Howdee Gaudi

Jane: well, sorry to be teaching grandmother to suck eggs as obviously you all know that Antoni Gaudi from Catalan was the father of Catalan modernism and responsible for many architectural masterpieces in Spain, promoting artisanal crafts and skills including ceramics, carpentary, stonemasonary and ironwork to produce his unique style of architecture.  Here´s a bit of it.

 This was Gaudi´s Casa de Botines in Leon.

 This is Gaudi´s bishops´palace in Astorga.  You can see he liked a turret. In fact you could be forgiven for thinking we had leaped to Disney Land, Paris. It was fascinating inside, however.

These were the amazing vaults inside.  Every tile on the edges was hand crafted.

This is St James (who we are trailing to Santiago to see) in his "Moor-slayer" persona.

I don´t know about you and flying ducks across your living room wall, but clearly in 13th centuary the penchant was for flying bishops.

This is a 13th centuary figure of St James in a more benign mode (and as fresh as if this had been crafted yesterday).

There were an amazing number of very ancient, but very exquisite figures of the Virgin Mary.  She was often missing her crown and the fruit (??) she was holding in her right hand.  She would always be dressed in the rich raimant of the period and decorated in gold leaf.  The figure below is a particularly nice example from the medieval period.

We also visited the cathedral and its museum and we were amazed at the work that went into embroidering the church vestments -- gold and metallic threads cannot have been easy to manipulate and the curly fleeces on the Lamb of God must have taken weeks to complete and nobody would have seen this detail.

Below is me hanging onto a pilgrim´s staff to avoid being blown into the Leon Hills (which we have to face tomorrow).

Astorga is both a popular pilgrim town, with many pilgrims passing through all day, but also other tourists are here - we guess they are visiting the chocolate museum and purchasing bars of chocolate the size of gold ingots on display in the numerous sweet shops on every street.

Charlotte. This is me at the entrance to a very peaceful park that has wonderful views of the mountains in the distance, we head off tomorrow towards them. I am very hopeful my leg will be OK, we have rested, I am taking massive anti-inflamatory tablets, icing my shin, rubbing in embrocation and strapping it. ( we watched very helpful you tube films to instruct on appropriate strapping) We have also been walking around Astorga and going up and down many steps. My leg is sore but 90% better so as long as we rest frequently and take each day as it comes we will get to Santiago in about 12 days!!!!

We are getting my backpack portered to each albergue for the next few days, so we have had to buy a larger pack for Jane to carry as I need a small pharmacy to see to my needs!!!

Wish us luck, hasta luega. Love to all of you from C & J.