My Journey to Santiago de Compostela Part XV

Art, Kim and I left Burgos together on a cloudy day.  The previous day it had rained in Burgos although not hard enough to require us to use a raincoat.  But it would be a pretty cool day for walking 33 kilometers through the “meseta”.  This time, the Camino would take us to small villages again, each with its own church four to five centuries old.  At one point, we helped an old English lady who was riding a tricycle go up the hill.  People travel the Camino in all sorts of vehicles…

We first went through Tardajos, then Rabé de las Calzadas, a lovely town where there were several murals that I captured on my iphone camera.  One of the murals meant so much to me because it depicted a scene of a woman called Denise who had probably died on the Camino.  My godmother who died when she was thirty-five was the one who raised me until I was eleven years-old.  I suffered a lot when she and I had to say goodbye at the old airport in Port-au-Prince on a sunshiny day of 1963 as she was boarding her Panam flight to Kingston, Jamaica then to NYC.  It was the last time that I would see her alive, for a year later she died on an operating table in a New York City hospital on September 10, 1964.  When I saw that mural in Rabé de las Calzadas, it was like she was there with me and would give me the strength I needed to walk the remaining 480 kilometers to Santiago de Compostela.

On that day, I met three new friends, a Puerto Rican couple from Boston, Felix and Laura, and Lindsay from the Netherlands.  We went to the same albergue at Hontanas and had a paella for dinner.  I sat with Felix and Laura and they told me that they had a friend, a Haitian woman called Dominique, who had asked them to say prayers for Haiti during their pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.  They gave me a small card with the Haitian flag on one side and the prayer on the other.

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