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COUNTRY ROADS
I slept well in Hospital de Orbigo, and set out into a frosty cold morning just after 7 am ready for the day's walk. Today's route led out of town onto a dirt road that passed through a couple of very cute small villages before taking us into open countryside and brush. It also started to get rockier, which made us much more careful about picking our path; we've been spoiled by a few days of flat or asphalt roads, but the rocks now in our way got our ankles flexing again. You definitely felt it.
At one point we entered what looked like a sleepy town, except that there was pop music blasting at full volume even though it was 8 am -- Snow's "Informer", no less, which was an amusing bit of Canadian content that just added to the inexplicability. As we walked through and approached the centre of town, we saw one of those stage and speaker setups you see at street festivals, some party debris strewn about, and about two dozen teenagers milling about dancing and laughing and yelling "HELLO!" as we passed. It was very much a WTH moment, but sort of funny too, and the kids looked like they were having a great time in these wee hours of their after-party. I shook my head and smiled as I chugged on, even though the stupid Snow song stayed in my head as I continued on.
The road we were walking was really just a country path through woods and fields, and it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere for a long time (actually more like 8-10K). There was a cantina listed on the map that promised to turn up sometime, that I thought would make a good coffee and bathroom stop before pushing on to Astorga. But when I came up over the edge of a hill, what I saw on top was not a cafe. It was actually much better.
SAINT DAVID IN PARADISE
The only thing in the bare field was a rundown and pretty much abandoned brick building with a cafe cart in front. There were also some makeshift benches made out of old car seats, under a lean-to roof, and an awful lot of pilgrims milling about.
As I drew closer, a guy with a marquee idol face burnished by sun and wind, wearing a long sleeved t and a sarong, saw me coming, and shouted warmly, "Hello! Welcome! I am David! Come and eat and drink, and be comfortable...this is your house! Welcome to paradise!"
The colourfully decorated cart he waved me to was covered in juice bottles, fruit, bread and spreads, a coffee pot and boxes of pretty much every possible kind of tea you could think of. "Self service, help yourself!" David urged in a gentle but encouraging voice, and, a little amazed, I stepped up and made myself a peanut butter and jam sandwich, and joined some of the others sitting under the shack roof. By eavesdropping, I gleaned that David is a former pilgrim, who for the past three and a half years has lived on this empty hilltop offering a little food,drink, company and comfort to pilgrims passing by. There is no charge for whatever you take, although you can leave donations in a little box if you wish, and you don't go without a stamp of a heart labelled "CASA DEL DIOS" in your pilgrim passport, and a hug. David just runs around replenishing the cart supplies and taking empty glasses to go wash, in between heartfelt conversations with every individual who comes by.
It's really kind of remarkable.
I hung out there for about 20 minutes just marveling at the friendly vibe and enjoying a glass of mandarin juice and banana. I also got to talking with an American woman from Tennessee named Colleen who was able to explain the scene in the last town for me, as she had stayed there overnight. Apparently, almost no one lives in that town anymore...but yesterday was the feast day of their patron saint. So on this occasion, everyone who was born there or has family there or whatever comes back to celebrate, and it's a whole day and night of festival madness. They toss fennel in the streets, and then rose petals, and they ring the church bells so hard they do a full 360-degree spin, and they baptize all the kids and have a big collective meal and then at 11:30 pm the orchestra comes out and the street party begins and goes all night. What we walked through the morning with the teenagers was clearly the dregs of all that....but wow. How cool would that have been?! Colleen showed me some of her video for the whole afternoon of festivities and it looked fantastic; such a lucky break to come upon that. I was amazed we hadn't heard the celebrations all the way over in Orbigo!
Eventually it was time to push on, but before I left I dropped a 5-Euro note in David's donation box. Walking away, I thought about how normally I might pay 2-3 Euro for a cafe breakfast of coffee and toast, and here I'd paid double for some juice and a bit of bread...but I was much more willing to do so, because the value of the experience was so much more than the food. I'd never voluntarily overpay in a restaurant -- who would? -- but here I was happy to give a little extra so that David could keep welcoming future pilgrims as warmly as he had me, and continue giving passersby this lovely surprise gift on the road. It's interesting how value can be altered by the spirit in which a transaction occurs.
THE LONG AND WINDING - AND WINDING - AND WINDING! - ROAD....
The hilltop walk past David's continued to a pretty lookout over a valley, and Astorga with its prominent cathedral steeples was now in sight. I was glad, because the previous day's walk was catching up to me and I really felt like I needed a bit more rest, so I was keen to get there. The road ahead seemed to point directly into the city...but oh, Camino, you are a vixen, aren't you? As usual, just as you started to feel like you were getting close, a marker would steer you another way and make you feel like you were just as far as ever. It really was a cruel joke how the oath kept making inexplicable turns while the town was right in front of us. And then the punchline: right on the edge of the city we got to the world's most ridiculous bridge, and all we could do was throw up our hands and laugh in helpless frustration.
This bit of urban infrastructure truly is a piece of work. In and of itself, it's actually quite elegant: a well built and visually pleasing modern construction of green metal and asphalt. However, it is completely overbuilt for its purpose: it features three or four ramps that switch back and forth to a bridge that crosses ONE SINGLE RAILWAY TRACK, and then continues on the other side with more ramps that ease you back to the ground. We guessed it added a half-kilometre to the Camino, to traverse something that could be crossed IN FIVE STEPS. It's preposterously unnecessary.
Standing there and laughing in disbelief, I thought of one person who I knew would truly appreciate this engineering silliness in the same spirit as those of us about to cross it: my brother-in-law John. I could just hear his big hearty laugh in my head saying, "What IS this?", and knew he'd well appreciate what a comic waste of design and effort this was. That made it the perfect place to park his rock, and that is exactly what I did -- left it there as a tiny stab of good sense amid an otherwise mad project that was too bizarre not to laugh at. We all went up, over and down wondering who had thought it would be great to add all the extra walking to our journey this way.
Finally we were climbing the hill into the ancient Roman city of Astorga, a neat and well-tended burg that floats above the plain on a steep ridge. It was a longtime convergence point for commercial trade routes, and is steeped in history; not only the Romans but the obscure Maragato culture centered here, and there is a church named for St. Francis of Assisi because he stopped here while doing the Camino pilgrimage in the 13th century. I would just be among the very latest of many to come hang out here for a while.
The search for my albergue led me from one side of town to the other, near the cathedral I'd been staring at from a distance for about two hours, and also near the lovely Bishop's Palace designed by Gaudi. It is impossible not to appreciate Gaudi's vision and what he brought to architectural design, especially after literally weeks of looking at conventional square buildings and the usual Gothic or Roman-style churches all over the place. Unlike his famously wild cathedral in Barcelona, this building is an elegant variation on familiar themes; Gaudi puts graceful curves where there are so often sharp angles, and softens all the familiar structures so that the overall effect is more harmonious to the eye. It's almost soothing to look at, and even as dead keen as I was to just get to my damn albergue already, I paused there to take it in. Truly lovely.
The place I stayed was a very atmospheric converted historical building with a fireplace, courtyard and common lounge space called the San Javier, but you could call it a haunted house because the old wooden floors creaked so much with every step anyone took everywhere in the building. I briefly wondered whether anyone above might crash through the weak-sounding timbers before I decided I was too exhausted to care, and crashed hard on a bunk for a few minutes to rest my swollen feet. Eventually I limped to the showers for my daily dose of healing water. The showers were on timers so you had to keep hitting the button every 60 seconds to keep the flow going, but at least the water was warm, so that helped.
As I was coming out, I saw a tall slim short haired blonde who'd just arrived and was taking her boots off, and looked familiar. "Alison?" I asked, not completely sure this was the girl I'd bee speaking to through the forest of bunk bed posts in Hospital de Orbigo last night. She looked up and recognized me. How funny to meet again so soon!
She explained that she wanted to scurry over to the cathedral because on her way in she'd seen the museum was only open for another hour, and this being Sunday, it would not reopen after siesta. I was dead tired, but didn't want to miss a chance to see something of the town, so I said I'd come with. Together we dashed up the street to check it out.
In retrospect, we both kind of regretted it. The museum we later realized we SHOULD have gone to see was the one in the Gaudi building, because that one was about the various Caminos and would have offered some really interesting background and contexts you wouldn't see elsewhere. But we didn't have time to check our guides and learn that. So instead, what we saw was yet another vast, dank, largely empty stone church, with little to really distinguish it in my opinion (others might disagree). Yawn.
Our rather pricey 5 Euro tickets (hello, pilgrim discount?) also gave us access to the church museum, so we hoped this might redeem things. It was actually worse. This was a series of chambers attached to the church that featured super creepy religious statues and paintings, while Gregorian chant and organ music was piped in as background atmosphere. There were hideous paintings of demons out of Hellraiser torturing martyred saints, and statues of holy figures painted in that disturbingly humanistic style popular in the early medieval church days before they started stylizing, with unnervingly large oval heads and vacant stares atop disproportionately small bodies. Upstairs in what appeared to be former residential rooms from the Middle Ages was a huge gallery of cases enclosing dozens of religious vestments. The problem is, these otherwise lovely works of embroidery are always spread out so it looks like there was a body in them that decayed away, which is morbid and eerie, and on top of that and the music there was also a strong chemical smell of formaldehyde or some other preservative filling the chilly air. It was a complete sensory overload of religious creepiness, and not in a fun horror-movie kind of way either, and I frankly couldn't wait to get out of there. I don't regret going because how else would we know -- it might have proved to be super cool like Burgos was -- but it did make me decide I'm churched out now and don't care to see another cathedral till Santiago. It's just enough already.
We returned to our albergue, and after sending down some laundry to be cleaned so I didn't have to do it, I had to go down for a nap. And I went down hard, for two much needed hours. Clearly I still hadn't fully recovered from the last few days of hard walking. By the time I awoke, I had a new bunkmate -- an American named Ann who had just started the Camino in Leon a few days ago. We chatted a little and then, since siesta was over, I decided to go check out the town for a bit.
Being Sunday, and having turned rainy, it was a pretty quiet afternoon in the town I'd seen bustling at midday. I mostly ambled around, enjoying the close knit feeling and looking in on whatever stores were open, wrote some postcards, and took myself to dinner in a cafe on the plaza mayor. Very sorry I missed the Museo del Chocolate that was long closed for the day -- it seems Astorga is a centre for the fine fare. But I did walk around enough to get a sense of the city and knew I liked it.
GOOD VIBRATIONS
Back at the albergue, I met Alison hanging out in the lounge space by the fireplace, and since we both had to charge our phones, we sat and chatted. Ann soon joined the conversation, as did another American named John, a newly graduated student who had also just started in Leon. He is here doing the Camino with his mom so they could, as she jokingly put it, "BOTH figure out what to do with our lives".
Being quite new to Camino aches and pains, John got curious about the electronic foot and calf massage machine standing nearby. This is a thing you put your legs in and it uses different speeds and vibrations to rub your sore muscles and joints. I'd only ever seen these in the As Seen On TV store in Toronto, but loved the effects so much I desperately craved one for home...and back in Santo Domingo a few weeks ago, I'd seen one in an albergue and had happily fed it a 2 Euro coin (Eurotoonie?) to assuage my aches. I'd assumed, because no one had been using it, that this machine here was broken. But John figured out it was just not plugged in...and then the games began! We all took turns letting the magic fingers pummel away our pain, shrieking in amusement at the sensations and thoroughly delighting in how well it squeezed out even the most persistent soreness in the joints. (This is what passes for a party night in an albergue.) I seriously want one of these machines for everyday life; I'm convinced if we all had one the world would be a happier place. If you haven't tried it, get thee to the TV Showcase store nearest you forthwith, and you'll see what I mean.
It was fun to hang out and chat with new people, and I went to bed finally feeling properly restored. My only regret was that I could have done so much more in Astorga if only it hadn't been a Sunday; this is definitely one place I'd like to return to so I could see several things properly and get a little more of the city experience. But otherwise, it was a good day, and full of really interesting moments. I've added a few photos of the highlights, in hopes that they evoke some of the best parts more than mere words.
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