Last night at the alburgue
Note – This blog post is a day late. The alburgue where I originally planed on staying in Burgos was having problems with their WIFI and the municipal alburgue where I wound up spending the night did not have WIFI. The trials and tribulations of a blogging pilgrim in this digital age.
The alburgue we stayed at Saturday night was very medieval, and that is the best thing I can say about it. We had a pilgrim dinner at 6:30 PM that was almost inedible. We got a tremendous amount of food for $10 but it was really bad. The first course was pasta that was over cooked to a gelatinous glob of goo. It was the consistency of wallpaper paste and tasted like warm snot. The cooks poured a dollop of marinara sauce over this so called pasta and called it a first course. The second course was called a mixed salad. Mixed with what I don’t know. It was iceberg lettuce with a splash of olive oil. I can’t get them to understand that there are a number of different varieties of lettuce that they could use in a mixed salad besides iceberg lettuce. And the salad dressing! I thought ranch dressing was the international gold standard for excellence in salad dressing. Every time I ask for ranch dressing they recoil in horror. It is the same reaction I get when I ask them to lay off the ham and cheese in the sandwiches and put something different between those two slices of bread. Next time I visit Spain I will bring my own squeeze bottle of ranch dressing.
The main course was french fries, they call them chips, and mystery meat. The whole chips thing is strange because we call potato chips, chips, and they call potato chips, crisps. I ate the mystery meat, and to be polite, complimented the cook on his dry, tough and tasteless chicken. The cook got offended and told me it was pork. If you have been following this blog you know that my response was: “Not Pork Again!!” This pork, if that is what it was, was like eating shoe leather. It would have been at least semi palatable if the cook had smothered it with gravy or ranch dressing. But this is a country that has never discovered gravy and seems to have decided that ranch dressing is off the plate for pilgrims. The dessert was a cup of yogurt. After choking down the first three courses just to get enough calories in my system to fuel the next day’s walk, the yogurt was a pleasant and surprisingly delicious dessert.
Correction
I need to make a correction here. My very good friend Don Kane has informed me that in Spanish, jabon means soap and jamon means ham. I have been in Spain for almost two weeks ordering jabon and queso sandwiches 🥪, instead of jamon and queso sandwiches, and complaining bitterly about how much I have grown tired of them. It turns out that instead of ordering a ham and cheese sandwich, I have been ordering soap and cheese sandwiches. I always wondered why the waitress would chuckle when I ordered what I thought was a ham and cheese sandwich and would really guffaw when she brought me the jabon, soap, and cheese sandwich that I had actually ordered in my less than perfect Spanish. Lesson learned. Watch what you order in a foreign country. Getting snails 🐌, or escargot, might be the least of your problems. You might wind up with a soap and cheese sandwich.
I thought dinner was so bad that I had hit rock bottom for the night. Boy was I wrong. After dinner I went up to the dormitory room with 39 other people arrayed in 20 bunk beds, like chickens in a coop. I already told you that this alburgue was medieval and has been serving as a Pilgrim way station for centuries. Well, the lower bunk bed that was assigned to me had obviously been around for centuries. First of all, it was designed for a hobbit or a munchkin. It could not have been more than five feet long and I am about 6 feet tall. My feet were sticking out way over the end of this bed. Second, the springs in the mattress were so shot that you had only one place to sleep and that was the deep trough in the middle of the mattress, caused by the fat backsides of tens of thousands of overweight pilgrims. They try to put the bulky pilgrims in the lower bunks because they have a very hard time hoisting themselves into the upper bunks. My third complaint was the cold. The people that run this alburgue don’t believe in coddling pilgrims. The windows were jacked open and the heat was turned off. They ran out of blankets before they got to me and I had to put on every, and I mean every, stitch of clothes in my backpack to keep from freezing. I have never been so glad to see the first light of day and put that medieval, monastic hellhole of an alburgue in my rear view mirror.
This is our breakfast stop in Ages. As you can see we have come a long way but we have a long way to go. I learned a valuable lesson at this breakfast stop. An empanada is like a Hot Pocket and is usually very good in the morning when it is stuffed with scrambled eggs, potatoes and cheese. When it is stuffed with tuna salad it makes for a rather unsettling breakfast. My mother, St. Rita, always told us kids, when we asked her what was for dinner, that there were two choices on the dinner menu, take it or leave it. I took my tuna empanada, ate it, and was grateful to be eating this unusual breakfast on the Camino.
This is a view of the next town that we encountered on our hike, Atapuerca.
This is the cross at Cruz de Matagrande. We stopped here and said a prayer for Anna.
Just beyond Cruz de Matagrande Abe spotted this rather extensive labyrinth. Don’t even think about asking if I walked this labyrinth!
This is the view from the top of a ridge looking down towards Burgos in the distance.
We stopped for lunch in Cardenuela Riopico. I almost got a tortilla with blood pudding on the top. It is a locale delicacy. At the last moment I lost my nerve and ordered a plain tortilla. A tuna empanada for breakfast was enough culinary excitement for one day.
This is the cafe where we had lunch.
This is the riverside park that serves as an alternate route into Burgos. We had to walk 5 kilometers in the blazing sunshine, around the Burgos airport, to get to this beautiful tree shaded park and riverside path. It was a long day, about 27 kilometers and we were beat when we got to the municipal alburgue. This was a new, clean and modern alburgue and it was only $5. What a deal. There were 300 pilgrims staying in 6 big rooms on 6 floors of this high rise alburgue. The mattresses were covered in rubber as was the pillow and you did not get bed linens. I was more than comfortable in my sleep sack and got a restful night’s sleep until they turned on the bright lights at 6:30 AM and started an every 15 minute cycle of announcements over the loudspeaker, in a variety of different languages, that we had to be out of the alburgue by 8:00 AM or face summary execution.
I hope everyone had a restful Sunday.
Good evening from Burgos, Spain.
AbeAndMarkontheCamino 