Friendly Friday

Happy Friday everyone!  It's a beautiful, amazing, SUNNY day here at last!  This winter it's been so dark that it feels as if the sun will never come back...and it's always so difficult to be cheerful when it's bleak outside.  So, in the spirit of sunny days and happy times, I thought I'd post some more pictures of all the Lovelies we met on the Camino, where my (probably faulty) memory assures me that it was sunny everyday.  I'm still working my way across the Camino, mostly in order (so we're starting once again around the halfway point, and moving towards Galicia in this series).  Here goes!

Voici Praline.  She was awesome!  She walked from Lyons in France with her owner Roland, and made it all the way to Finisterre!  This was a rare break for her--she liked to keep moving even when Roland wanted to stop (she'd wander off then, or start eating cigarette butts from the ground to irritate him). 

See--this is here getting ready to wander off.  Fortunately, she had a good sense of direction, and could follow the yellow arrows.



This is Lindsey again!  She's having her blisters tended to by this AWESOME hosteliera in Mansilla de las Mulas.  The stick is for her to bite on if it's painful...but Lindsey's a super-trooper!  And now ABBA is stuck in my head.  Note the giant bottles of iodine in the photo--the pocket-sized version became my best friend.  Turns out my dad was right all along, and iodine really is good for everything.



Yes, everyone is sitting around watching Lindsey have her feet doctored.  For an hour.  This was the big entertainment of our evening...well, at least until we went out with friends and actually ordered everything on the tapas menu (Jana did the Spanish equivalent of "We'll have one of everything" even though we didn't know what it all was...then it turned out that our buddy Keith actually spoke quite good Spanish and could have ordered...this is why you have yet to see a photo of Keith).

This is Paul from Armagh (with me on the left).  We met Paul in a little hostel in El Burgo Ranero, which translates roughly into the Town of the Frogs (we understood why when hundreds of frongs were calling out to us as we left town in the early morning).  Paulie traveled with us through to Léon, and then met up with us again in Santiago (where he had not such a great finish to his pilgrimage, but we'll cover that later).  We're walking towards Léon in this photo (you can see the other pilgrims ahead), and shortly after this was taken, Paul and I helped Praline walk across a metal bridge.  There's a video of that moment which Paul included in a photo/video display he posted online--if you're friends with me on Facebook, you'll find a link to it on my page.  If not...I think you may be out of luck!

We found a sushi buffet in Léon.  There are many things wrong with that sentence.  Still, since we hadn't had anything but Spanish food for weeks (with the exception of a donair in Pamplona at the Hemingway Restaurant...there are things wrong with that sentence too), we decided to walk back across town to where we'd first entered to enjoy some Asian food!  Paul's experimenting with the seafood portion of the buffet (you loaded up a plate full of raw seafood, and they cooked it for you--I remain unconvinced, and Jana and I stuck to the cold sushi). 



This is Joost.  We met him and his wife Gerda (who live n Ontario) through Bill and Lindsey, and this is our usual view of them, as they hiked on ahead of us :D  We would also meet them in squares where they'd stopped to picnic.  That blur in the road ahead, that looks like maybe a traffic jam?  Sheep.  An entire herd, that closed the road to automobile and pilgrim traffic for about 20 minutes.  And see--sun!

 I'll leave you with a preview for next week!  Enjoy the sunny weather, amigos!

-K-

Next week there will be a post of interesting sights along the Camino.  This is a wine fountain, which I think counts as an interesting sight.  It's also around 7:00 in the morning in this photo, so we had a few sips just to say we tried it, and then wandered on to find ourselves morning coffee and pastries.