Day 12: Still walking! Villafranca! Snails! Storms! Paella!

A macaroon while sketching the local church in Villafranca, right next to the albergue.  (The panaderia bakery was right next to the supermarket, so I figured if I balanced out the macaroons with fruit it was almost healthy.) 

Day 12.  How has it only been 12 days? This feels like a forever's worth of walking, and there's still 530 km of the 800 left to go...

Now, until yesterday, I had started to think maybe the good weather was just following me around. Last week we did have that little squall before Villamayor, when I got the last bed in town; I thought that was a rainstorm, and felt quite the explorer for pressing on and walking through it.  It lasted about half an hour. 

No.  Yesterday was a rainstorm. 

We woke to grim cloudy skies and gusting wind, leaving the tiny town of Cirueña and its rather strange artistic-reclusive hostel owner.  The sky looked vast and ominous, made more ominous by the straight road showing just how far we had to go through rolling farm fields.  Just when I was thinking this land was all cultivated and domesticated and settled, a WILD BOAR tore across the road, racing away across the hay fields and heading for the forested hilltops.

That woke me up.  There were a few drizzles, which gave way to patchy sun and more drizzles, and I was thinking this was rather annoying weather to be outdoors in- first overheating in a raincoat in the sun, then getting soaked all over again when you take it off - until I noticed all the old ladies coming out in droves with their umbrellas, busily hunting in road ditches and looking for something.  This took my mind off overheating.  Eventually I found a friendly pack of them pointing and searching together, calling out "Aqui aqui, hay dos, que gordos," and I realized they were hunting for snails and seeing who could find the fattest.  These ladies must have been at least 70; they were having a grand time.  When I asked, they said snails are delicious, and this was perfect snail weather: rain mixed with sun.  Snail is "caracola", I learned, and apparently these are cleaned and boiled and prepared with chorizo and tomatoes and ham and bread crumbs.

Anyway, the weather wasn't too awful yet, and I was thinking maybe drizzles were okay if it meant I got to talk to cheerful Spanish ladies about snails.  All the 10 km through Santo Domingo and Grañon, the gray skies got lower and lower.  Then - in one great heavenly gust - I stepped out of a lovely small church and straight into a horizontal gust of rain.  I happened to bump into a lady from Denmark that had shared my albergue the night before, and together we stumbled sideways into a bakery for sustenance, then stumbled back out into a narrow cobbled street that directed the wind like a funnel.  An elderly man yelled in Spanish that we ought to link arms for safety; I'm not sure whether he was being sarcastic or not.  I told him that was a good idea.  Then we started to eat our bread (mine chocolate covered) with our hair whipping around our faces as we walked.  By the time we reached the edge of town we had our heads bent like two emperor penguins huddled against Antarctic wind, and every once in a while we'd squint bleary-eyed for the next yellow painted arrow or seashell symbol, to follow on the dirt tracks out of town.  (Finding these arrows is rather like a treasure hunt.  Especially when they're on the sides of old crumbling buildings in a narrow alley, or on a sidewalk and mostly washed away, or on old irrigation ditches out in the middle of nowhere - like these two days ago, when the weather was much finer:)

Back to the rainstorm: eating a chocolate-covered pastry in a wind funnel, with storm clouds rolling in:
 

At first I was eager to get back to walking alone and listening to my music, because this Danish lady seemed quite reserved and I figured pounding music was the best way to get through the storm.  Then I realized I couldn't hear my music through the gale buffeting my coat hood, not even slightly, and after 12 more km and several more tiny towns, I learned her name is Melanie and she was not boring at all.  Not even slightly.  She and her husband and two sons have taken 6-month road trips through both North America and Australia, and the way they do it is this: they buy an RV when they arrive, travel in it for 6 months, then resell it and go back home to Denmark and go back to work.  Incredible!  At the moment, their latest RV here in Europe is being repaired, and when it's fixed in a couple weeks her family is driving down from Denmark to pick her up (wherever on the Camino she's walked to) and going camping in Spain. 

Anyway, during this rain squall we hobbled doggedly onward and saw very few other pilgrims and eventually decided 23 km was enough for the day, so we stopped in the tiny town of Viloria de la Rioja.  Population: 50.  Now, in this tiny town, there were two tiny albergues, each with just a dozen beds, so we had two choices.  A trailside billboard advertised them both.  One albergue was known for having homemade paella cooked in a gigantic pan.  The other albergue was known for being sponsored by Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian writer who wrote the Alchemist.  I thought that sounded pretty cool.  So we went and waited in front of the Coelho albergue, until they opened their doors at 1:30, and as we waited I started thinking about the book The Alchemist, and how the protagonist wandered and wandered on foot and met all sorts of spiritual mentors on the way, and how in a way this experience of the Camino is so very similar, because by coincidence or fate it seems you somehow wind up meeting the very people you most need to meet, and having the very conversations you most need to have on a particular day.  What destiny, I thought, that an albergue is here plastered with photos of Paolo Coelho and the Alchemist, at just the right time to make me think of this. 

Then the owner opened the door and said they were full with online reservations, and had no free beds.

We cursed under our breaths (she in English as well - she spoke excellent English) hoping that in that 15 minutes of waiting the other albergue hadn't filled their beds.  Then we turned our backs on the posters of famous Coelho and retreated to the other, smaller, unassuming albergue, with a simple concrete floor and giant pan waiting for paella.  A round woodstove was crackling in the center of the floor, and through thebig glass windows we watched hail pummeling the ground outside.

It was incredible.  The perfect albergue for a stormy night, with such amazing encounters.  Perhaps that other place was full for a reason.

(Photo from later in the evening, when the pan was indeed filled with paella, spiced with saffron as is customary:)

These albergue owners spoke no english, and so I had the first real conversation about ideas and deep topics that I've ever had in Spanish, largely because they were so patient in repeating things.  It was surreal.  I'm a very clumsy and slow speaker in Spanish, but still - a conversation!  Ah!  About the need for art, and whether a greater percentage of humans are generous than stingy, and government funding for the arts in schools, and positive thinking, and deciding to be optimistic regardless of one's situation, and how the mind never deletes memories, it just stores them deeper and deeper in the subconscious...

Anyway.  Then there was paella, and the others at table were: an Irish couple, a German couple, Melanie from Denmark, three women from Poland, and a guy from Brazil.  I got to practice Spanish again with the guy from Brazil, and that was so, so amazing.  I just... love having words. 

The board behind the table was covered in 'good day' greetings from literally dozens of languages from previous guests, which we read out while we were eating.

Words.  There is nothing more exhilarating. 
 

Buen camino,

-mlj