On the Camino again
Aug. 23rd, 2011 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWe seem to have booked ourselves a holiday. We've been plotting it for a little while now, but all the pieces have fallen into place, we have had confirmations from all our chosen hotels, and today Amazon delivered the road atlas - so it must be happening.
Kindly disregard anything you may have heard me say earlier in the year about going to Scandinavia. we were very tempted, and we may yet go and visit some of the locations of the crime fiction![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler enjoys so much. But we cooled towards the idea when we realised that there is currently no ferry from Tyneside to Scandinavia, and the journey would involve travelling south before we could go north. Eventually, if we must we must, but for the time boing we are sulking.
After that we tossed a number of ideas back and forth, and they all sounded fun, but there was nothing that filled us with "Of course! That's what we want to do!" Until I was leafing through the Britanny Ferries brochure, and found right at the back a few ferry plus hotel packages in Spain: including one which they described as the Camino de Santiago.
Over a number of holidays we have actually walked (almost) the GR65, the long-distance footpath that follows the Chemin de Saint Jacques, the pilgrim route from Le Puy in the centre of France down through the Pyrenees at Roncesvalles. And we'd always told ourselves that one day we would carry on across the north of Spain to Santiago de Compostela, only maybe - probably - not on foot. From not having thought of that particular trip for this year, I switched in an instant to cetainty that this was what I wanted to do.
We haven't bought the full Britanny Ferries package, which seems more concerned with booking you into the paradors with which they have an arrangement than with following any historical pilgrim route, and certainly doesn't share our passion for completeness. We have put together a mixture of their ferry crossings and those hotels where they offered a good deal, some paradors booked through their own central booking system (which gave us a much better price except on the one that we hesitated over and then decidd to indulge ourselves) and one small hotel which we have booked direct online. I couldn't have done it - neither the planning nor the booking - without the internet.
Broadly, the plan is to sail to Bilbao, drive back into the Pyrenees and pick up not the 'Camino Frances' which we had been following but the 'Camino de Aragon' which crosses the mountains further east. We head west in a leisurely manner (we've allowed ourselves a couple of days in La Rioja) to about the midpoint of the Camino, then turn and head for the coast, with another couple of days in the mountains, just to have a look round.
In a month's time I will be in Spain.
Kindly disregard anything you may have heard me say earlier in the year about going to Scandinavia. we were very tempted, and we may yet go and visit some of the locations of the crime fiction
durham_rambler enjoys so much. But we cooled towards the idea when we realised that there is currently no ferry from Tyneside to Scandinavia, and the journey would involve travelling south before we could go north. Eventually, if we must we must, but for the time boing we are sulking.After that we tossed a number of ideas back and forth, and they all sounded fun, but there was nothing that filled us with "Of course! That's what we want to do!" Until I was leafing through the Britanny Ferries brochure, and found right at the back a few ferry plus hotel packages in Spain: including one which they described as the Camino de Santiago.
Over a number of holidays we have actually walked (almost) the GR65, the long-distance footpath that follows the Chemin de Saint Jacques, the pilgrim route from Le Puy in the centre of France down through the Pyrenees at Roncesvalles. And we'd always told ourselves that one day we would carry on across the north of Spain to Santiago de Compostela, only maybe - probably - not on foot. From not having thought of that particular trip for this year, I switched in an instant to cetainty that this was what I wanted to do.
We haven't bought the full Britanny Ferries package, which seems more concerned with booking you into the paradors with which they have an arrangement than with following any historical pilgrim route, and certainly doesn't share our passion for completeness. We have put together a mixture of their ferry crossings and those hotels where they offered a good deal, some paradors booked through their own central booking system (which gave us a much better price except on the one that we hesitated over and then decidd to indulge ourselves) and one small hotel which we have booked direct online. I couldn't have done it - neither the planning nor the booking - without the internet.
Broadly, the plan is to sail to Bilbao, drive back into the Pyrenees and pick up not the 'Camino Frances' which we had been following but the 'Camino de Aragon' which crosses the mountains further east. We head west in a leisurely manner (we've allowed ourselves a couple of days in La Rioja) to about the midpoint of the Camino, then turn and head for the coast, with another couple of days in the mountains, just to have a look round.
In a month's time I will be in Spain.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-23 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-24 08:05 am (UTC)And I'm really looking forward to seeing you, and talking about your Paris trip! (Tell me where this flat is where you will be staying?)