We started with a bus ride that saved us 5 miles on hard pavement, following the good advice of River's healer from 2012. Our plan was to catch the first bus st 6:15am. We allowed a full half hour to make our way in the dark, only to find that we were locked into our very Catholic alburgue (in a Benedictine monastery) and that the door officially opened at 6:30. There we stood in the dark with 45 minutes to wait. Luckily the priest showed up at 6am and after a moment's hesitation unlocked the door for us. Amazing flexibility actually for an organization that has survived by rigid adherence to hierarchy and tradition. We sped to the bus stop and caught our bus.
Then began a lovely walk through the countryside. Photo 2 shows the predawn crescent moon.
Photo 2 shows one of many gloriously bright yellow fields of mustard.
Photo 3 shows a place we found a relatively discrete pee among the otherwise level fields.
And photo 4 shows frogs floating in a ditch. They were making an incredible racket and when she saw th floating there River couldn't thinking of her recent journey through Dante's Inferno where in one of the circles (maybe the fourth, the materialists) where the souls float in hot pitch like frogs and the demons harass them.
Chris had her heart set on making it all the way to Villares de Orbigo, her favorite alburgue from our 2012 walk. It was a stretch but we did make it. To her disappointment the beautiful young couple that had run the alburgue back then had sold it to a middle-aged Belgian woman. Transience, as Freud tells us, is an inescapable part of human life. As it turned out however the alburgue was still very special. We enjoyed the communal evening meal and her excellent home cooking quite different from the usual meals. Leek soup and quiche and salad for dinner and apfelkuchen for dessert (though she made a special gluten free baked apple on a traditional Belgian way that her grandmother had used, using coffee and brown sugar -- it was superb.)
So we decided to stay for breakfast which meant fresh homemade whole milk yogurt which River loved, homemade jam, real butter, good toast and coffee -- and that we didn't leave the alburgue that day until the scandalously late hour of 7:30.
Oh the smile you gave at the thought of Chris and River making a poor unsuspecting priest bend the rules of his Catholic masters. "Open the gates, young man. We must be on our way!"
ReplyDeleteOh the smile you gave at the thought of Chris and River making a poor unsuspecting priest bend the rules of his Catholic masters. "Open the gates, young man. We must be on our way!"
ReplyDelete