We now have five full days on the Camino since our “reboot.” Our first few days were in the Rioja region, famous for good and reasonably priced wine. We suggest you look for it on the shelves of your favorite wine vendor. The mornings were cool enough to require gloves and extra layers of merino wool. The afternoons were hot, but tolerable. Much of the trail went through vineyards and olive groves on gravel roads.
The last few days have been in a region where wheat is interspersed with fields of sunflowers drying on the stalk is the norm. Rolling hills and dodging traffic when crossing highways is easy compared to crossing the Pyrenees in our first days.
Our evenings are spent in small towns where we associate with other pilgrims and watch Spanish life unfold in front of us. We enjoy watching children play with each other in town squares. And watching mothers checking in guests at a while affectionately interacting with their kids; common here, but would be unusual back home. And the history here runs back millennia.
One of the more interesting towns we stayed out was Santo Domingo de la Calzada, named for a local who washed out of “monkhood” but built a local infrastructure to support pilgrims and was credited with several miracles—including one related to saving a wrongly accused German pilgrim and the miraculous resurrection of chickens on a dinner plate. The legacy of the saint has led to the only Catholic Church to have animals permanently in residence. Check out this article for the details. I will say that we did observe—and hear—the rooster in residence, but his hen was shy.
We have two more days on the Camino this stint until we reach the metropolis of Burgos. Then we’ll spend a few days there and a few more in Madrid before returning home. We plan to return to Burgos in the next few years to finish this Camino.
Thanks to all for your prayers and support. This wasn’t the Camino we planned but has been a good adventure.
Further reading: Check out The Camino Compendium: A Historical and Cultural Exploration of the Camino de Santiago by Dave Whitson. It contains interesting stories about different stages of the Camino Frances as well as an in-depth analysis of Santo Domingo and “the chicken church.”