Day 11

Saturday September 25, 2010

Day 11 on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela

Santo Domingo de Calzada to Belorado

Dear Blog Readers,

Go to bed at 9 p.m. and wake up this morning at 7:50 a.m. Guess the body needs the rest.  Trust the nuns, pilgrims dine on bread and jam with a cup of tea for breakfast - not a piece of ham in sight!

Leave Santo Domingo in light rain, which remains for most of the walk.  Long day today as the villages and towns with available hotel rooms are getting fewer.  Sunday tomorrow but Cannot take it off.  There is no place to stay except at an Albergue with hundreds of other pilgrims and bed bugs!.  So will walk, turing around to spend a second night in Belorado.  Trek travels through every hamlets, uphill and downhill in and out.  One place is so small, nowhere to buy a coke.  The Camino takes us into the village where the locals are sitting outside, guess on Saturdays one thing to do is pilgrim watch.  Well, I think all the pilgrims on the road this morning have had enough of the in and out of places, adding kms. to their walk.  As I leave this one town, down the hill I see pilgrims cutting across a farmer´s plough field, taking some of the kms. off their trek. Rain continues.

Walk pass more potato fields being harvested.  At the entrance of one small hamlet, it seems like Saturday is the day to prepare for winter. A man labours over an oil can cut like a bbq, with wood chips at the bottom, and a grill at the top, he is roasting large red peppers.  I stop and ask to take his photo but he would not let me, just a photo of the peppers roasting. In the background sit three other people washing the peppers.  He says they store the roasted peppers in ceramic containers with water and then use them all winter for up to five years.  They put them in meat dishes or soups etc.  Wonderful to see this happening, one man is in the family´s garden picking the peppers, the rest of the family washes while the shy man roasts.  Pass several others doing the same thing.  It is roasting peppers day!  Rain persist, with that nasty cold wind again - pilgrims are exhausted by the end of the day. Finally get to Belorado for the night.  Trek today - 23.9 kms. no steps.  Off to St. Juan de Ortego tomorrow, another long day with some steep climbs. Then back by car to this town.  Thanks for your comments and prayers!

Blessings from the Camino,

Yasmin

My personal thoughts today - As before, I continue to feel the Camino can break your spirits if you let it.  I have picked up my walking stick, only using it on occasions if I have to cross a wet or slippery track.  At times it is like the pilgrims attack the Camino, poking their walking sticks into her trail.