Welcome to Davids-Camino

Today the scenery realy changed and I was climbing a mountain about 2000ft vertical great views.

I beat the rain today but tomorrow will be challenging, 38 degrees and raining. Also no blankets at this Aubergues. My plan is to wear everything I have with me to bed and in the morning.

This place is really different, no town, just a lawn and a trout pond, trout for dinner,

I just figured how to get some pictures. I needed to clean out the media library and change the resolution.

Here is the Gaudi Palace

Here is a good stork picture

Astorga on the distance, do you know how far a mile is until you can see something a mile away and then walk to it.

I still can’t upload pictures, I am not sure what is wrong it could be a wordpress problem. Yesterday I was wipe out going into Molenesca, but today felt good, However when I got to 20K I began to drag and in addition when it began to rain I looked for the nearest Aubergue, this is one I like the least, hard to describe, very functional and a long way outside from my bed to the bathroom, also outside of town so not near any source of food. I would move, but it is too much work.

I am afraid there will be no more pictures. Intru to upload them and they won’t possibly a problem with wordpress or the internet here. Today was hard, the last part was a drop of 3000 ft and hot. I thought I might go further, possibly by cab but I didnt want to go anywhere. At the top was the Iron Cross, you are supposed to bring a stone from home and leave it there in appreciation of someone in your life who helped you reach this point. An elderly women(actually younger than me)!Had made a long streamer with the names of 150 people who has helped her overcome her respiratory problems. I used the moment to think about who I appreciate.

There is alot of christian spirituality on this trip but it seems that a lot of christianity is about denying death, but replacing it with a rather scary alternative, I talked to two priests who were on the camino one quite felt these were medieval notions not to be taken two seriously, I did get a chance to ask the other because he was very curious about Unitarianism and kept me busy expaining it.

I did some computations and at this rate I will not be finished in time. I decided to go faster and make this my last sight seeing day until Santiago. if I can do 20k a day I wont have to change my flight home. Astorga has a population of 12,000, less than Sharon’s and a cathedral and museum with treasures that would make any museum of art envious. But this is true of much of the camino and to a certain extent is its point, send people on a journey that will show them treasures beyond measure. Today I walked only 13k but I was alone the whole day.

The also have a building by Goudi, much more recent but has a fairytale quality, it was designed as the Bishops Palace.

It would not upload. I will tru somewhere else,

Moving more slowly then the guidebook, stopped 12K before astorga, and tomorrow I will stay there, so I can enjoy the city. Others I met solved the same problem by taking a bus from here.

I am posting less pictures, for one the take a long time to upload, secondly they don’t capture the feeling of a landscape, and thirdly the medieval towns are beginning to resemble each other. I am slowly getting closer and closer to the mountains.

How far to walk each day is always an issue. You want to hit the big towns with tourist interest. But sometimes they don’t line up with a comfortable walking distance which for me is at most 25k. I want to see Astorga but they are 49k apart and there isn’t a town right in the middle. I went 18k today but I cant do 31k tommorow. I have two choices, take an extra day to walk to Astorga, ie two 15 K days, or walk tomorrow for 20-25k and then take a cab into astorga. What do you think. ?

Today was pretty boring walking, except I met a Jewish man, originally from Istanbul and I learned what the Kabala teaches about the afterlife, which paradoxically gives meaning to life. No yeah yeah when I get back to Seattle I will so take a break

I used an app “my phone tour” to lead me arround th city, but of course, it is the unexpected that is interesting. Just my luck it was market day.

I had asked at the tourist office for a cultural event. I ended up at a a show put on by the municipal music school. I was probably the only one in the audience who didnt know someone on stage. There was a surprising number of adults performing I guess there are a lot of late starting musicians like me. The theme was the Camino, cleary the Camino is important to the cities along the route, It

is hard to say but pilgrims make up a good proportion of the tourists in the town.

Despite the fact that I only had 10miles to walk the walk into Leon seemed interminabable I was mostly alone walking along highways waiting to get the first site of the Leon cathedral which would tell me the end was in sight.

I also had a sad task. The last time the phone fell out of my pocket the screen cracked(again) so I needed to either get it fixed of find a screen cover to hold it together untill I got home. I dis the latter but it probably took several hours to find the store.

Leon is a rest stop, probably the last so I am in a hotel, have my own room, and will be a tourist tommorow.

The cathedral is amazing and in it is the finest Organ in Europe and lucky me, tonight there was a free organ concert.

Being a pilgrim in a city is a strange experience almost like living in a small town, I am constantly running into people who I met on the trail weeks before. It is like we are part of a community. We remember what ailed them and what their story was.

A few pictures of the cathedral and friends in the trail.

Groups of people form and then disolve, effort mustbe made to stay in a group. Also yo meet less new people. Everone walks at a different pace,

Yesterday I aranged to have dinner with Paul and Linda a couple from Vancouver, BC and Amnon a man from Ashville, I got int talking with a Mandy from Barbados, and didn’t make the dinner time. Amnon was very nice to come me. We had an animated conversation mostly about skiing helped by tw bottles of wine. Afterwards, Aminon quietly told me that he felt that I wasn’t listening to him and was cutting him off. Yes this was true, I need to have two ears open, one to the subject matter and the other to the group dynamic. Perhaps there is anouther solution, but the people I encounter deserve better.