Mike McClenahan

Rabanal del Camino to Ponferrada to Villafranca del Bierzo We are sitting in our albergue in Villafranca and it's pouring down rain. Check weather.com or your international weather channel and you'll see its true. Rain. Nothing but rain this weekend ALL OVER SPAIN. We are eating locally fried potato chips, olives, marcona almonds and Bierzo Roble. Fortunately we have a beautiful view of the river, should it overflow and flood our street. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Two accomplishments for the past two days:  1. We are within 200 km of Santiago. 2. We crossed over the highest pass of the Camino since the Pyranees. The flowers and slate rock were stunning. We kept saying, people spend thousands of dollars to recreate this in their gardens. Over the pass is the Cruz de Ferro, the iron cross where pilgrims drop the burdens they have been carrying. We each dropped something important to us and read a psalm.  The snow capped moun...

Villadangos del Páramo to San Justo to Castrillo de los Polvazares to Rabanal del Camino On our way up out of the  meseta  we passed through the medieval festival in Hospital de Órbigo, which celebrates the story of the knight who defeated the other jousters and got the girl. Apparently this is the inspiration for Cervantes’ Don Quixote. A priest stopped to tell us the story while we were caring for our feet at the end of town. It was actually very sweet. He wrote a book on the Quixotic pilgrim who, like Cervantes' dreamer desires a better life for society, and for him or herself, and endures the pain to get there. The Camino is a quest inward to make a difference outwardly. He said the pain in our feet makes the Camino mean something to us. He blessed us. As we crossed the mountain pass of  Santo Toribio toward Astorga,  with the red soil and blue-blue skies, we came across Diego who has provided pilgrims free food and drink for eight years. A shop owne...

León to Villadangos del Páramo After the mass last night, at the León Cathedral, we stayed out to enjoy the evening. The Spanish culture is so social—everyone enjoying a paseo along the narrow streets and gathering around a drink and free tapas. The first place we stopped was right in front of the Cathedral. At our last stop, we splurged and paid for the morcilla (tripe blood sausage on toast—surprisingly good) and vermut casero from Paco at La Bicha. His spicy chorizo on bread tapa was also great. This morning we stumbled on the Saturday farmer's market. Beautiful produce, cured meats and cheeses, under colorful tents, and people connecting with one another. We had breakfast looking at the Cathedral. It’s hard to get the three story structure in the picture. We took the audio tour and loved the descriptions of how and when it was built.  The thirteenth century was a boom for architects and builders (see Pillars of the Earth ). Coming out of the da...

Sahagún to Reliegos to León In Sahagún we celebrated the halfway city of the Camino. We are the blue dot in this map.  The last few days were really challenging and long along the meseta. As I wrote in my last blog, there are very few churches and very few masses, or pilgrims blessings, in this section of the Camino. But the hostel in Sahagún was a great surprise. Our four French friends told us there was a pilgrim mass at the Monasterio de Santa Cruz, so we decided to stay the night at the Santa Cruz  albergue.  Father Andres is a Marist priest from Rome and he is leading his team in new ministry in this Benedictine monastery of nuns. Apparently, the ministry  of the nuns in prayer and work— ora et labora— doesn’t lend itself to a ministry of hospitality or evangelism in the albergue. Andres and Daniel, from Madrid, invited us to small group sharing. We all picked a card that reflected our experience so far on the Camino. Their hope is to i...