Sept 21: the knights who say "nee"

For those of you not familiar with the knights who say "nee", that comes from the Monty Python movie "The Holy Grail".  It's a great movie, if you like British humor.  Anyway, I thought I would take this opportunity to share some photos of some castles we've seen the last couple of days on the Camino. 

The first 2 pictures are of a fabulous castle in Ponferrada.  Back in the 1100's, it started as a Knights Templar castle that was used to protect the pilgrims on the Camino.  However, as some of you may know, the Knights Templar were dissolved by the Catholic Church in the early 1300's (supposedly with a lot of pushing by the French king at the time, who happened to owe the Knights Templars a lot of money and who also happened to be the brother of the pope at the time.  Furthermore, many of the Knights Templar who lived in France were burned at the stake, and many of the remaining Knights sought refuge in Spain).  Anyway, other Spanish nobility added on significantly to the original Knights Templar castle, to create a trully significant castle in the region with multiple levels of defense (one being the river that you can see in the second photo with the castle in the background.  There is even a tunnel that runs down to the river to give the castle access to water should it come under seige).  Many parts of the original walls remain.  However, there has also been a significant amount of restoration done to help people get a feel for what a real castle would have been like in its heyday, which was very cool to see.

The third picture is of the castle in Villafranca de Bierzo.  It dates back to the 15th century and is pretty much as it was back then.  Unfortunately, we were not able to get in to see the interior of this castle.

Today we hiked to O'Cebreiro, which is in the province of Galicia.  Provinces are like our states, and then they have regions within their provinces.  We've walked across 4 provinces now, Navarra, Rioja, Castilla y Leon, and Galicia.  Today's hike concluded with a 600 meter (1,800 foot) ascent.  We saw dark clouds in the distance and heard thunder, so we moved along at a pretty good pace.  Galicia is know for it's unpredictable weather, particularly rain.  Interestingly, it also has a strong Celtic influence.  I guess being near the coast they had earlier contact with the Celts and absorbed a fair amount of that.  They were even playing bagpipe music in one of the local stores in O'Cebreiro.  Our book said that we would see a significant difference in culture and weather when we entered the Galicia province, and they weren't kidding.  Also of note: 1 week from today we will walk into Santiago.  We are contemplating whether to get up really early to make the 12 noon mass for the pilgrims (that would probably require us to start hiking around 6:30am, when it is still dark). There is a noon mass for pilgrims every day, but we aren't clear yet if they swing the fumador (the large incense burning thing) for every mass or just the Sunday mass.  We'll have to see if we can get more definitive information as we get closer to Santiago.

One last point of interest: it's 8pm here, and we are sitting in the bar of our hotel right now.  We are watching the Redskins play the Eagles on tv while following the Bengals game on Linda's phone.  So the NFL has definitely gone international, because the game was already on the tv when we came in and nobody has asked to change the channel since.  Except of course Linda, who asked the bartender if it was possible to get the Bengals game on the tv, but unfortunately it was not available (hence, following the Bengals on the phone).