26th of August we still had to see one cultural highlight of León: the palace and monastery of the Basilica San Isidoro and connected to the cloister. It has a beautifully painted Romanic crypt in brilliant colours with the royal Pantheon. The building was built directly against the Roman city wall. It also shows a Renaissance library with its original leather cladded huge books, which one person couldn’t carry alone. To sum up the experience of León: it’s worth the trip. On our way out of town the Camino is passing by the Convento of San Marco which would have also been worth a visit, but we had to continue…

25th of August we had planned to discover the cultural highlights of León and to catch up on my diary. After having already seen so many cathedrals you think there will not be a lot more which could surprise you, but Santa Maria de la Regla is also called “Pulchra Leonina” which means “beautiful Leonese”. Even if a choir in the main ship interrupts the perspective of the complete space, it is one of the most outstanding gothic churches, comparable to the Sainte Chapelle in Paris where the supporting walls are reduced to the most minimalized structural ribs, vaults and pointed arches as possible. How did they discover that you…

24th of August it was still dark when the first pilgrims left the monastery at 6:00 o’clock. We were so much further west by now that actually we were at the same degree of longitude like Dublin, which lies already in a different time zone. But Spain keeps its whole time system connected to the central European time zone all over the country. The French Canadian group was getting ready to leave, and Sandrine the clergywoman who guided the group still wanted to wish me a good Camino with some confirming words which really touched me. It was very precious to meet someone who appreciates what I was doing with…

23rd of August I woke up at 2:30 and tried to find sleep again. As my pillow was on the bunkbed right by the door I was woken up each time someone needed to go to the toilet. Mostly they left the door open with the light coming in plus the draft in my face. There I was lying in my sleeping bag and following my mind like in the “Logical Song” by Supertramp. I was thinking about what I had focused on lately and what remains of all the things we were seeing on our way. Is it only the facades we see of which we even don’t have…

22nd of August we enjoyed the great choice of the breakfast buffet, which offered even very juicy Santiago de Compostela cakes which we never had before and grabbed two apples for our tour. Leaving town through a gate in the city wall which was in the style of the moors we passed a suburb of Burgos called “Villabilla” which reminded me of a German TV-advertisement for washing-up liquid where Villariba and Villabajo are both cleaning their Paella pans, but due to the detergent used by Villariba they were already continuing their fiesta while Villabajo was still scrubbing their pans. As there exists a supermarket chain in Austria called Billa I…

21st of August we were able to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary and Robert had chosen a nice hotel in Burgos which was located in a former seminary on the hillside below the Castillo de Burgos to give us a bit of a honeymoon feeling. After breakfast we were ready for some cultural program, but we were astonished to have to stand in line to get into the cathedral as it was turned into a museum. The way this cathedral accumulated human creativity over its building time of five centuries in which more and more styles, altars, tombs and chapels and so on were added to it was so overwhelming,…

20th of August we wanted to start from our hostel not too late as always, but the pumped up tire from last evening was flat again in the morning. Luckily the bike shop was close by and they promised us to get it repaired within one hour, which left me some time to work on my laptop. Everything was fixed and we could start an hour later. We used our museum tickets which were valuable even for today to see the convent of San Franciso before we biked on westwards. Leaving Santo Domingo de la Calzada we were trapped in a construction site of a highway. They had blocked the…

19th of August our hostel offered no breakfast and luckily Robert had found online a cafeteria on the way out of Logronño which offered porridge for breakfast. We were hungry and took even two portions and it helped to calm my tummy trouble. Very helpful when you want to be back on the road again biking. We left the city on well separated bike-lanes in the busy rush hour of the city and reached a beautiful park where all the Logroñians enjoyed their morning walk all the way up to an artificial water reservoir called Embalse de la Grajeira. We had to pass some highway crossings to reach Navarrete up…

18th of August Robert wanted to send a package back home with all the maps from France and the Pyrenees as we wouldn’t need them anymore. It was a bit like we had preached to the Taiwanese girl to send the unnecessary stuff by mail to follow the motto: “ less-is-more”. Robert was able to get rid of 1 kilo of weight – not personally but at least out of his bike bags. At the post office Robert had to get a number and wait in line while I was waiting outside where it started to rain. It was not a lot of rain, but it must have been either…

17th of August another heatwave was predicted for today and we had decided to stay one more night in Pamplona to avoid being on the bikes in more than 40° C. There was still so much to see in this beautiful city that it was great to discover more. They had even a little exhibition about the history of pilgrimage. Pamplona had originally been founded by the Roman Pompeius as Pompeiopolis. The city was destroyed several times by the Moors and in the year 778 by Charlemagne. Later in the 12th century the city got two more fortified cities in its close neighbourhood with different ethnic groups fighting each other,…