The Spain Wandering - Day 12: Atop The Santiago de Compostela Cathedral.

We spent the morning doing some wandering before an 11:30 Tour of the Cathedral's Roof and Ratchet Tower.  

Breakfast was at a spot that cops frequented, figured that's a good indicator!

The trick to avoiding crowds is to get there early folks.  Once they started the Mass schedules, queues (long ones), formed as one isnt allowed in then unless actually attending mass.

Lots of pilgrims are on site, having finished their "Camino".

It was May Day here in Spain, a National Holiday so lots of folks were onsite as well with their families.

And of course several rather large tour groups bussed in from other cities and probably ports.

Some photos before the tour when we perused the Cathedral Museum (included in tour fees), dodging slow moving groups of tourons who liked to block passage.

Medieval tapestries:

The Sun finally started hitting the front of the cathedral after 10:30 a.m. 

Note: this posting has pictures where the people have been deleted.  If only such places were this empty all the time.

Here's the pics from the rooftop/tower tour:

Yep, we actually meandered on the cathedral roof!

Tour guide talks to the group, you can see the back of the cathedral's frontage. 

It was a 25 person group we were part of, I chose to edit out everyone but Martha and the guide, out.

You can, through several windows, peek inside the church above the main altar ( I think).

Ming the gap!

The queues to get in, it was even worse in the afternoon.

Another group following ours:

The main plaza, yes that's a carousel.

The tower we went up is Called the Ratchet Tower, the other tower is the Bell Tower.  Why Ratchet?

The below device, several of them I believe, were mounted in the tower.  Inside each, mechanisms caused a loud racheting noise.  This noise was used to announce Easter Worship.

Lunch after the tour was at the Piccolo Italia Cafe/Bar.  Good Spaghetti Carbonara and Pizza Italiana!

We rested the afternoon away, only a brief rerun to check out the Pilgrim Museum only to find it closed.  May Day, you know.

Dinner was Galician Vegetable Soup, tasty.  

Martha and I are still coughing frequently.

The Spain Wandering - Day 11: Santiago de Compostela

Another driving day today, we made it to the city of Santiago de Compostela it's on the hotel is not even 400m from the cathedral. 

Parking is difficult in the city so we are paying for parking.  8 Euros/24 hrs.  Not bad, considering.

The hotel Wi-Fi isn't great and our cellular access is poor there.  No matter, we found other places with better signal, one of them being O'Galaico where I'm writing this while awaiting the dinner hour.

Around 4 pm we ventured out to do some exploring, we found the Cathedral easily but ended up also going in and taking pictures. It was raining all afternoon soon after we arrived.

The art museum which faces the front of the Cathedral and main plaza.  Some AI editing to remove the kids' carousel in front.

Near the building where the pilgrims check in for their final stamps signifying the completion of their "Camino"

The symbol of the Camino, the shell, can be found in many places near the Cathedral and of course guides pilgrims along the routes.

Santiago or Saint James

In case you're unfamiliar with the Camino de Santiago: LINK

More exploration tomorrow in hopefully drier weather though it's not looking good. 

 

The Spain Wandering - Day 10: Mountain Driving Day

Tuesday, April 29

No real objectives today after Martha determined during breakfast that a visit to a house designed by Gaudi, wasn't worth the time.

So, we wandered westwards.  Drove into the coastal city of Gijon near Oviedo.  No real reason, just see what we could see.

We parked in a paid parking lot and confirmed they scan your license plate when you come in to park. And then use that number to pay for whatever time you use and when the system sees you have paid they open the gate automatically when you come to it at the exit. Pretty slick. 

The parking attendant that was there provided this information to me, and also mentioned that the power outage yesterday played chaos on their system of course. They ended up just giving everybody a free day.

We wandered to the Mayor Plaza near the Old Town Center.

La Iglesona (big church)

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart

The city was bustling, hectic and a bit crowded.  We checked out the beach promenade area.

The day had turned quite warm and we decided to leave town as it was quite hectic and crowded.  Marta tried to find us a hotel close to the national park of Somiedo where there are some lakes to do some hiking by. It's also within the mountainous region of northern Spain.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at things we ended up taking the long way to our hotel.   

Turns out picking a hotel location on the small screen of a phone doesn't work for us while we are moving. The hotel in question when we got to it didn't work for us and we had to go and make changes from there.

I choose to look at it as fortunately since it gave us the opportunity to drive on some spectacular in terms of views and terrifying at times, in terms of narrowness and local drivers, country lanes.

There is apparently very little traffic on these country lanes (coded yellow on maps/signs), so the locals are used to using up all of what is euphemistically expected to fit two vehicles at the same time.

They also drive these roads way above the speed limit, if and when the speed limit is posted that is, mostly it was up to one's judgment apparently. 

 The fact that these roads are very twisty with lots of blind curves caused them to swerve when they spotted us coming at them in the other "lane".  

These roads allowed us to cross several mountain ridges, with tight switchbacks and incredible views once you were on top. 

We didn't stop a lot for pics, no real safe spots usually.

Let's just say we were happy to get to what are green-coded roads, where there are actual two almost full-sized lanes with marked centerlines!

We made it to the village of Samartin and checked in.

Dinner was at 8pm and I tried the Asturian Stew with Faba beans.  Tasty.

I'm almost, hopefully recovered from the Cruise Ship Crud.  Martha is fast behind.  Hopefully, our energy levels will rise accordingly.

The Spain Wandering - Day 9: Mirador de Sotres

We drove to the funicular at Bulnes this morning thinking that it would provide us with a better view of the Naranjo de Bulnes peak pictured in the last post.

It's a short drive from the town we're staying near at but when we got there the parking lot was full and it didn't look promising.  The cost was 21.50 Euros per passenger too.  

There was a road that kept heading up the mountain so we decided to see what was up there instead.

After several kilometers of a very twisty and narrow road (AS264) and nice views of canyon walls we came upon the town of Sotres.  A quaint little town that has a Mirador (viewpoint) of its own.  It's called Mirador de Los Jorcaos.

It was even awarded a historical preservation award by the king and queen back in 2024. 

A few Km from Sotres:

Hilly Farm

You can see the road we came in on far below.   I was standing about 300 ft from the Mirador platform at this point.

I was trying for a better angle on the below peak:

Sotres is a link in a national trail system.  You can see another trail zig-zaggimg its way up the mountain to the right.

Some of the locals watched us taking pictures:

A view of Sotres:

Another sleepy village further on, we think accessible by hikers only.  Probably by locals with permits, there was a sign saying no parking available.

We've also seen over a dozen+ descendants of the Suzuki Samurai over in this area.  Two door Vitaras and even a stretched body model:

It made me miss the Sammy.

Returning to the hotel, we noticed that the lights weren't working.  Hmmm.  I checked with the staff and they said it was out in the whole town and "welcome to Spain".

Chucking, I returned to the room and Martha said the news was reporting a power outage for all of Spain and Portugal.

Quite a big event for the country, we napped.

Ironically, cellular internet access worked while the hotel Wi-Fi went down.  I figured backup generators perhaps 

It work work till 6:30 or so when power returned.  Then, internet access went down until 8:30 pm.  No idea why.

We leave tomorrow....stay tuned.

I'm slowly recovering from the cruise ship crud I picked up, Martha is also experiencing symptoms and is about two days behind me.