Skip to main content

Villadangos

Last night we went to mass in Leon Cathedral. It is a massive gothic building with flying buttresses and towers and statuary and carved doors and the whole nine yards. But there is something which separates it from everyother cathedral I hav ever seen, namely,  the glass. In our diocese one of our great treasures is St. Barnabas Church, Warrington. St. Barnabas would be a fairly ordinary small wooden country church except that early in the 20th Century, for reasons I won't bore you with here, someone installed a stained glass window intended for another, much larger church. The result is a back wall that is almost entirely glass, and the effect is breathtaking. Those familiar with St. Barnabas might like to imagine what that effect would be like if you applied it to every wall of a very large gothic cathedral. If you can get your head around that, you can get your head around what Leon Cathedral is like. We sat through the mass in a side chapel, and no, I didn't join the queue to take the sacrament, and walked out through the nave with appetites whetted for a day of exploring on the morrow, when we intended to take a rest day.



At about 6 am Clemency and I woke in separate parts of the Alberge. This one is run by Benedictines and men and women have separate quarters. Independently we watched people packing up all around us, doing their blister routines, stretching, putting on hats and boots, wishing each other buen camino! and striding off into the breaking dawn. Both of us knew that that was how we would like to be spending our day, rather than wandering around art galleries and sitting at dinky little tables sipping vino tinto.

We are not tourists. We aren't here for the sightseeing and the shopping. We are here to walk the path of miracles. So when we met for the day, both of us surprised the other by being fully packed up with our walking shoes on.

We got away at 9 am. Many had described this day as being "the ugly day", and as we moved steadily Westward we could see why. From the elegant boulevards of Leon, with their intelligent, quirky statuary we moved across the bridge to the other Leon, the one that makes the classy one work. We passed through raw, working class neighbourhoods and grim little industrial enclaves.


For most of the way the camino ran beside a busy two lane highway full of vans and eighteen wheeler trucks. There was graffiti and rubbish and yards piled with incomprehensible equipment. The sky was overcast, but it was warm all the way, mid 20s probably, with a headwind. We stopped in a small shop and bought mixed fruit and nuts, and we drained our water pouches before the day was through.

There is, apparently, a more scenic route, but we were in a rush to leave, didn't look at our guidebook, and missed it. So here we are, where we washed up at about 12.30 after about 23 km of walking. The municipal alberge is on the outskirts of Villadangos and we were glad to see it. It is housed in an old school, is clean, light and spacious with all the facilities we might want. 

There is hardly anybody here. The hospitalera had left a note saying she would be back at 1.30, but to choose a bed and make ourselves at home, which we did. after showering and laundry we walked the hundred metres into the local village and bought the makings for lunch. Fine crusty Spanish bread, tomatoes, fruit. All is well with the world. And tomorrow is Astorga! Goodbye Meseta, and hello winding paths, greenery, quaint villages, rolling hillsides and photo ops on every corner.

ps. I am writing this on a computer that is so old it has a disk drive. A  5.25 inch one. And  it has a Spanish keyboard. The version of Internet Explorere I am using won't allow such niceties as spell checking, so if I've made a few mistakes, tough. I did it on purpose to see if you would spot them. I'm sleeping in a school, after all.
Labels:

Comments

Elaine Dent said…
I loved the part where you both met each other in the morning ready to walk instead of the previous plan.
22 September 2012 at 11:56
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Walk 800 km

John is just walking the 80 metres back to his bike here, but you get the general drift.  The question I get asked more than any other at the end of the Hikoi is "how are your feet?" It's nice that people care, but my feet have never been an issue on long walks. Good shoes and socks prevent blisters and cushion the effects of long distances on hard surfaces, but I have had other issues. When walking the Camino Santiago knees, Achilles tendons and shin splints have all at one time or another given me trouble. This time round, these have all been fine and I finished feeling as though I could just keep on going indefinitely; to Cape Reinga if needs be. Over the last couple of years I have learned 6 things that have made all the difference. Namely: 1. Footwear. On the Camino I wore walking shoes - Salomon in 2009 and Asics in 2012. A year ago I changed to full walking boots - Salomon Cosmic 2 - and the difference was instant and major. When walking more than 15 minutes...
1 comment
Read more

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder.  One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...
47 comments
Read more

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

It happens sometimes. I have a question or am pondering some conundrum or other and the right book arrives at pretty much the right time. In a session with my supervisor a few months back Paul mentioned an article by Rene Girard, whom I had never heard of. I read the article and over the past month have read two of his books, The Scapegoat and this one. I have another couple sitting on my shelf and they have elbowed all others in my to be read pile out of the way and sit firmly on the top. Girard has pulled a number of threads together for me: he has enabled me to rethink the atonement in a way which is consistent with an evolving Universe: he presents a view of scripture which is again consistent with what I know of science but is also faithful to the Bible as the Word of God; he has given me, for the first time in my life a theology (if that is the right word) of Satan which makes sense to me. Most importantly for me, he is consistent with my own lived experience of God's s...
2 comments
Read more

2 More Years

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...
25 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more