Month: September 2016

Made an early start (08.21 says Garmin) and it was a little nippy and I was glad to have two tops on for the first hour or so as the sun started to throb.  However, there was a thin but pretty complete layer of high cirrhus cloud.  I think that was sent by my lovely friends in Barcelona as I’d Emailed them to say that I’d gotten into Spain, which was good, if not Catalunya, but how do you turn the heat down.  Guillem said when it gets too hot for them they just go to the beach and Juan Carlos said it will get cooler in another 300km or more.  I think they were embarrassed and sorted out the high cloud. Whoever did it: more please!

The road was a bit weird at first: I thought I had anohter day of having an old N road very much to myself with a new A road alongside it and it looked that way until this:

Yes. That road really does just stop there, about 150m before the bridge and become, well, nothing.  It was actually easy to hop onto the real road on the left there and plough along the hard shoulder.  I was relieved to see a local cyclist going the other way and concluded that I was legal and the road surface was so much better than sharing the camino with the walkers (it’s a gravel track most of the way, fine on a mountain bike and Toto and I could have done it but it chops at least 15% off speed/efficiency I’d say).  Basically, I stayed on that hard should for 78.11km. Elevation:

I’m intrigued to see, to the extent one can on these plots, that I’m higher than where I started as the last stretch from that lump of green hills the road went straight through felt like it lost all I’d climbed.  Anyway, much more subjectively important, gradient:

Oh yes, that red bit!  The bit where a gentle climb out of a village suddenly got steeper, softened again, and then said in bright red and yellow: “6% for 3km”!  That was tough but I seemed to have so much better legs than yesterday.  The rest was really fine so I did 78km pretty much in one go bar a couple of brief stops to take ‘photos or to open a “gel”: experimenting with what the real cyclists do!

That brought me to Burgos.   For what it’s worth, here’s speed:

There were a couple of lovely fast, yellowish 50+kph downhills but most of the last 20km were  lovely with sun still not burning and the garmin on the handlebars saying “-1%” gradient most of the way.

Heart rate:

Yup, those 3km of 6% and sometimes more did get the heart pumping.

One really weird thing happened on that climb: the words “He who would valiant be, let him come hither” came into my head, complete with (a very poor version of) the notes, and then the whole of the first verse of “Onward pilgrim soldiers”.  Now youngsters reading this who didn’t have “school hymns” probably won’t know this but a bit of sleuthing here on the internet revealed all three verses and the origins in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”.  I had NO conscious thought of the pilgrim bit at the time and no idea where the hymn had come from.

That led into some interesting reflections on what I call “martial christianity” and how much I mistrust all martial religion.

I found a hotel (OK to good), had lunch (ditto and included some black pudding which Juan Carlos recommends as a speciality round here (this is Burgos/Castille).  Then I did some “site/blog” work and went to see the cathedral.  And that’s the architectural equivalent of doing a full 12 round professional boxing match I think.  I’ve never seen anything like it and I think it’s a total mess and much of it horrible but you can’t not admire the aspirations and the hubris.  That will have to wait for another day though as I know I need sleep if I’m to blitz the “high meseta” in the next two days and survive the hills that follow.

On the run in to Santiago now and I think I will make it though it’s by no means a given.  Have had a lot of thoughts about how to continue the life changing thinking and experiencing, the emotional processing and personality review that it’s involved on my returrn and I’m clear now that will take months, several years I think.  I think that’s a common reaction of people who do this or one of the many similar things, including psychotherapy.  In the last ten years I’ve said things like: “You think these 18 months are tough and the gist of it.  Well they are tough but they’re not the gist of  it’s the next 18 months that you do on your own, the next 18 years, that really matter.”  I guess this is very similar.

OK.  Out to sample the café/bar life of evening Burgos.  Apparently it stops about 02.00.  I’ll be long abed by then!

OH, nearly forgot.  Cumulative Garmin trace is 1,999.1km.  As it’s not recorded everything, for various reasons, I’m well over 2000km.  There’s a thought and here are the pictures:

Elevation:

Gradient:

Heart rate:

Doesn’t vary much at this scale eh?  And speed ditto:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feels odd going back to it now as today has been very different.  I was a bit down on pilgrimages by the time I limped into Santo Domingo de la Calzada yesterday and I pretty much slumped off the bike next to this sculpture.

The one in the background is Toto whose gear injury is invisible, the one in the foreground is how I felt: all in pieces.  The sculpture does deliver drinkable water from that spout pointing toward me and I was sick of my diet of drinking yoghourt and fruit juice so ditched some remaining youghourt and verily happily drank some water and told myself just to sit still in the shade (over to the left of Toto those steps were excellent for the purpose).

After 20 minutes I hauled myself up and found a hotel with an absolutely lovely man who busied himself with his 15 to 20 words of English and my similar vocabulary of Spanish making me and Toto at home.  He even helped me up the stairs with some of the baggage.  Boy do these things make a difference when you’re battered.  I had seen a public laundrette and reasoned that as I had given up mid/late afternoon (not sure exactly when it was now), I should at least go and get my washing done as I had only a day or so’s reserve, and told myself to look at the town a bit.

Laundrette even put its own washing powder in automatically: OK, Santo Domingo legacy of thinking about those on the Camino does live on.  While things washed and then dried I admired buildings.

OK, you’re right: it’s not the building there.  Just checking to see if you were really reading and looking at this.  To be fair, I suspect that the building is quite a few hundred years old, yes, it was the bikes I was admiring.  Both worked as far as I could see and I certainly saw a man from the shop to right ride the dragster one on the left.  This is the courtyard of my earlier collapse as you can see.  It was a nunnery and is now an auberge for pilgrims.  Apparently OK but a complete warren inside.  I liked the clean, almost military simplicity of the exterion. Bit reminiscent of the simplicity of the exterior at Irache.

Sculpture minus youngters and minus Toto who was resting in the cool of the hotel garage.  It was still seriously hot though it was now about 18.00.

This is the Calle Major: main street.

And this the story of the building with eaves in decay there.  Hope you can read it.  Hope they restore it carefully.

And these were the walls:

I wonder how many pilgrims’ hands have stroked those pitted surfaces, adding to the erosion and the character?  Several in a few minutes while I watched.  The Calle Major is the main pilgrim street through the town:

I like the juxtaposition of guide mark for the modern pilgrim with the drain cover.  Heraldic assertions are all the rage here.  Interestingly for me, that’s true both on lay buildings but seemingly particularly on religious ones.  These are the arms of the town’s mayor who in 1555 ordered the building of this for the order of Saint Domingo so they could continue the saint’s work of looking after pilgrims.

I can find no right way to introduce the cathedral.  This (terrible ‘photo, the ‘phone doesn’t cope with incident light at all), was what I saw first: lovely “Roman” apsidal chapel.  (I have to adjust to all the signs saying “Roman”, as I did in France: in both countries it refers broadly to what chronologically and architecturally is called “Norman” in the UK.)

Moving round the East end.   My sort of stuff.  There is just room for a car to get through between the East end and the house next door.  No letting it stand hogging spotlight and glory.  But, if you squint up, above those you see the classical gothic of flying buttresses:

And that tower is completely separate from the cathedral: added after two earlier ones had fallen down and built there to avoid the problem with the foundations that they couldn’t fix. This is the full sight pressing myself up against a wall further down the street.

Moving back onto and along Calle Major you get the South transept.

Here’s the full South face (with a bit of the tower).

And here’s Santo Domingo himself, well, modern kitsch which amused me.

And were you to put your head behind him and look back you see the West end:

I don’t know what to make of that.  It’s open to the skies but clearly wasn’t always.  It’s not a narthex and it’s way, way cruder than the nave and transepts but the documents insist, and I’m sure they know, that it’s a hundred years later than them.

Inside is famous for its resident black cockerel and white hen.

It’s invisible there but in the bottom right of that illuminated hen coop, about 25 feet up in the south transcept, the white hen was clearly visible and very much alive.  You can just make her out, occupying about a sixth of the width of the coop there.  There’s a special papal dispensation dating from the sixteenth century that  gives permission for the animals to be kept in the cathedral. I’m not making this up.  Look up “Your son is as dead as the chickens on my plate” for the full background myth.

A restrained alterpiece.  There’s a lot of this (but wait for Burgos!)

Is that Judith?  Oh dear, I was a choirboy once, I should know.  So much grimness, so richly done.

A relic:

But I prefer this:

Still grim …

…

But so much better with the simpler style and without all that gold.  To me there’s something almost perverse, tipping toward the sadistic, in some of these later depictions of the horror stories from the Bible. This again is more to my taste (the inside of the apse you saw the outside of earlier).

And I have no idea what was going on here. It looked like Lego.  It wasn’t open yet.

And here’s a building just opposite that, i.e. just opposite the cloisters attached to the North transept.

Needs some repair work but that’s a lovely wall isn’t it?  Very traditional grocers, just opposite Toto’s garage:

Looking back now, just a day on, it’s as if yesterday afternoon and evening, as I got the washing done, looked at the town, marvelled at the cathedral and speculated again on my taste in ecclesiastical architecture (and all ecclesiastical art really) I moved from a battered wimp to someone who spent much of the evening getting all my GPX/Garmin maps done and, sort of, ready for today.

Yesterday started OK but even then I didn’t seem to have any power in my legs and it became the most  disappointing and the most dispiriting day iin terms of cycling, not the sheer gruelling challenge of the climb day but tough.

This is a lake/reservoir just outside Logroño where I ate some breakfast.  Lovely, brief flash of a kingfisher and mute swans and great crested grebes and fun watching the speed with which the ants took away the crumbs from my patisserie.

A mix of local exercisers and pilgrims.  I don’t think you can see but one of the pilgrims has a parasol and already it was hot.

I think this amazing rock formation is Nájera.

Much of the day was on the “old” N-120 which has been replaced for the infernal combustion engine by the A-12 so I  had hours of well metalled road almost to myself.  I was battered and stopped to admire this stray and derelict petrol station that was clearly left above the tide mark when the A-12 opened.

Oops.  I will leave things there as I must have breakfast and go as the temperature rises so fast.  More this evening if I get internet.  Very best to anyone reading this and apologies for tantalising.  There is more aesthetic, and heartening, architecture to come!

A lot of work with the excellent (and free) GPS tracker and Greenshot programs last night got me lots of maps.  Won’t have time to put them all up in the maps section now so here are summaries and highlights.

First the summary: the trip so far.  The colours just mark separate recordings from my Garmin.  I have yet to work out how to colour the days.

Average speed doesn’t vary much at this scale:

Altitude does a bit:

You can see the long stretch within a few tens of metres of sea level down the French Atlantic coast, the climb over the (lowest bits of) the Pyreenees and the relatively sustained altitude since (hardly going to cause oxygen deprivation though!)

And here is heart rate:

Which doesn’t show anything at this scale.

Here’s the mountain bit showing the altitude change:

And the gradient:

Those blue descents were heaven but those climbs were …  well, pretty much the opposite.  Here’s the heart rate.  Remember that the speed ranged between as low as 6kph on tough parts of the climb where the gradient went into double figures but, if I remember rightly, saw a wonderful 72kph for a short time on one the straighter bits of descent.  That means that the same distance on the map may have taken 11 times longer where I was barely moving compare to where I was flying  I’m impressed that I could sustain a heart rate up in the 140-160 range for as long as it turned out I could.  Can’t really see that on this plot.

So finally, here’s that day in speed:

Fun!

OK.  Another up and down day both topographically and, though less so, psychologically.   It’s been very hot, felt far hotter than the 32°C (about 89°F?) that the Garmin tells me it was at the end and the Navarre countryside is moderately hilly.  However, I’ve treated myself to another hotel night and tonight the IT has just worked so I have ‘photos but I’m tired and want to go out and have a well earned drink and a sandwich so no philosophising again.  (“Phew” is a perfectly legitimate comment: go on, who’ll post it?)

Started in Puenta la Reina, found small supermarket and loaded up with fruit juice and drinking yoghourt.  Here’s that bridge she built again, this time from the other side, from the modern bridge I was on.

Oh, by the way, I may have underestimated that queen, forgot to add this more modern message last night:

I think that was reminding me about what in our family is called “girls go best”.

OK. Then up into the first climb of the day:

Puenta la Reina has disappeared behind and Toto and I were pretty much alone a fair way above.

After a lot of hills, including some exhilarating descents (not the 72kph I hit coming down into Roncevalles the other day though) I pushed on the chainwheel change lever to get a nasty “snap” sound and no change.  OK.  Thank  goodness it’s  leaving me with only the small chain ring, I will adopt J’s approach to cycling from here on: if it’s downhill she freewheels.

Actually, that did seem it might lose me some time so I found a bike shop in Estella (OK, Google maps was great for that) and the lovely man confirmed it was the selector built into the brake pull that had snapped and not the cable and that he couldn’t fix it.  Actually, quite a bit of that was agreed with the help of my daughter on the ‘phone from London which amused the bike shop no end. Onward to Logroño thought I and onward we went.

Actually, up we went again and the road went right and the true Camino path went left and was unmetalled and nasty and steep but it went to the famous Irache monastery with the red wine fountain for pilgrims: I had to do that.  I did but had no puff for any amicable “Buen Camino” as I went past a walker.  Here’s the fountain, red wine on the left, water on the right.

And that’s the lady I had passed rather rudey.  From Toronto and very forgiving about my faux pas but very wary of the wine which was actually fine, I didn’t risk more than two tiny swigs though. The water was also lovely.

However, I decided to rubberneck a bit and was immediately rewarded as a black redstart showed me where to park my bike.  (On the right in case you’re wondering.)

The monastery is superb, famous for its cloisters but the main church is wonderful.

And that’s just gotten us in the west door.

The crossing and … the cloisters …

Then it was back onto the old main road: great road surface much of the time and twenty minutes between cars and longer between cyclists (I think seven in the whole day).  However, it’s a savage looking landscape.

And oh boy the road does go up and down.

But Toto’s remaining 11 gears, and my legs, just, got us to Logrño.  Here’s how it welcomes you, way out  the boondocks.

Lots of the small graffiti are from walkers to other walkers they’ve met before wishing them good luck.  I suspect that the shade in these underpasses helps encourage what is clearly a local tradition.

The first very nice cycle shop man looked at the bike and made all sorts of noises and, no doubt, very articulate Spanish comments on the seriousness of the broken gear changer and the extreme low probability of ever finding such a part (damn Campagnolo) without cycling to Italy.  At least, I think that’s what he was  saying.  To be fair, he pointed me to another bike shop, OK, it was the other side of town but I had to go that way really and they were … closed so:

I’m sure I’d be thrown off the Vuelta a España for such flagrant doping but the coffee and beer did wonders and actually the cycle shop was only 50m away and opening in 15 minutes.

So here we are:

Evidence of man without bike.

Bike in the bike hospital. If you look closely, you can see that the left brake lever is black and the right is the original aluminium one.  Amazingly, the lovely man in this shop had a nearly new second hand lever and his young technician fitted it while I found a place for the night and this:

We started with women leading by example and ended on the same note. Good night. Bonne nuit. Buenas noches!  613km to Santiago according to Google maps.

I slept like a log and woke just before the alarm went off, something I seem to be doing a lot, regardless of how well I slept.  I’m sure it wouldn’t work for me to rely on that as my alarm though.

OK.  Aiming for 64k to Viana or a bit more to Logroño so should be off soon but had a few minutes as supermarket here in Puenta la Reina (bridge of the queen) doesn’t open ’til 09.00 and I know I need lots off fluids aboard for today as it has a lot of up and down and will be exposed and hot.  Amazingly, wifi and internet both working so here I am.  The bridge was built by a canny medieval queen according to something I read.  I doubt if she did it alone myself as it’s wonderful:

Hooray, all that hard work last night was worth it: ‘photos up!  Here’s another to show how hard she worked:

and I call this “self-portrait with beautiful bridge”:

OK.  More of this later. Truly beautiful town with two fascinating churches but I must go and get breakfast and get onward.  Very best to anyone reading this rather erratic and tantalising blog: I do appreciate it that people are.  Do post comments, if you do, WordPress has a not very obvious button that allows you to sign up to receive Emails when more posts go up … how could you not take up that offer?!  (Don’t worry, I’m the only one who can see your Email address.)