Friday morning June 7. We are just arisingFriday morning and we realized we have not explained much about our group and how our trip is organized. I'm sure we will be posting another blog after our day today, so please excuse the multiple postings.
We found out just before Christmas last year that several friends of ours were organizing a trip to Spain they were calling FEAT, which stands for Faith, Empires, and the Arts Tour. The 18-day tour includes a week walking on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, which is a pilgrimage walk that includes a number of routes through Spain, France and Portugal that all end up at Santiago de Compostela, Spain, the final resting place of St. James. Some of these routes are over 800 km. If you have seen the movie, The Way, starring Martin Sheen, you have seen what we are doing. We will be walking 115 km of the Portuguese Way, staring in Tui, Spain, and walking north to Santiago. But that is just the last week of our trip. The first week and a half we are touring Spain with 18 people from Northern California. Half of the group is made up of people we know from church. The trip was advertised locally, so the others are from Davis and other spots in California.
During our tour of Spain, we have a guide who has lead groups for many years. Danny, our guide from Barcelona who's parents are originally from England (hence perfect English) met us when we arrived in Madrid and has lead us on tours of Madrid, Toledo, Granada, Cordoba, now at our last stop before we head to The Way, Seville. Our days are a mixture of organized tour and meals, and time on our own. We have also had additional tour guides Danny has arranged who are experts in certain cities and attractions. They have been extremely interesting and helpful.
In addition to the sites and sounds of Spain, we have had to chance to meet and get to know those on the trip. A few we have seen around Davis over the years, so it's nice to finally get to know them. The others on the trip, including a young man who just completed his junior year of college, are all friendly, interesting and fun.
We will leave Seville on Saturday, around noon, by bullet train back to Madrid, then fly to Porto, Portugal late Saturday afternoon. After a night in Porto, we head to Tui, SpainSunday afternoon to begin our walk Monday morning. We will walk about 14 miles a day on our way to Santiago. That may seem like a lot of walking, but just during the past few days, we have been walking about 8-10 miles a day, so a few more miles should not be too hard.
Finally, we have to admit, we know nothing about blogging. We are 9 hours ahead of California time, so our day ends long before yours, and we have time to email our son, Josh, text and photos. He then posts them on this blog he has set up for us. Without Josh, our trip would be a total mystery to you all.
We have just finished breakfast and will be out the door soon to take in more of Seville. Keep up with our blog because we are sure we are going to experience many more exciting things we will want to tell you about.
Gib and Susan
Enjoy the Seville Cathedral, exit quickly if there is a hint of an earthquake. Apparently the cathedral has had some problems with earthquakes. It was built 600 years ago before engineers with college degrees, before earthquake standards, before building inspectors, before high tensile steel.
ReplyDeleteHere is a tidbit from Wikipedia..According to local (Seville) oral tradition, the members of the cathedral chapter said: "Let us build a church so beautiful and so great that those who see it built will think we were mad". Construction began in 1402 and continued until 1506.
Thank you for sharing.
Make sure you have someone explain the NO8DO that you see everywhere in Sevilla.
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