And to Finish ...

How do you finish the tale of such a great adventure, that has been a major influence on my life for the past 3 years, if not longer? I've been thinking long and hard, and there's no easy way to do it.

I think I'll just share a last selection of photos that have escaped the blog so far, and offer a few random bear thoughts to go with them.

The path of the camino has some lovely sections and some not so lovely, but if it were all the same, it wouldn't be half as interesting.

I did enjoy sections like the one in my first photo ...


We'd be walking through a woodland glade, with the sun shining through, enjoying a soft dirt track under our paws and some nice easy walking. And then, we'd come across a group of pilgrims having a picnic by a small stream. We would realise we knew them as companions along the way, and pause for a few friendly words. You might find it hard to see them behind my minder, but there were pilgrim picnicers there.

In fact, among that particular group of picnicers, were a lovely Dutch couple, minders of someone who became a good camino friend of George, Yorkie and myself. This was none other than Artis de Partis, who you see with me in my next photo (we were actually outside Santiago cathedral at the time).


I feel quite ashamed now that in an earlier post, before I got to know him, I referred to Artis as a strange creature! He is of interesting appearance, but that's as far as strange goes. He is delightful and has a very interesting life as the mascot of Amsterdam's Artis zoo. He is very well travelled and, if you look at the zoo's website you will see pictures of Artis all over the world. I'm sure a picture of him in Santiago will be appearing soon.

We'd like to visit Amsterdam before too long and, when we go, we will visit the zoo and look up Artis.

But back to the camino and another lovely quirk of the route. On more than one occasion we saw these adaptations to the sign used to warn motorists to drive carefully as the road was shared with the camino path.


We felt that the addition of the hair and skirt was graffiti at it's best - adding humour and not destroying the original. Everytime we saw it, it put a smile on our faces.

We didn't have a smile on our faces though, when we were woken in the middle of the night at the Rabanal alberque, by pilgrims getting up at about 5.00 a.m. to start walking in darkness. However, as we'd been woken up we also made an early start, setting out at 7.30 a.m. - even then it was still dark. We did feel it was worth it though to be able to see our beautiful surrounds gradually revealed by a lovely sunrise.


We concluded that perhaps every pilgrim should see at least one sunrise, and lots of sunsets (more of the latter as these don't require the early starts!)

Finally, for me, it was having such wonderful walking campanions as George, Yorkie and Pedro, that made our walk special. They may be veteran travellers, far better travelled than me, but they are definitely not travel weary and always take a great delight in each new day on the road.

Yorkie will always be Yorkie though, and here he is being thoroughly typical: trust him to find the biggest bottles of wine and beer on the camino. It isn't just that Yorkie's small, these were seriously big bottles ...


... the wine bottle must have held nearly a gallon. We couldn't take it with us though as we were carrying all our own gear: one of the things that makes a pilgrim a true pilgrim rather than simply a plastic one.

But I won't set off on that hobby horse again, so it's time to end. I hope you enjoyed travelling with us to Santiago via the blog.

We don't have a new adventure to report yet, but we'll be back soon with news of life in the Bear Cave.

Lots of love Gio, on behalf of the Camino bears xxx

Gio's Church Selection

I'm sure you won't be too surprised to hear that we did visit one or two churches along the way. The numbers weren't as great as you might think, due to the fact that, as we found on our earlier trip, the Spanish do tend to keep their churches locked. It's a great shame.

Quite soon into this trip, we walked through the big city of Leon. The Camino took us right past the entrance to this magnificent cathedral ...


The office where we went to get a stamp for our pilgrim passports was just after the rather fine screen in our next picture...


The artwork was so intricate that there was almost too much to see. I concentrated on the colours instead as I'm a simple soul, and found some of the frills too much.

In contrast, I really loved the simplicity of the church at Rabanal. It was just outside the albergue we stayed at, run by the English Co-fraternity of St James. It was very old and very peaceful. When we arrived a French pilgrim was playing his recorder inside and it sounded wonderful.


A few days later we went into a church that was open and, while the church was not really to my taste, with a bit too much gold and heavy decoration, I was more pleased that you can imagine, to see my old friend St. Roch, with his dog, again. We saw St Roch quite a lot in France but only occasionally in Spain. He is the patron saint of pilgrims and was a similar sort of figure to St Francis of Assisi, so, with me being a Franciscan bear, there is an immediate affinity.


You'll always know if you've seen St Roche as he always has his very distinctive thigh wound and the dog who saved his life by bringing him food when he was sick, at his feet.

We'll talk a bit more about the big one, Santiago Cathedral, next time.

Lots of love Gio xxx