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Another 57km done, and they were a switchback of ups and downs and the guidebook had said they would be.  I was in sleeveless top and shorts and for the first couple of km coming out of M, that was nippy.  However, I had guessed rightly and the switchback started after that and kept me warm until a few km before the end, by which time grey cloud covered the sky and it started mizzling: I was pretty cold when I finally made it to the cathedral.  A meal was very welcome and was found, and I’m checked into a hotel where the receptionists were lovelyyy.  More about all this later but for now I’m announcing the simple fact that I’ve done it. I’ve cycled from London to Compostela (with help from two boats on the way!)

Here’s the map record for now.  Firstly, today and starting with elevation:

Gradient:

Hm, that shows the ups and downs pretty well.  The net change was a good loss of height thankfully and some of the downs were great, if cool or frankly nippy, and many of the ups were fairly manageable but some were nasty with my gearing.

Heart rate.  I didn’t have much oomph so not that high.

And speed:

Some welcome yellow descents!

And here we are, just elevation, the whole thing:

I’ve done it!  I do have time to do Finisterre and back on top arriving here today.  However, I made heavy weather of today to be honest, and that weather thing is threatening to be dull or worse for the next few days.  I think at the moment that discretion is winning and this really may be it.  That will make it much easier to do my meeting with St. James (I wasn’t leaving Toto alone in the crowds at the cathedral today, huge lock or not).  It’ll also make it easier for me to sort out Toto and my separate journeys back to London.

Maybe I’ve grown up enough on this trip to quit while I’m OK!  The next few hours looking at the options will tell.

I’m postponing setting off on the last leg as the weather forecast says it won’t be roasting and I wanted to catch something that capped off yesterday so well.

I had stopped very near the top of the long slog up through  the outskirts of M (saves all that messing around with “[t|d]” out of my obsessional respect for people’s language wars).  I stopped when I saw this:

That sign says “CLINICA DE PSYCOLOGIA. PSITEM”. It was roughly opposite a little church that I looked at and thought “ugh, 20th Century, or 20thC messed up”, and I discovered there were few hotels in M but that one, and it’s fine, was just round the corner, and had a room, garage for Toto for 35Euros.

I settled in and gave myself a siesta for the first time and woke up and thought I should find these two churches the guidebook said were worth finding.  I never did work out which they meant as I think they’ve got the names wrong but I found four and a museum!

That’s San Pedro with the town hall on the left and a wonderful little town museum just beyond the town hall.  I like that unusual, an grand, door.

It has a layout that I’ve now seen quite a lot so as you go in and go to the middle of the single nave and look to the altar you have a low arch above you:

and beyond is  this:

Above is a simple barrel vault with high walkways.

And there’s all this (in very stubby north transept), just a sample.

Above:

Outside, just before the town hall, is another church, i.e. less than 100m away.  This is the chapel of St. Anthony.

Very simple inside with rather grand paired niches on opposite sides of the single nave:

and further up, you can see them in those shots, two smaller niches with these:

The cleric looking straight ahead, not needing the altar to help him see God and Mary but the nobleman turning, rather overtly, to pay obeiscence?

Then I walked a 3km round trip (cyclists shouldn’t do this much walking!) to find this:

That’s in what would surely have been a separate, and tiny, village when it was built.  It’s now Santa Maria of M though.

That very simple and, to me, lovely, east end faces this, in fact, I was backed up against it to take that:

That’s a horreo, a grain store.  Quite a lot in this area.  Talking of area, the tiny village as was is nestled so close on the church that it was hard to take ‘photos.

Interesting niches either side of that, south side, door:

And this, almost on top of the west end of the church:

It’s huge, you can see it in the earlier ‘photo.

So right up against, less than 10m separation from, this:

The west door, under this (why “17”?)

I think piped water only arrived very recently, this pump is well made, not rusted at all and I’d say it was 2nd half of the 20th Century.  When I visited my French penfriend’s grandmother in a small village in Brittany as an adolescent, ?1972, we got her water from a pump in the village square and chopped wood for her fire, which was her only heating.

Finally, I came back to the psychology clinic and its chapel.  I was both right about that one and wrong.  It was built in the late 20th C from parts of two churches that had been decommissioned or had died:

Lovely west door.  (It and the last church were locked so no interior shots.) And this right next to it: said to be the oldest cross in Gallicia:

And the museum, which I wandered round earlier, between churches 2 and 3, was lovely.  For any other medics out there, here’s the local doctor’s gear (20th C):

Very recogisable obstetric forceps (near Keilland’s, i.e. rotation needed, or have I forgotton all that?)   and to me a surprising collection of permanent laryngotomy tubes down there.  There was a brilliant collection of everything from lots of prehistoric dolmens from the area, through Roman to a wonderful run through of artefacts from the Medieval era to the 20th C.  Interesting how the medieval is mostly ecclesiastical but more recent had much more of how lay lives were lived.

I’m sorry M, you are a truly ugly 20th C town but you have kept gems within you and gave me a good visit before I reach Santiago: thanks!

You’re probably thinking “He’s finally flipped” or “Oh boy, he does like to tease”, hm, the latter is undeniably true.  A few may, no doubt from a misspent yoof (family spelling) have recognised the lyrics which are from Rory Gallagher’s song called, and this I had forgotten, “A million miles from home”.  “The bar has lost all its people, the yellow man has caught the last bus home”. If you don’t know it or him and like rock music, go find it: a great anthem.

However, it’s not as daft as it seems (I like think I never am quite as daft as I’m seeming).  My new name comes from these two guys:

OK.  There’s only one there and you have to look really carefully, and probably need quite a good access to this site, to see him, but he’s cycling ahead of me on the bridge into Pontomarin.  The town beond him was apparently shifted, stone by stone, brick by brick from somewhere down below us so it survived the creation of the reservoir.

OK.  This is a better picture of them:

OK.  No it’s not, but it’s how I got the name “yellow man”.  I stopped to grab a shot of that as I loved it.  Normally yellow arrows are for walking pilgrims and white ones for cycling ones but we both go the same way at this point, some way after Portomarin.  As I snapped it thinking “Is that really how people see pilgrims on bikes?” I started to digest that there’d been a yell, probably to me, from behind me.

I had yelled “Hola” or something similar back, without thinking much, perhaps added “Buen camino” but had wondered why someone had sounded so specifically friendly.  I turned round and saw the guys, and the bikes.

We’d been playing leapfrog with each other since leaving Sarria (more on that later) and so I went over and said “hello” and, on the basis of bits of conversation I’d heard on the way, misguessed that they were German and would speak English.  Ooops, they were Dutch and said they were fortunate not to be German but seemed forgiving about the mistake.  They were about my age ± 5 years I’d guess, actually, probably 62/63 ± 55 years (my age estimation is no better than the Garmin’s height estimation). We exchanged pleasantries about having come far and being nearly there and seeing other cyclists but not often talking to them.  That’s when I learned that I was known to them as “the yellow man”.  I first thought it was respect to my panniers, and only later remembered that, as it had been damn cold mist and fog until about 30 minutes before that, I’d been wearing my lurid reflective yellow shower proof top and then, when the mist/mizzle broke, had removed that to reveal the full glory of my very, very yellow bamboo top: the only other long sleeved thing I’ve got with me.

We had a brief but very warm conversation.  You probably get to have much more of that sort of thing walking and I think it has suited me that don’t get that much of that cycling: I had too much thinking to do.  But it was another good moment of contact, as had conversation with a young woman from Madrid at the earlier café/bar where I’d stopped, been able to ditch the yellow long sleeved top, soak up some welcome sun, a café cortado and un vino tinto (a glass of red wine) that J would have described, accurately, as having initial industrial notes and a strong aftertaste of diesel.  It, the coffee, the sun and the brief conversation with the lady from Madrid who loves London and has visited us nine times, were the turning point in a day of two halves for me.  Not downhill all the way from there, but completely different. Oh, and the wine and first rate coffee cost two euros!

So, to come back to where I started, I’m the yellow man and the words from Rory Gallagher’s song came into my mind a bit later, on one of the hills (songs seem to come into my mind when most cardiac output is going to the legs rather than to the thinking box).

It’s really been a day of two halves in the old cliché. From about 08.40 as I left the hotel in Sarria, to about 12.00ish, it was damn cold, a damp, sticky mist, and it climbed.  Exactly as my guide book had warned: these aren’t mountains, but it was a long, depressing climb for a very long way before a wonderful long, sweeping descent, with a lorrry windshielding me some of it, before Pontomarin.  Then … more damn up and down, seemingly mostly up, and more sticky mist and misery.

The sun didn’t show at all until 11.20 and that was just a tease. However, as you can see from those ‘photos, things improved. The road continued to emulate a rollercoaster but only a little one, and the sun really did come out and I made it not  just to Palas del Rei, as planned, but about 15km further to Melide/Melite (not sure which is Gallego/Gallician and which Castilian/Spanish) and, despite the grinding pull up into it, and the visual impression that, like Sarria, it was a late 20th Century dump aesthetically:

1. I’m nearly there: four hours cycling tomorrow and only 56km according to Google
2. Meli[t|d]e is not a dump, well, it is in many ways, but it has a small but absolutely lovely town museum and great churches.

So here I am:

Very odd thinking that the adventure is nearly over, at least in term of making it to Compostela.  I’m digesting that and, in a good way, and not about any negativity about my home, “A million miles from home” captures something of that.  Old people here feel they have earned the right to sit on benches, on their doorsteps, wherever they like and, much though I love London, I’m not sure that’s so true “back home”.  Much to digest and perhaps I’ll look for food.  As ever, I don’t seem to have left enough time in the day for this site/blog!

Anyone who’s reading this, share some warmth from Gallicia and feel you’ve earned the right to be reading this and tell myself I’ve earned the right to be sitting here writing it.

P.S. If, like me, these maps amuse you.  Here is today.  I’d like to see a temperture one.  I think the data is up on the Garmin repository, maybe one day I’ll work out how to unleash it and add a temperature plot for today and the whole journey.

Height:

Gradient:

Speed:

And heart rate:

There, I’ve admitted it: I cracked, I pushed. In fact, I think I pushed for something like 1km on the climb to O Cebeiro.  My increasing accurate guide book had said: “This road is steep and unrelenting for 5km and can be very exposed and daunting in bad weather; which is often the case here.”

What it omits to say is that for more than 5km the gradient is between 8% and 15%.  Oh, and you have already climbed steadily on lesser gradients for about two hours before that.  So here we have the gradient map.

That long red bit was the “OK, I give in” bit.  Don’t be fooled by all that white: we know that the Garmin is not to be trusted on height or gradient. That initial long white was lovely but it was all climbing, albeit very manageably. Suckered me, that did!

Elevation:

Average speed (which is flattering stretches of that):

Yes, there was some lovely descending. And finally, heart rate.  Even pushing was damn hard work!

Here’s that early white stuff, yes, the old road does keep crawling up to join the new road you can see there on one of its many bridge sections.  I had left as dawn was breaking and only did a short stretch on bike lights today.

This is looking back after the pushing stretch:

And this:

The observant amongst you will have noticed that there was no problem about blistering heat any more, in fact, that was a bright break in the cloud and this was the scene at the false summit of O Cebreiro:

Yes, the entire tiny village had been replaced by a street market in fog.  (The last and next 5km had visibility down around 100m.)  I was relieved   that some Spanish TV crew interviewed the lovely Spanish lads in their 20s on mountain bikes, with very little load, and opted not to interview me.  (Do I sound envious of them? Damn right: youth, light loads, gearing at least 50% lower than my lowest.  I was green with envy, or perhaps it was exhaustion.  Please note the highly technical distinction between envy and jealousy: I envied them their attributes and possessions but their relationship with the TV was no object of envy: how stupid can you look, green against the grey background and trying something like “[gasp] No hablo Español [gasp, gasp] lo siento [gasp, gasp, gasp]”)

Actually, about  2km before that, one of the lovely things that have happened on this trip happened at the first coffee bar stop for what had seemed like hours.  A group of four English/British speakers, on completely unloaded mountain bikes (oh that green envy thing again!), who had bravely cycled on past me on their lovely low gears as I pushed, and who had stayed ahead of me when I managed to get back on, cheered me into the stop, and were simply lovely in respecting that I had given myself some significant handicaps.  It’s hard to convey what that means.  If any of them ever reads this: thank you again!

They told me that their (human form) guide had told them there were 2km more to O Cebreiro and I opted to go on.  As one said: “If you stop now you might never get back on eh?” and, tempting though the prospect of coffee and changing into cycle leggings and adding a layer to my top was, he was pretty on the nail there.  I thought my legs might mutiny, and I paused only long enough to thank them, and rode, OK, that’s an exaggeration, crawled, on; but I wasn’t pushing thanks to that injection of pride or something they’d given me, and I didn’t in the remaining 2km before hitting the bazaar at the top.

Oh, but it wasn’t the top dammit!  There was a bit of lovely descent, but a bit gingerly given the visibility, and then several more km, but less killing, of climbing before the true summit.

O Cebreiro was actually the proposed end of day one of the two days from my guide book; two days I was ticking off in one day; so, with only about 32km of 72km done, I went onand there are interesting, and less physically harrowing, tales to tell of that, and ‘photos.  However, I’m exhausted and the second day of today (if you see what I mean) will have to wait for another chronological day as this room has a cramped bath and my poor legs deserve it.  Sad, as there’s much more to say (and one blog post draft written in a long gap from the cycling) … but that will all have to wait.

With any luck, I’m on target for Compostela in two more days cycling now. That makes two days left over for a round trip to Finisterre and I’d still have one day back in Compostela before I fly home.  However, although that’s the guidebook recommended stages from here, i.e. two days in two days, it’s 60km tomorrow, and the authors say “Although the high mountains have been left behind for good, this probably the hardest day’s riding of the whole pilgrimage and should not be taken lightly.  There are long stretches with nowhere to rest and a number of long ascents.”  I keep reminding myself that today was two of their days.

So here we are:

Good night all!

 

 

 

Wow, finishing cycling early has given a lot of time on the computer.  Earlier, I linked a bad night to fears that some of my academic/research work on “outcome measurement” actually, it’s change measurement and the first bit of overegging in our field is that we all give in to social and political pressure and talk about “Outcomes” with a big “O” as if that’s what they are.  Well, sometimes they really are: death is an outcome, it’s an outcome that awaits all of us, but if you’re in the mortality game (and we all are, not just the oncologists, surgeons, politicians and actuariess) the timing of that outcome does matter and oncology wouldn’t have made much of the progress it has without recording times of death, without good statistical methods for analysing it.  It’s not as simple as it sounds because we can die for many reasons, though all of those are deaths, and because it may matter how old we are when we become at risk, and because not all people known to be at risk and treated one way or another are yet dead, for one reason or another, at the point you analyse your data, and because some are “lost to follow up”.

Millions and millions of pounds has, mostly rightly I think, been spent collecting datasets about survival after diagnoses of cancer (and pre-cancerous states, and known risks of cancer) and a fair bit of money and real mathematical/statistical genius, and huge amounts of computer storage and time, have all been thrown at this.  I say “mostly rightly” as the only danger of all of this is that can, and in the past did, problematically, sidestep the question of the quality of life with the risk that treatments that lengthened survival a little, but devastated quality of life, were perhaps seen too positively.  How to factor Quality of Life (QoL) in alongside mortality remains a huge issue.  In some, small but at times useful ways, I think my work and the work of the huge numbers of people who have helped us on the CORE project (www.coresystemtrust.org.uk) touches on the QoL issue, particularly the work of Iphigenia Mavranezouli on the CORE-6D scoring.

However, what worries me is that the political pressures, and the human and societal pressures for much greater certainty, much avoidance of Fear, much intolerance of Doubt (you knew FUD wasn’t going away didn’t you?!), these all mean that data is now collected, and analysed, incoherently.

Ah, damn, I don’t really have the ‘photo I want, of the crossing in the cathedral in León, I guess it was one where my effort was really too bad to keep.  However, this is León cathedral, with scaffolding.

You pay up your entry fee and get a huge colour A4 booklet about the cathedral, but if you’re cycling onwards, you ditch that (in Rabanal when I had time to scan read it enough) as, beautiful though it is, and in Spanish and English, it’s too heavy to come all the way home.  However, I loved a quote from Mariano Diez Sáenz de Miera “co-author of the Cathedral’s Master Plan” (capitals in the original):

“The day that the Cathedral’s scaffolding disappear it will be a bad sign because León’s Cathedral is like a  sick person who is stable but needs constant care”.  I thought that was genius.  In the (?) 18th Century the lovely Gothic crossing was replaced with a Baroque octagon, by the 19th Century that, and other changes, and the fact that the stone is beautiful but prone to flaws, and the fact that it was all put on top of a Roman baths (with lots of hypocaust hollows still there by the sound of it) and a Romanesque church on top of that, all meant the cathedral was starting to collapse, pretty literally with stones falling.  The whole had to be shored up and the Baroque crossing taken out and the simpler, structurally far more sound, crossing put back in.

I think something similar is going to have to happen to health care.  At the moment we have fantastic sums being spent on  some things like new anti-cancer drugs, but we’re pricing ordinary people out of a “free to all at the point of delivery”  health care system and many people are to my mind clearly very happy to do that, they’re sort of putting in Baroque altars that obscure simpler truths and simpler things that make people happy and healthy and always claiming the data shows that things are as good as the can be and better than the previous government etc. etc.

It’s all pretty mad to my mind: a cult of sales and advertising rather than critical thinking and sharing the sadness of things.  Don’t get me wrong: I still think the NHS, I still think much in the idea of health care and even hospital based systems for that, have much in them that is brilliant.  Visiting my now deceased father-in-law in hospital some years back when the NHS was, as it did repeatedly, unequivocally extending his life and his quality of life, I said to my mother-in-law that I thought hospitals were grim, sad places, full of death and suffering, touched with a sort of odd quiet like temples that are really about those things (death and suffering).  (Yes, I’m a real joy to have with you on hospital visits.  Actually, I think she would say that on balance I’m useful and supportive but I look back and can’t see that as one of my better moments.)  Anyway, she was astonished and said, briliantly, “I see them as exactly the opposite: temples of hope”. I think we’re both right.

What’s this got to do with data and uncertainty and using data coherently?    You don’t help overstretched services though with the kind of spin and “friends and family” tests and the constant farming out of some positive statistic or other to reassure everyone that the junior doctors are wrong, that the NHS is getting better when it’s one of the least well funded services in the Western world and when you’re actually attacking the glue systems that held it together to replace them with “market values”.

I can’t prove anything of this at the moment, in fact I think such systems are so complex we shouldn’t be thinking of “proving” much within them but of how to nurse them thoughtfully.  That needs data, open data, openess to think about it.

Here’s another graphic:

Hm.  I probably needed that a bit bigger but it’ll have to do for now.  What the heck is that?  “We want more beauty, more travel, not nasty data!” some might be saying and I sympathise and I would like to be putting up more ‘photos of León including its glorious, stably ailing, cathedral; of Astorga and a superb church I nearly missed here in Villafranca del Bierzo but bear with me.

That’s a graph of my altitude on the bike today with metres above sea level on the y axis (i.e., and highly appropriately, vertically) and time on the x axis.  You see that hard slog up from Rabanal to Crux de Ferro and the later true summit and then that 15km descent.  The grey line is warming up my then frozen hands in Ponferrada and the second grey line is visiting the tourist information office here in Villafranca (lovely helpful lady) and the tiny last bit of black is from her to the hotel.

OK so far.  But there’s something wrong isn’t there?  The two grey bits should surely be pretty much level.  OK, I didn’t restart the Garmin with the bike exactly where it was when I stopped it and I think both the drop in Ponferrada and the rise here are too big for the short distances moved between stopping and restarting the Garmin.  So we learn that something is imperfect in the data.  That’s fine, you can argue that no measurements are perfect, we just have to be thoughtful about the imperfection, perhaps we need to explore it.

That’s trivial by comparison with NHS data and healthcare and psychology data generally, but oh, so much of it is not being criticised contstructively, not being made stronger and more helpful, it’s just being used to paper over problems.

Now that takes me to a  lot of other things but this is more than enough for now.

By the way, the plot was generated with the completely free R software system using packages that people wrote to handle GPS data.  Just trivial use of it so far, much more fun to be had from that in the future, including drilling into the elevation data and how it’s generated.  (I now suspect it’s atmospheric pressure, not GPS, but that does sound weird.)  But why oh why do Garmin avoid open data standards and open source computer systems as far as they can?  Why do they make it impossible to upload your data unless you’re running Windoze or a Mac?  (That’s a huge part of why I have a Windoze machine with me: without it, or a Mac, literally no data from the Garmin.)

 

OK. FUD is one thread running through this journey, though I think and hope it’s counterbalanced by others that are about celebration of (still) being alive, of experiences, emotions, sharing.  There are two layers to FUD: one is the general structural one that is not particularly about now, about stopping clinical work, nor about taking that moment, that turning point in my work track, to look at how I have dealt with some of the more problematical, the more struturally undermining, bit of FUD in me by working clinically; the other is the quite specific one about how to move onward without, say, just using academic work to bodge the same anxieties.

Three ‘photos from last night, thee shots of the east end of Santa Maria, one of the three chapels in Rabanal del Camino.

OK.  That’s south, a bit further round looking at the east end proper, and beyond that, the mirror of the south side.  Two thin, and battered but to me truly lovely, decorative pillars. (Or are they pillasters as they’re so much decorative rather than structural?  Must check!)  Then in the middle, I’m sure later, much more crude, a buttress.  I assume there were anxieties, with or without good evidence, that the end of the apse needed shoring up.  The buttress is quite the least connected I think I’ve ever seen.  However, it would have brought quite a weight to bear on the wall if those stones were laid so as to lean against it, for all there seems to have been no attempt to bond them into the wall.

Clinically, I think we’re all a bit like that: we have all manner of things shoring ourselves up, or just decoratively helping the structural look to others.  This isn’t about “defences” and certainly not about “healthy” versus “unhealthy” defences, it’s just that we all need and have structural features and one thing then address is FUD, both FUDs that we’re conscious of, and ones that we aren’t and can’t be, the truly psychoanalytically unconscious ones.  We also have ones that only work (or only fail and waste huge resources and energy) because they, like that buttress, are part of the vital issue about being human: not standing alone but on and with others, leaning on each other, been seen and being leant upon.

I didn’t go into that church as it’s attached to a small monastery that offers free accommodation to any pilgrim who asks and also offers free consultation and short retreats and, when I opened the door, there was clearly a service going on and I quickly glimpsed a diverse collection of people in casual clothes standing and clearly focused on someone or something in the East end.  A young man beckoned me in in a very friendly way, but I shook my head, smiled, and closed the door quietly and walked on … to thse three ‘photos (I’d already admired the first pillar/pillaster from the north!)

I don’t think there was anything very wrong with dealing with some Doubts about myself by working hard clinically.  I think I became quite good at it, given another 32 years I’d really have been getting somewhere!  I had improved and good I sometimes did largely by youthful enthusiasm I think got replaced by wiser, calmer ways and, though nothing was ever certain, I think that meant I was getting better at helping a wider range of people and problems, better at helping more structurally, better at helping people help themselves and, on a good day, I think really quite helpful to colleagues.  I’ve done quite a bit of leaving clinical service in the last four years and had some lovely thanks and don’t think alll were just people being nice.  One person said I’d helped when s/he really thought s/he was going mad and enabled work with a client with who had been a struggle to help to move on safely.  I can’t imagine a much better thank you message and was deeply moved, and this, belatedly, is probably a bit of starting to think how to process that and return the thanks.  (I’m becoming a firm believer that some things really can’t be rushed and take years.)  I am going to miss all that like missing a limb I suspect when I have less to distract me and when my continuing  academic and research work will take me back much nearer that work.

Anyway, I do want to move on.  If there were a Garmin (heavens forbid!) for these life travelling tracks we have, in which “retirement” or just stopping something, is a big turning point, then I’d like it if the forward tracks were sort of successfully onward, upward or with exciting, fast, completely in control downhill tracks.  Dropping that rather mechanical image, I’d like it if the onward track had new experiences, new  pleasures and new ways of sharing those.  This blog is a bit of a taster for that I guess.

OK.  This is getting long.   I’ve got a lot bubbling up nicely about making useful distinctions between F, U and D; about conscious and unconscious (Cs and Ucs in the terminology of psychoanalytic thinking that may crop up a bit from here onwards); and about locations and connections: who, what, how, why, where is Fearing or Doubting, who, what …?  What Uncertainties, how uncertain are they?  How scary because uncertain or uncertain because scary? (And therefore perhaps not looked at properly?)

More than enough for one post though.  A bit more of that beautiful little church/chapel to finish.  This is how I first approached it walking up the main street of Rabanal.

The West end bell tower catching the by then rapidly dropping sun.

The south side.

And this man (you can see him in the ‘photo above, just).

“A monument to Julian Campo, born in Rabanal del Camino on 15th May 1956
who was killed in the fatal train crash in Villada of the intercity train Vigo/A Coruna/Irun.
Campo spent much of his life helping the poor of Calcutta” which I think is a translation of the plaque, at least, it squares with my guesswork Spanish reading.  Taken from http://www.tumbarumba.co.uk/PILGRIM%20WALKS/Camino%202014%20Part%202/Day%203%20Rabanal.htm with thanks.  That has better ‘photos of Rabanal and another personal take on it.  He was less than a year older than me so would have been 60 now.  I thought it was a superb sculpture and in tone with the work of the little monastery there (staffed by Beneditines from Bavaria).

Enough for now.

Yes, I’m here, 56km on from the lovely Rabanal del Camino and I’ve been up and over Cruz de Fero.

I was up, packed and on the bike at 07:17 before the sun rose.  The sky was lightening from black but I’d had to load the bike by head torch as it was so dark in the courtyard and I needed the bike lights for the first 45 minutes I think.  I couldn’t see what the Garmin was saying as I’d forgotten to switch its backlight on and wasn’t going to stop to change that.  Perhaps as well as the first hour was relentless climbing and I probably wouldn’t have been helped by seeing how slowly I was going, whatever the gradient was at that moment or what my heart rate was.  I decided to keep things as slow as I could without falling off (oh for a couple of lower gears, as I know repeatedly moan here!)

No blame on the Samsung camera, ‘photos can’t convey things.  This was first photocall (and chance to drop the heart rate), sun still wasn’t up.

A bit later and higher and by now the sun was really rising.

And I crawled through the first, absolutely tiny, hamlet.  That’s the first of those circular dwellings I’ve seen and so far the only one but I believe they’re a feature of this area.

It’s all about exposure but this is a fair flavour of what it felt like looking back, but it can’t capture anything  of the sheer vastness of the views.

The cycle route isn’t marked as formally as the walking  route but there are lots of spray painted white arrows on the road where there are turnings so it’s usually easy to find the way.  At one point, now I couldn’t see the gradient on the Garmin as the only way I could keep going was to cycle  standing up, the same white spray paint had painted a grimacing emoticon.  I was not going to stop to take a ‘photo but I appreciated the humour in a wry sort of way: I really felt that someone else, the painter, was his name Elvis?, had suffered as I was.  Of course, I strongly suspect the kindly painters whose work I so much appreciate actually do the roads by infernal combustion engine.  Here’s a later one on a downhilll bit:

Yup, that captured my state well at that point and sure enough, round the next bend the road kicked up again but almost immediately I was at the (false) summit of the Cruz de Fero (cross of iron).  Much of the mound is said to be made of stones that pilgrims carried up there and left asking them to be taken as sins to be wiped out by the pilgrimage.  The man kneeling was very still and  I hope he felt some release as he looked to be asking for something or involved in something profound for him.  As so often on this journey, I felt an intruder, sareligious and didn’t join him and the others there and, after taking my ‘photos and hoping that wasn’t intrusive, I cycled on.  There’s a bit of up and down still and my pedantically, excellently, correct guidebook underlines that the Cruz de Fero is a false summit.  However, the short up and down bit gave me some time to ponder why I wasn’t addressing my sins there.  I decided that, many though they be, (rather religious, Bunyanish phrasing), that’s not really why I’m doing this; I don’t believe there’s someonee (other than those I hurt) to forgive me; nor do I think that dwelling on my failures and failings is what this whole journey is about.

The views in the next short section were sensational but I thik a seriously good camera, moderate telephoto and real skill would be needed to capture it. Trust me, in the early light and the morning haze, it was stunning.

Self-portraits gorging on the sights:

and:

Then this:

Right next to this:

Well, I don’t know about outstanding, but I was a bit smugly thinking I had been quite strong to get there without stopping.  (Yes, OK, there were those photo stops but they were for you, honestly!)

I suspect that the Spanish says “savage descents for 15km” and if it does, it’s right.  The next 15km passed fast.  The road hairpins and the surface is mostly good but with the odd pothole and loose stone and I agreed with the guidebook advice to stop intermittently to let the brakes cool and I used the brakes a lot but still hit 57kph.  You slow to go through the beautiful Al Acebo:

The Garmin says that the highest point was 1,462m, that the elevation gain, by which I think it means the sum total of the upward bits, was 471m, which sounds trivial now, and that the sum descent was 1,055m which I can believe.

The irony was that, having gone to these extremes to avoid roasting today (another yellow heat warning) and despite wearing a long sleeved top and a short sleeved top (what are sleeves?  I’ve hardly worn any since Chartres) … I realised when I hauled into Ponferrada that I was frozen from the windchill on the descent.  I could hardly hold my change until I’d cupped my hands around two cafés cortado (and my first churro of the trip).

Ponferrada templars castle:

Glorious, but the sun was heating up, I was thawing out and I bashed on to the next castle: Villafranca del Bierzo where I am now.

It’s now 14.30 but I’ve found a cheap hotel, put Toto in their garage and been entrusted with the garage key so I can get away early again tomorrow, I’ve uploaded the Garmin data, created the maps, uploaded the ‘photos, done this blog entry, and updated the page about the days so it gives a chronological overview of the posts.  I think that’ll make more sense to anyone joining this blog late or later and I think I needed to do that to take stock.

Here’s today’s height:

You can really see the “outstanding strong” net descent as you can in the gradient map:

Here’s speed:

and heart rate:

Peaked at 162bpm according to Garmin.

Here’s cumulative, elevation only:

OK.  Hotel is fine but room is stuffy so I’m off to see if I can find somewhere in the shade with wifi, and to see some of the sights.  More later.  (Oh dear, and that reminds me, more serious up and down work tomorrow and, I think, most of the way now from here to the end.

 

Just to finish up yesterday.  I forgot this bit of evidence that everyone who is anyone does the Camino through León.

I don’t know why that amused me so much, but it did. Back next to the Gaudi was this:

It marked a meeting place of the youth of León and a bike seemed to be an important marker amongst some of them though not in this shot.

“Ride or die” seemed a bit extreme to me but it certainly caught something for me, including the fear that the heat and the riding would be the death of me (not literally, I’m not that daft).  But the day finished on another meal with a view.

And there was all of 30m to walk to the hotel!

I got off by 08.15 moderately alarmed by the weather forecast which was a yellow heat warning threatening 38°C and risk of fires.  Elvis had gotten ahead of me and was doing some painting:

Perhaps, in my “self-portrait with” theme, that’s “self-portrait with Elvis, or is it Richard”!

I was aiming to make it to Astorga and then quit and have lots of time to catch up on this site.  I belted off 50km to Astorga by 10.53 and Elvis was pretty much the only time I stopped. Coming into Astorga involved having to go up and over this railway bridge.  I don’t know what went wrong with these ‘photos (I do actually, it was too bright to see what the ‘phone was seeing).  There were three layers of those ramps.  Bizarre!

By then it was hot: even I moved out of sun into the shade while rewarding myself with a late breakfast.  I had discovered that there was another Gaudi there: the Bishop’s Palace and it was covered with scaffolding when I arrived but I had a word with the blokes, said I’d have breakfast and see the Cathedral and could they pull it all down and they did wonders but it wasn’t quite all gone by the time I finished sadly.

That’s the Cathedral in the background.  This isn’t Gaudi turkey, in fact I think it’s quite good but way off his best.  Apparently he drew the plans without visiting, based on ‘photos he was sent of the site as he was so overcommitted back in Catalunya.  He was commissioned by the new bishop who was a personal friend as Gaudi had done an altar for him previously.  The cathedral is late Gothic going through to high Baroque and so I was braced to hate it.  I didn’t and think it’s superb, though I still think the Baroque was a mistake.  ‘Photos of that another time and perhaps something about going to listen to Pevsner’s history of art lectures on “Mannerism and the Baroque” as a medical student.  The man almost had me convinced that I loved this stuff and, though I’ve never really loved it as perhaps one could, without that experience I suspect I’d still not like it at all.  As I say, that’s all getting off today’s track though.

This was where I took a big decision: “Just another 20km”!

I found a bike shop. Lovely man fixed gear changer (for now?) while I got cash and a litre of youghourt and a litre of orange juice so I would make 20km.  The youghourt was stowed anatomically and the fruit juice in Toto’s drop tanks and most of the juice and a fair bit of water from the other drop tank went in the next 20km.  I tried to cycle breathing through my nose not my mouth as you could feel the heat sucking moisture out of you and the nose is much better at resisting that than the mouth is!

It was 21km in fact and it was slow.  I booked a room here (brilliant choice by pure luck) so (a) I would have somewhere and not risk having to go further as even villages are thinly spaced here (three in 20km, this the first with more than a couple of hostels) and (b) to force myself to do it.

It was mostly climbing, though mostly gently.  The villages were beautiful  and now we’re up into what I would call maquis or scrubland with little oak trees and a lot of dry earth.  The huge cereal fields are over.

And here I am in Rabanal del Camino and I told myself I wouldn’t go rubbernecking.  However, the village was lovely (that will have to wait too) so off I went with ‘phone in hand after the bat had lifted my spirits.  S I’ve made very little of the progress on the site and blog that I had intended, but I am 20km further and the next climbing phase starts pretty immediately tomorrow.  I think the key will be a really early start as it’s still yellow heat warning and there have been helicopters flying water in sort of upside balloons over us.  I think it really may only be mad dogs and mad men (now that’s a theme I keep postponing) who cycle beyond 12.00 tomorrow unless the altitude I will have gained moderates the heat.  I don’t think so.  Wish me luck.  Even 40km will do I think to get me to Santiago.  See Days which I’ve belatedly updated!

Here are today’s maps and the latest cumulative altitude one.  Height today:

Speed:

Gradient:

Heart rate:

And here’s the overview:

It was 17.52 Spanish time and I’m sitting in the courtyard of the hotel/café/bar here in the tiny village of Rabanal del Camino:

Something swooped around above me and for a moment I thought it was a swallow and it took me a couple of moments to realise it was a bat as there’s still hot sun in one corner of the courtyard, and everywhere that’s not in shade.  (I do mean “hot”!)

I’ve seen a few sad little pipistrelle corpses in the roadkill along the way but this is quite a bit bigger than a pipistrelle and has a light patch on the rear I think.  It seems that it lives here in these great rafters:

Great, I seem to have collected quite a few insect bites in the last few days, now I hope we’ve got a full   resident bat family levelling the odds.

This really is a lovely place to stay.  This dog welcomes you at the outside gate.

S/he does seem to be minus an ear but very friendly looking: I think there may be a Camino in joke here.  Savage dogs are a famed challenge on the Camino, said to be particularly in Spain and I’ve had a few barking at me including two tough looking Dobermans as I came out of León this morning.  The one that just stared silently was definitely the more scary.  The pretty convincing fence was reassuring.  Actually, the most scary dogs barking at me were all, so far, in France, one particular one was tethered by a running chain thing in a farm up in what I think of as the “tough farming” areas of France, I think it was just south of the Loire.  He, I always gender things I think are attacking me as male, sorry; was a large, and largely Alsatian mongrel I’d say, and was half strangling himself in his clear enthusiasm to put at least some of those magnificent teeth in parts of me.  It’s funny how that helps you belt away from them.  Ah, back to “F”: fear is an evolutionary good!

Ah, it’s nice to sit here and ramble.  Some more ‘photos.

What was that rock there for?  It looks contemporary with the wall, it’s well cut as are all the stones, this was a house of some class.  It’s way too low to be a mounting block.  Inviting menu and laid back style.

Above the door to my room.  An omen?  Mocking me?

Immensely solid old wooden door and the thickness of the stone walls (nearly a metre) mean it’s really cool in there and the courtyard keeps this area cool too.

I would have kept the left wall simple but those beams are glorious:

It’s interesting to me that the beams are so crudely, but effectively, cut while such care and clean cuts were achieved on the stone.  Surely it was orders of magnitude harder to cut stone that well when this house was built than to cut wood?  I wonder if the philosophy was that the wood would be replaced at intervals but the stone was built to last, and say something about the care taken, for centuries?  I guess the sheer thickness of the walls means that most stones are actually only cut/faced on the one, the outer face, I imagine what’s buried in the mortar of the wall is pretty irregular.  That makes the stone outside even more interesting.

OK.  I’m a very, very lucky man but enough rambling.  I shall fold up the mobile office:

and find the shops so I have a litre of fruit juice for the road tomorrow.  More later I hope.

That’s me smiling at you all from León.  He’s on the basilica right opposite the cheap hotel I managed to find when I arrived in León at about 14.50.  Took a while to find somewhere and then to find the reality, not the internet page, and then to find a real person who would let us in.  Then a shower was vital as I’d done this:

That’s 107km of mostly fairly flat but increasingly hot Spain done.  OK, the last two km were going round in circles in León itself but it’s still 105km of real progress.

Google maps says between 322 and 342km still to go to Compostela but I know better than to trust her.  This was her idea of part of the route to the hotel:

It was so much further to find a way round that I did get off and coax Toto down those two flights of steps with a pigeon looking on in amusement:

Eight cycling days left and I know that a lot of what’s left is pretty seriously hilly.  However, I think, barring accidents, that I should be safe now to make it to Compostela and back for the family wedding, but sadly, no Finisterre for me.

León is beautiful.  My architect hero Guadi created a turkey in my view:

I’m told that many people like it, but that was a really, really bad day for Guadi in my view.  I’m not a huge fan of the Sagrada Familia, but I love everything else I’ve ever seen that I he did and at least the Sagrada had, what can I say?  Panache?  Hubris?  I think he fell out with people here in León and that this was a joke on his part.  Unlikely I guess.

It was acually the first bit of significant architecture here that I saw as we arrived:

That’s Toto telling Guadi it’s a turkey:

Guadi wasn’t listening.

OK. Enough silliness. The basilica is magical, the cathedral is wonderful, none of the grandiose overkill of Burgos and a similar amount of Gothic stained glass to my beloved Chartres, and not dissimilar period, but underlines why Chartres is breath taking as the windows here are interesting, but really don’t turn your stomach upside down. To be fair, the unity, and much of the stone carving do.  But that all has to wait as, talking of stomachs, mine needs feeding or we won’t be making a good next step tomorrow.

And on that note: this was from last night in Carrión de los Cordes.  Jamon Iberico as advised by my Catalan friend Guillem.  It was every bit as good as it looks.

But I finished the day off there like this:

You can’t really see it there (no, not the beer silly), that’s reckoned to be the best Romanesque Christ Pantokrator between those two lights.  I think it came out well with the floodlight actually.  I think it’s hard to disagree with the accolade but I’m hardly an expert and a smartphone camera (though great, as you say Haroula), can’t do it justice either.

Tonight I will eat and drink looking across the square at that basilica.