Ciruena to Villamayor del Rio

Ciruena was a fun stop because of the company but the albergue was over-priced and had not a lot going for it; run by a real Nazi of a Spaniard. I mentioned Anita and Maurice at the end of the Ventosa post. They are great company and despite my limited French and their limited English we have a lot of laughs together. We had chatted at various times and then met up at a cafe in Azofra at the same time. Don`t you think Maurice looks impossibly French and rather like inspector Clousteau from Pink Panther?

I had intended to stay with Leonie at the albergue in Azofra because we were going to take time looking at Najera on the way which was said to be interesting. But unfortunately everything was pretty much closed because it was Sunday.


So since Leonie hadn´t shown up the night before and I hadn´t seen her yet today and she was clearly ahead of me, I decided to walk on with these guys  to Ciruena. They are social workers from the Loire Valley and each year since 2005 they have completed a section of the Camino at this time of year and will gradually get their passport completed.

At the albergue was another Camino character. A Dutch girl in her early 30´s who had been in training for a year. She is being sponsored to walk to raise money for cystic fibrosis which has just been discovered in her family after her brother and sister-in-law, having their first baby were tested and both found to carry the gene for it. The baby has it. This means that any further babies they have will need to be by IVF so they can harvest the egg, check the genes then throw any away that carry it. Bleedin heck. 

This girl was so concerned to help CF people but she herself had not worked for 10 years and had been on medication for bi-polar all that time. Amazing who comes on this walk!

Somehow though I have got out of step with my posting and I am writing about Ciruena on a post about going from there to Villamayor.

So onto the day itself. It started with a short walk to Santo Domingo where the thing to see was the cathedral where they keep the live chickens. Legend has it that a couple were walking with their son to Santiago and stopped in Santo Domingo. The son took an unwelcome interest in the refugio owners daughter and to cut a long story short went before the judge who sentenced him to hang. After the hanging the parents continued to walk and pray their way to Santiago where St James told them that their son was not dead. On their way back they stopped in to see the judge and told him Óur son is not dead`. The judge was eating his chicken dinner and said ýour son is as dead as this chicken I am eating´´ at which point the chicken flew up off the plate. And from then till now there have been live chickens kept in the church.

The other interesting thing about Sto Domingo was that there was an antique rolls royce convention in town, with all the owners staying at the Parador hotel. So I helped myself to a first class pee and then went to look at the cars. Thae photo is Hans and Anita with (part of) the rolls line up

After looking at these things the supermercado was finally open and I told the others to go on while I went back for a couple of things. When I set off again I crossed the river going out of town, turned right as indicated and walked up the river path until i got to a fork. it was unusually, unsigned. I decided to take the right fork but after a couple of kms decided I definitely had the wrong fork and back tracked adn took the left fork, only to walk into a dead end.

The only thing to do was to go right back to the bridge, and there discover that I had missed a hairpin bend immediately after the first turn to the river path. So I got on track again and spent the rest of the day contemplating ´false choices´´. it also turned a 25km day into aabout a 30km day and my legs knew all about it by the end.