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Rest Day in Burgos
Our rest days are always highly anticipated as we don’t have to get up early and rush out into the cold darkness and start walking. We do have to find a lavanderia and wash all of our clothes though. In the larger cities we also search out ethnic restaurants other than Spanish for a change…
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Belorado to San Juan de Ortega and on to Burgos
This is another 15 mile day which is about our daily average and there are more rolling hills which keeps it interesting. We leave before sunrise using our headlamps. It is quite cool at 52 degrees but with the exertion and humidity we get sweaty quite quickly. San Juan de Ortega has a population of…
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Najera to Santa Domingo de la Calzada and then on to Belorado
Our typical days are getting up at 6-6:30am, breakfast at 7 and heading out in darkness 7-8. We like to walk 4-6 miles before stopping for another breakfast as the breakfast fare at our lodgings is fairly meager with minimal fruit, cereals, maybe yogurt with lots of bread, ham and cheese. Jim likes a Spanish…
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Logroño to Najera
After a one day rest, nice bath soaks and all freshly laundered clothes we are ready to set out on a 16 mile day which ended up being 17.7 with over 1,000 feet of elevation gain.
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Rest Day In Logroño
We have only walked four days and 61.85 miles. but are looking forward to a rest day in Logroño which is a city of 150,000 with a Cathedral of course. Our hotel is adequate, in the city center and has a bathtub which is great for soaking our sore bodies. Actually neither of us has…
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Camino de Santiago Francés, From Pamplona to Logroño
We walked almost half of the Camino del Norte just one year ago now. We did well from San Sebastián to Bilbao and from Bilbao to Santander. Jim began struggling and we had to abort the pilgrimage on October 3 in San Vicente de la Barquera when Jim just felt that he couldn’t go on…
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Pamplona
Hemingway reportedly made Pamplona world famous for its weeklong festival of the running of the bulls when he wrote The Sun Also Rises in 1926. We are going there, not for the Festival of San Fermin as it is known in Spain, but to begin a 451 mile pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Our goal…
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Deb Does London
Deb Camara has become a very close friend and an adopted daughter. We first met Deb as a childhood friend and running companion of our daughter-in-law Catarina Gomes Cipriani. Deb is a social worker dealing with high risk children in Somerville Massachusetts. It is a very intense, high stress job which she is very adept…
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More Guests in London
Our last two weeks in London we are double booked at times which requires our houseguests to find alternative accommodations which they all accomplished quite well.
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Philip & Phyllis in London
Jim has three brothers all of whom have been featured in this blog from time to time. The youngest brother Philip and his wife Phyllis last visited us in Seville. They were scheduled to visit us again in Madrid this spring but were unable make the trip due to Covid issues. Given that we missed…
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Braverman’s in London
Jennifer Ludlum Braverman worked with Jim in the Emergency Department and then with Sandy in the PACU at Lahey Clinic. She then met Igor Braverman while working in the PACU as he was an anesthesiologist. We have watched them through their courtship, marriage, childbirth and parenting of Sophie. Jennifer and Sophie visited us in London…
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Münich
Our six night stay in Munich was set in motion by our now very close friends Sigi and Paul who we first met in June of 2018 through an email connection initiated by our Boston neighbor Peggy Scott. We have gotten together many times since then both at their lovely home in Richmond UK and…
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Last Days in Porto
Dick and Andrew left us on the 19th of July and we have seven more days to explore Porto on our own. One day was spent walking the Portuguese Camino which we have already written about. After they left in the morning we headed for the Pálacio de Bolsa, also called the Stock Exchange Palace.…
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The Stalkers Find Us In Porto
Our upstairs neighbors from a past life, Andrew Buzzi and Dick Maniace, deserve the credit for inspiring our present lifestyle of living wherever we desire around the world. Unlike us who have completely dispossessed our selves of everything, they have been accumulating houses, furniture and even a car. They have recently sold houses in Sitges…
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Porto Portugal
We have now been to the Açores twice and to Lisbon once in 2014 for Jim’s 65th birthday but we have never been to Porto, the second largest city in Portugal. Portugal is intriguing to us as we don’t know enough about it. It is relatively inexpensive and the language is quite difficult to understand…