Seventy by Seventy - 10

Day 12 - Monday 23rd April   Santo Domingo to Belorado

The first serious blisters have appeared.    My right knee was clicking and twisting and I was persuaded to borrow a knee brace, but I think this changed my gait and hence my boots rubbed in differently and so I have developed a hot spot on my left inner ankle.

At breakfast in the parador I find that after ten days or more of coffee and tortilla for breakfast and the change in diet, my stomach and my expectations are so shrunken  that I cannot begin to do justice to the parador’s buffet breakfast, though their chocolate and churros are exquisite and so too is their scrambled eggs.

The concierge has rung ahead to book rooms in Belorado for me – and I only just catch his whispered warning ‘Son pelegrinos’

We eventually start late, at 1100, and what follows is the worse day ever on the Camino.   I had thought those pictures of pilgrims bent double were struggling with the weight of their sin and maybe of their packs, but am taught the sharp lesson that they are leaning into the wind which blows hard from the West.   For long stretches – too long – the path follows the N120 along which huge lorries swoop.   The wind is in our faces and blowing Force 4-5, chilling and drying us, and the young wheat in the field alongside us is bent double.   An old peasant tells us the wind is most unusual and damaging.  

En route we meet Tara who seems to have teamed up with Linus the Swede and three or four German boys, who strut round her like mallards round a duck in the park.

She tells me that James is still on the road, but Catlin has been forced to return to the USA suffering from some kind of memory loss.   Roisin is also close by, but has stopped for sightseeing in Santo Domingo.   They are staying in Grañón, where there is a church tower with mattresses on the floor, because they have heard it is ‘cool’.

El Chocalatero, well reported in the guidebook, turns out to be a truckers’ halt, and a rather poor one too, though there is at least decent chocolate.   One wonders what experience the writer had which made him so enthusiastic.

The church at Viloria de la Rioja, the birthplace of Santo Domingo, is closed, as seemingly is the rest of the village.   Even though Liz picks us up in Viloria de la Rioja, this at only 15 kms has to be the hardest day of the Camino so far.   At one stage poor Penny who has her head bent against the wind cannot hear to noise of an approaching tractor, on our track, above the noise of the busy main road.  My hat is whisked off by the wind and flied 100 yards before catching on a fence.

Into Belorado and the Hotel Jaboceo which despite its modest 2* and proximity to the road, proves to be a more than decent place, and shows that even without a parador one can enjoy a little luxury and privacy, and, compared to the great unwashed mass of the pilgrimage, a hot bath.

The blister has grown.   Compeed is brilliant, easy to apply and flush-fitting:   the own-brand sold by a large household-name chemist chain are more difficult to use.   But neither has made allowance for the fact that my arms are not long enough to reach my feet or rather that I can no longer bend my legs to get my feet close enough, and need reading glasses to tear the different layers of the plasters apart.   I appreciate why ladies should need clear or skin-coloured plasters so that they don’t show in their ridiculous footwear, but I need coloured ones to see where they are!

I insist that the girls should experience the joys of a pilgrim menu.   After all, I have had some excellent pilgrim meals.   The meal in Roncesvalles included fresh trout, elsewhere there has been home-made soups, and plenty of chance to top up on carbohydrates with patatatas fritas.   And at Jakue there was a four course buffet, and always good wine and fresh bread.

The pilgrim meal at the recommend Etoile is a disaster.   The service poor, we sit in a draft, the red wine comes chilled, the bread is burned, the merluza looks like a fish finger which has been run over on the N120.   .

  All told, a bad end to a bad day.