San Juan Bautista albergue in Granon (the second story windows were our room)

(Azofra to Granon: 21.9 km, 6 hours; about 30,050 steps plus 3,200 later)

Micah 6:6-8
v. 8 He shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

I am walking more humbly than I used to. Pain will do that to you. At home, getting things done, I don’t suffer fools gladly who dither along the walkway impeding my progress. Here, with my slower pace and occasional limp, I am in the way of the young hard-chargers. “Buen Camino!” they call out cheerily as they pass. They’re not irritated. They share the road willingly. They walk humbly with me. I too need to show mercy and walk humbly with those who are slower than me. Lord, may more patient walking with others help me to walk more humbly with you.

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Maurice said we had another long day ahead and filled out the slips for both packs to be sent again. We left the albergue and went to the bar to get juice, coffee for Maurice and chocolate croissants for breakfast, supplemented with yogurt from the store and a package of what I thought might be granola to mix into it. It turned out to be tiny crackers, corn crunchies and seeds but we stirred it in anyway. By 7:45 the sun was rising over the grapevines. Between every row big clusters of grapes were lying on the ground; none of the pilgrims we talked to knew what the story was on that, but there were thousands more clusters ripening to perfection on the vines. “Let the vineyards be fruitful, Lord, and fill to the brim our cup of blessing!”

About 9:15 we reached the top of our first mountain, where a young man offered fruit, cold drinks and souvenir trinkets for a donation; a sign noted Spain’s 60% youth unemployment rate. We bought a plum and a banana. Soon we were in a mostly uninhabited golf course development outside Ciruena. It was eerie walking through blocks of empty buildings, and it took a half-hour detour to find a bar for our second breakfast (tortilla, coffee and coke) and the WC. As we left town the sun came out and followed us into Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Saint Dominic of the Roadway. About 900 years ago the Benedictines wouldn’t accept Domingo because he was illiterate so he devoted his life to improving facilities for the many pilgrims passing through on the way to Santiago, founding a church and a hospice and ending up having the town named after him. There is a legend involving a cooked chicken springing to life so chicken motifs were everywhere. The old streets looked interesting and there were interpretive signs in English, but we had no time to spend, so we got a sello at the church and kept moving.

The grapes suddenly ended. At 1:45 we arrived at our goal for the day, San Juan Bautista in Granon, where the guidebooks and previous pilgrims promised we would have the true pilgrim experience. The entrance was through a lovely little green space and up the dark bell tower stairs to a wooden hallway in the church annex, where the hospitalera checked us in. Then, passing the men’s and women’s one-seater bathrooms, we went back down the bell tower stairs one level to the sleeping hall, where about twenty brown mats were laid out on the floor…our beds…without pillows. “Are you sure you want to stay here?” asked Maurice. I took a deep breath. “Of course. I want the true pilgrim experience.”

It was time for laundry. I took our clothes back upstairs, past the aseos and the hospitalero, rounded the corner through the lovely common area and continued up more stairs, walked across a slant-ceilinged overflow sleeping area and up a couple steps to a door at the end. It led to an odd little hallway, with a no-entry sign across stone steps down to the left and a few more steps up to the right; I climbed them and I was in the church eaves, over the tops of the domes of the side chapels. A small laundry sink was against the wall to the right; clotheslines were high overhead up some old cement steps to the uneven stone top of one of the domes and across a sloping floor. To the left a railing prevented falls down a floor or so to more stone domes. The whole scene was inexplicable; in all the places I’ve been in Europe where I’ve said “They’d never allow this in the US!” this was the most unallowable. I washed my clothes and went back down to ask the hospitalera if there wasn’t an outdoor place to hang them, because in addition to the difficulty of the space they would never dry. Oh, yes, there is a clothesline in the sun. She pointed to a hand-drawn map on the bulletin board: You go through the garden and across the street and to the end of the park and past the bus stop and down the lane to a yard where there is a clothesline. Really? Another pilgrim, Lisa, who was just going to check on her clothes there said it was so and it wasn’t far and we could walk together.

Laundry in the attic (pilgrims were not allowed to use the washer)

The dangerous conditions behind where I was washing clothes

Clotheslines past the bus stop

Another feature of this albergue was a piano. I could hardly wait to get the chores done, whip out my ipadded music and try it. The room was empty when I had my chance. I fingered a few chords. Hmm. I selected a piece of music and began to play. Oh dear. Although this piece of furniture looked like a piano and felt like a piano, it was not a piano. It was a dis-harmonium. Perhaps there were cats living in its bowels, cats made screechingly unhappy when its strings were struck. I persevered through the piece, intent on finishing what I started, chimerically hoping the keys just needed to be warmed up. Done. But before I could make my escape, the older hospitalera appeared, wrapped her arms around me and, obviously deluded, whispered sweet Spanish nothings into my ear about beautiful music and continuing and pleasing San Pedro. (Pleasing San Pedro? Maybe I misunderstood.) A little later I returned to the quiet common area to write and plug in my ipad. The ipad has a new habit of starting to play my podcasts unbidden, but this time it started broadcasting one of our Camino music playlists into the silence. I was horrified, and it seemed to take forever for me to figure out how to turn it off. Just as I did the same hospitalera was at my shoulder. “Gregorian chant!” She practically swooned. More beautiful music, she said, and I could certainly continue to play it here. OK, except that by the time I managed to find that album she was out of sight.

We somehow missed helping with the dinner preparation in the tiny kitchen adjoining the common area (probably retrieving the laundry from afar, by which time there were already too many people standing around trying be useful). We attended mass at the church and went forward with dozens of other pilgrims for a special blessing at the end. We chatted in the garden with the French who stopped by to visit; they were staying in a nearby pension.

More tables were set up in the common area and all of San Juan Bautista’s pilgrims gathered for dinner. Some Italians had been commandeered to cook, so after a long wait and the satisfying Spanish salad (lettuce, tomatoes, onions, tuna and corn with hardboiled eggs ringing the edges of the large platter, but no dressing) we had a fine cheesy pasta dish with asparagus and something like guanciale. Dessert was peaches in a yogurt sauce.

It was late. We had readied our mats and it wasn’t long before the floor of the parish annex was filled with sleeping pilgrims.