it is a reference back to this idea of making do as you progress along the road – we are not always able to make do gracefully but whether we do or not, we can make life easier for ourselves if we try to focus on the possible rather than the most desired thing. Of course, even if we fail to do this we will still survive and the next day will be different.

And then there is the ongoing story of our preparations and I have been trying to find a particular type of rucksack, one made by those wonderful people at Osprey, and it seems that every store in the world has run out of the particular version I am looking for and they are not likely to get any more from Osprey for a while!

The Exos 34 is what I can't seem to get but want! It weights under a kilo and for my medium height it can pack up to 34 litres inside, it is the state of the art and when I didn't have the means to buy it I tried one on and it fitted like the proverbial glove. Bah humbug!

Tomorrow I will write to the Osprey people themselves and ask what's going on – perhaps they might even offer me some much needed help when I explain the good use it will be put to and that it will be undergoing a 1600 mile road test, to boot!

Otherwise I will just have to find another light weight sack to meet my needs.

Letting go

2010-01-27T11:30:00.001-08:00

OK, this is the thing, I started off writing a blog last week on what I will miss and not miss when we actually start walking.

The piece was going to say how most things are actually easy to do without for a while and that what you do miss will surely be small compared with the gains. I was then going to talk about the real things that are hard to give up.

Interestingly, I wrote one blog and then had to go somewhere before loading it up onto the site. The next day, I reworked it then other things led me to leave it unpublished. I went back to the subject at the end of the week on my office computer rather than my netbook and re-wrote it with a bit more vigour but other things got in the way and it is still on that computer tapping its electronic fingers with growing impatience while I write this one on my netbook.

Perhaps, you might think, I am either going soft (I don't miss deadlines – ever!) or perhaps the subject was not worth writing about but both ideas would be mistakes. No, the fact is that these delays are perfect illustrations of what is going to be hardest to leave behind and probably my biggest challenge!

What, you might ask, causes these delays and diversions? Family responsibilities, I answer. For example, this weekend saw us helping Rosalind and the girls (daughter and twin granddaughters) at various times. On Sunday and part of Monday that extended to helping Rosalind deal with two 14 month old girls suffering with the norovirus. What little tough cookies they were, too, real stars – they handled it fantastically well! I speak of this with deep experience as Alison, Rosalind and I have all, subsequently, gone through that very personal hell which is the norovirus. Phew, is that some bug! It picks you up, shakes you all about and puts you down pretty fast but it is one seriously unpleasant ride.

So, putting aside further reflections on nasty bugs, what do I conclude?

Well, I feel that can handle a variety of discomforts, especially if I know they are for a limited period; I can handle not having my own space or my own bed, I can deal with the walking, the different places, food, pains and faces, etc all for the same reason (come to think of it, it doesn't sound very bad to me at all) and especially when I can experience them while walking through three great countries (in fact it all sound pretty good, really). But my problem is how do I let go and not worry or feel like I am letting people down? No I am not Mr Indispensible, but I am a father and grandfather and it does feel like I am doing the abandoning.

This trip will see Alison and myself step out of the normal things in our lives and will give us the space and time to reflect, pray, discuss and learn.... so the things I will have to try to let go of are not those comforts, etc, but much of my responsibilities and family cares/life. I know Alison will have to do the same and will also have the burden of being the (absentee) Chief Executive of a charity (Housing Justice) to deal with, too.

Those are going to be the hardest things to let go of.

This is how it is.

Travelling really long distances

2010-01-12T07:30:00.000-08:00

Just can’t believe that New Year is now two weeks away….

I have a question for the readers of this Blog (if there are any) but first I just need to share the following with you -

We spent a wonderful week up in the North of Scotland at a place called Nigg with a bunch of really great people. Richard and Sabine, our hosts, run a seriously good B&B there (check out http://www.niggbnb.com/) and our good friend Mike drove some of us up and back down again – was it 1500 miles? Almost as far as Alison and I will be walking!

When we were there we ate/drank/walked/danced and broke bread together, we made a student cross leg out of snow and I will never forget the walk we did leaving a long trail of our footsteps across a beautiful snow covered landscape, stopping occasionally to eat Christmas cake and drink good malt whisky or some other high octane beverages (what was that Polish liqueur called again?) while some of the group tried to make snow angels in the very deep snow.

Thank you Mike (a star for sure) and thank you everyone else for being there and to Richard and Sabine for their fantastic welcome. And thank you Susie’s mum for the stop over on the way up and to our daughter Dominique for the Durham stop over on the way back.

The weather did stop us from getting to the Dornoch New Year’s street party and put paid to the surprise visit we planned for my sister who lives in Lybster (another great B&B www.acarsaidlybster.co.uk) a further 64 miles north of Nigg. Sorry Sheena and Norman!

So enough of the thanks and the ads and all that….

I have to say that we are not just planning to walk all the way to Santiago; we also have to plan a brief interlude during the walk when we will be slipping back to Durham for a day from somewhere in Northern Spain.

I know it sounds weird but it is necessary as our middle daughter graduates from Durham University this year and the graduation ceremony is on the 29th of June. As the proud parents (and as we went to her sister’s graduation, too) we need to be there! So far, I have found an affordable flight from Biarritz to Stanstead and back. Which would mean getting a couple of buses from wherever we are (Pamplona?) to Biarritz, fly to Stanstead, train to Durham, dress smartly for the occasion (clothes stored with Dominique before we start the walk), celebrate, jump on a train and reverse the route back to the place we first though of (Pamplona?).

Of course, I will keep looking, but have you got any other ideas? Have you travelled around there and perhaps know a different route? Perhaps we are too close to it and something extremely obvious has been missed by us…

Ideas in an email please.

See, I told you we would soon be getting you to do some of the work!

The wandering minstrel sings - about planning (?)

2009-12-25T11:27:00.000-08:00

When I was eleven I went on a day trip from my new secondary school, based in a place called Dalkeith, to the darling city of Edinburgh.

Unlike any other field trip, this one was run by a Catholic priest who was an English teacher and he was trying to instil a wonder and excitement about books into his new charges. We went to the Scottish National Library and were taught how to search for books, how to order them from the librarians and generally how to be comfortable and confident in such a special place. This came in very handy for me as I ended up spending many hours in this and a couple of other wonderful libraries when i began to habitually skip school not long after this field trip.

He also took us to a cafe and bought us a simple meal, but before this we trawled the wondrous range of second hand book shops that used to grace that lovely city. I didn’t have any money to buy books then, but it did not stop me from looking, falling in love with and promising myself that I would, some day, possess such riches as these.

This was all at the later stages of the first term in my first year at secondary school. It was a bitterly cold, snowy/slushy day and I was not adequately dressed to keep myself properly protected from the weather – but this did not stop me from remembering the day fondly.

This weird priest also organised trips to the annual D’Oyly Cart productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at the Kings Theatre (well, I think it was that theatre). None of his pupils could escape the preparations he would make for these trips and everyone, regardless, was subjected to the libretto, the songs, the recordings, etc so that when we attended (or not) we would be familiar with the whole thing. This was a great thing to do as we were then able to enjoy a lot of the games that the cast regularly played as they did their performances - giving off topical references and messing around with the edges of the script. The Gondoliers I vaguely remember and the Mikado I remember quite vividly.

When something is good you will enjoy it no matter how well prepared you are for it. If it is special, preparing for it will not take the mystery, or any of its unique quality away from it. Rather, it will only add to what is already special; give you more to appreciate at the time and more to ponder on when you have the chance to look back.

And, there are times when the planning and envisioning are pleasures, too.

So, when Alison and I are sitting pouring over maps and arguing about which road to take don’t look on us with pity. The path is already in our eyes and our feet are beginning to march to the tune of the beckoning road. Join in the game; offer ideas and advice; add your own harmony to the song!

Planning is an odd thing. It stops you from wishing your life away by allowing you to focus on the future .... while living in the present(?)!

......Sorry, getting a bit carried away, but I have to find some solace when Christmas is all around!

Have a happy Christmas and enjoy the coming year!

And, yes, I promise to actually write about the route in more detail in the next few blogs!

Walsingham to Santiago

2009-12-16T12:03:00.000-08:00

Alison and Ian will be walking from Walsingham in North Norfolk, England, to Santiago de Compostella in North West Spain (over 1500 miles) starting on Easter Monday, 5th April 2010. They will be walking via Vezelay in the Burgundy region of France.

This blog will be one of the ways you will be able to keep up to date with where they are, what they are doing and so on.

There are three logos displayed on this site and they, along with the title "The cross and the shell" need a little explanation:

The bird is the Housing Justice logo - Alison is the Chief Executive of Housing Justice, which is the Christian voice for the homeless and badly housed in England and Wales (see their website at http://www.housingjustice.org.uk/). We will be raising money for Housing Justice through our walk.

The cross represents Student Cross (and the other pilgrimages that have grown from Student Cross) - Student Cross is a cross carrying pilgrimage which started after WW2 and involves pilgrims walking during Holy Week, carrying a large wooden cross. Several groups walk from different parts of England to Walsingham where they then celebrate Easter together. This pilgrimage has its roots in a cross carrying march for peace which happened immediately after WW2 and ended up in Vezelay, which is one of our major stopping points en route to Santiago (see http://www.studentcross.org.uk/, http://www.northerncross.org.uk/ and http://www.scottishcross.org.uk/ for the other pilgrimage details).

The shell represents the Camino, or pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostella - the best known route is probably the section through Northern Spain from St Jean Pied de Port. We will join that after walking across part of England and through the length of France but our whole journey will be a pilgrimage very much in the traditional style - on foot, carrying all our belongings with us, etc...

So, "the cross and the shell" is our way of saying that we plan to link the three ancient pilgrimage sites of Walsingham, Vezelay and Santiago by establishing a new pilgrimage route between them.

Of course, we plan to keep you up to date on our planning through this blog and perhaps we will even get some feedback with ideas and advice from you!

We will soon have a facebook page and at the end of January we will have a website with a just giving facility and some mapping links so that, when we get going, you will be able to track our progress each day! So you will have ample opportunities to find out what is happening as we wear out the shoe leather across Europe.