Day 33: O Pena to Gonzor
When I began this post, I typed O Pena to Gondor. There’s a nod to Lord of the Rings fans. But, as we struggle to remember names of places we’ve been to or are heading into, the name association works. Until it sticks and you can’t remember the Spanish name, and someone wants to know where you found a bed and in what city…! And if they’ve never read Lord of the Rings, then you get strange looks. 🙂
Andrew and I started out, two peregrinos, (okay, one peregrino and one peregrina) amidst a sea of brightly dressed short-haulers. They spread out across the dirt paths. The bicigrinos yelled or rang bells from their handlebars, unheard by the hoards listening to loud music through earbuds and shouting at friends walking at their elbows. For the first time in seven hundred kilometres, I respected and had sympathy for the bicigrinos. They, at least, had pedalled their butts from afar. The bicigrinos and long-haul peregrinos were on the same Camino page. 
We walked through more forested areas, very beautiful, humid sections along walls of stacked stone. We kicked greying pine cones along the path. Some nearly the size of a foot. The forests provided shade, but no breeze circulated between the trees, and the air was close and heavy.
We emerged into sunny open areas with breeze, but the sun was brutal. Although we travelled with water, I needed electrolytes. And when it looked like (Gondor) Gonzor wasn’t close, we slunk into a farmer’s hayfield and slept under a row of trees. It was a picky bed, but I entertained spending the night there anyway. Andrew feared we’d be wakened by grazing cows, so we packed up and continued the dreadful walk through wasteland.
I remembered Gonzor. In 2013, I photographed Andrew feeding a black and white kitty next to his red plastic chair. The cat was gone now, but the red chairs remained. We checked into a nice albergue wedged between a barn (smelled manure) and a cemetery. To connect to wifi, we returned to the bar, where Andrew enjoyed a big-breakfast style supper, and I wolfed down a salad. The white asparagus makes an appearance more and more in Galicia. 
We drank more than necessary because we needed the wifi. But we also needed to meet the 10:00 p.m. curfew, so we cut short our choppy FaceTime conversations with family and friends six hours behind us. They had trouble understanding that adults needed to run back to meet curfew or face a locked albergue door. Gotta love Camino albergue life!
I reread my Camino journal before writing posts. This day, remembered for its stifling forests, breezy burning paths, and picky hay field beds, also showed me a stork in flight. Beautiful. Before coming to Spain, I’d never seen a stork. Since coming to Spain, I’ve seen nests weighing at least one hundred pounds atop ancient abandoned churches and chimney stacks, storks nurturing their young, and indescribable stork sounds from the church towers in Logroño. 
Then Andrew pointed skywards to a stork outside of Gonzor. Against the blue, blue sky, attended by the ever-present little birds, I saw a stork, resembling a heron in flight, search for food over a hayfield. Another wish granted. Another circle closed.
My notes included a description of a tiny roadside cafe that sold trinkets, including painted shells. After seeing shells attached to hundreds of backpacks and sold from every store and café con leche stop, the shell becomes part of the taken-for-granted in Spain. But these shells were artistically painted in fine detail and rich colours. Spread individually across two display boards, they livened the Camino with artistic talent. Again, I felt excited and strangely happy. 
And, though it was a day ago, I reread my notes on three times having to wait while cattle farmers herded their lazy shitting beasts along the Camino. We stepped outside their path. Herding dogs kept the cows focussed. Men and women farmers gently tapped the cows’ hind ends to keep them moving, and wished us a “Buen Camino.” I would spend nearly eight-hundred awesome kilometres dodging cow and horse patties along the Camino. Yet, what we find delightful, a Brazilian woman found complaint. “Is the entire Camino going to smell like this? When are they going to clean it up?”
Sleeping in Gonzor next to a barn smelling of “honey” is one of the Camino’s many charms, along with waiting out a cattle log jam, hand painted shells, and storks soaring high above a hay field during my siesta.
It’s not for everybody, but this peregrina keeps discovering her bliss.
¡Ultreia!
~Penny