A Day of Remembrance
Today is Memorial Day. Yesterday during “Zoom” church we viewed a moving video tribute to friends and family of church members who lost their lives in service to out country. It was striking to read about the deaths of uncles, nephews and fathers of people I know. I don’t know of anyone in my family who was lost to war, so I guess that makes our family very fortunate.
I’ve been doing a lot of other remembering these days. I’m in the beginning stages of re-organizing my Camino group trip plans to move them to 2021. Some folks have dropped out permanently, so I am planning on a group of about 5 and trying to move all of our reservations by one year, hoping that it is safe next September. In the meantime I continue my “virtual” Camino and I’m coming up on a milestone (www.walking4fun.com).
I am virtually on my way into Burgos, Spain, which marks the 1/3 point of the Camino Francés. Getting to Burgos was a big deal. I remember the day quite clearly. We had stayed in the town of Agés in a private hostel over a bar, about 5km past the guide book’s suggested stopping point. The Wi-Fi was so bad at this hostel that I didn’t manage to get an internet connection until the middle of the night. I remember waking up and realizing I had Wi-Fi, getting a blog post out and messaging with the kids.
As we climbed a boulder-strewn landscape on the way out the next morning, we made a new friend in an Italian woman named Siggi, who we learned was a nursing student in Austria. Siggi would become a regular companion of ours for the rest of the Camino. (For geologist friends out there she lives in the Dolomites and had her favorite peak tattooed on her arm.)
The way into Burgos had a number of trail options. Near the airport Rich and I turned left toward the “scenic” route and Siggi went right. By luck we managed to stumble upon the river-side way into town and we were very glad we did after hearing the grumbles of those who had walked in through the suburbs.
We got beds at the modernized hostel “La Casa del Cubo”, which really did have cubes for our bunks. It was nicely situated close to the Cathedral of Santa Maria. We explored the Cathedral, the first major church of our trip. The Gothic cathedral has been embellished with so many Renaissance and Baroque elements that it did not really appeal to me as much as the cathedral in Léon would later.
We had toured the Cathedral and been treated to a drink by our friend José Luis, a retired professor who we had met at dinner the first night in Roncesvalles. Burgos was his home town and this was supposed to be the end of the road for him, but to our delight he decided to continue all the way to Santiago!
Decision time arrived! We had made a great error in planning our trip, in that we had not scheduled any “rest days”. It hadn’t occurred to me that we would want/need such a thing. But we had decided that we would take a rest day either in Burgos or Léon and make up the time across the meseta. We had read and been encouraged by others that you could do extra long stages across the middle third of the Camino, as it is relatively flat. The day turned rainy and we decided that we would move on from Burgos without the rest day. On to the meseta! The rest day would wait until we’d earned it.