Day 11 - Friday, 2nd May, 2014 - 22.4 km
[The straight road from Azofra]
While we had been at Azofra we had noticed that the place had filled up at an alarming rate and several people had been forced to carry on ahead to get to us, because the hostels behind us had been filled. It was a Spanish holiday weekend and there was a sheer volume of people on the Camino. Because of the huge number of walkers, we were needing to become quite tactical to avoid night stops that were already booked out.
The rather hapless German girl, who we originally knick named 'Calamity Jane', and met on our first night on the Camino, we now knew as Mary. In fact we called her 'There's something about Mary' after the film title. It always amused us, but whenever we met her during the day she would be stopping at villages short of our destination, however on other days, when we had got up especially early to get somewhere, she was always already ensconced at our destination and very happy at the Albergue. We started having a theory that there was a special Chinook helicopter service that we did not know about, that she was using. I joked to Eila that I had seen a couple of coloured ping-pong bats hanging off her rucksack along with a helicopter flying helmet! This of course was not true!
[Lynn a Dutch lady waiting for her husband Franz to catch up]
[Breakfast at the Golf Club, Ciruena]
Our journey started taking a circuitous route to Ciruena a brand new village built around a Golf Course. It seemed to be a unfortunate village where there had been little take up on the sale of the new properties and that probably less that three percent had actually been sold. The rest were left to slowly succumb to urban decay, giving the whole village the feeling of a ghost town. We actually stopped off at the golf club for breakfast, which was excellent and then continued on to Santo Domingo de Calzada.
[Abandoned brand new properties in Ciruena]
[Strait Camino section outside Ciruena]
[Saying goodbye to Team Sweden, whose mini Camino ended in Santo Domingo]
[Michael taking a break, Santo Domingo]
Santo Dominigo has an impressive church that includes a nesting hen and cockerel, which are housed in their own hen house just off the nave. There is a complex story about a son of two pilgrims being hung for a minor crime, which I am not even sure he was guilty of in the first place. His parents returning to where he was hung found him still alive and pleaded his case with the local mayor/ magistrate, who while eating his chicken meal (not such an unusual thing to be doing on the Camino!) replied "he is no more alive that the chicken on my plate", whereupon the chicken got up off his plate and started to walk around. The chicken has for ever been honoured by the towns people and is a wonderful example of Spanish Catholic history and folkelore. So this is how we came to be spending three Euros each on a ticket to see a chicken in a church!
[Spending 3 Euros to see a chicken in a church (hen house is the lit up part]
[No room at the inn, the Granon Church Hostel]
We finally arrived at Granon during the afternoon only to find that the church hostel was already full and that they had opened an extra room on the ground floor as a sort of overspill. We entered this third chaotic room glad of a gym mat to rest for the night, but as more and more people entered the room the situation was becoming more and more like some sort of refugee crisis. Johana the German girl we had been walking with and who had considerable experience in the Lebanon came to the fore and tried to organise how everyone could fit in, but she was soon super-manded by someone else. Eila went off with Michael to suss out any other alternative accommodation and soon came back to say that she had found a sort of hippy commune type hostel just opposite. We were the first to move there from the refugee city and soon we were followed by others, who had spotted that we were onto something. The hostel we moved to was being renovated and it did seem to have a bit of a 'flower power' theme, but it did have beds and were we given an excellent communal meal, followed by the French pilgrims having a sing song, which was enjoyed by all.
Buen Camino.
[Eila relaxing at an alternate and alternative hostel]
