Photos

There is a poem on wikipaedia about the common cormorant or shag which lays its eggs in paper bags. Once considered a rare bird there are many near where we live.

A young cormorant on a nearby lake.

One of the hills near our home with lovely autumn colours.


A Victorian letterbox with an interesting note about the posting of coins in letters.

Autumn sights

We continue to make plans for a return to the Camino Primitivo in 2012. We now have our tickets to Spain and our Credenciales, to start in Tineo, and we are planning a rough guide to each day. This helps to work out how long we will need to reach Santiago as well as where we can find accomodation, food etc along the route. We are using the CSJ (Confraternity of St James) guide, as Terry did in 2009. There are updates, more accomodation in some places, less in others.
We intend to use the ferry and the FEVE again and finally the ALSA bus to reach Tineo before setting off to walk. It is over 200km from Tineo to Santiago through the mountains. Hopefully we will reach Santiago with time to see some more of western Galicia, maybe Padron or Coruña before heading for home again.

Meanwhile we have been walking as much as possible locally, while the weather has been good, to keep ourselves in practise. Walks are varying between 7km and 15km, up and down hills, but chiefly on the road now as the paths are very wet. On the shorter walks we have been carrying full weight packs and lighter on the longer ones.

The highly poisonous Fly Agaric toadstools are a bright splash of colour.

The heron was waiting and watching for his dinner.

Walks around Clumber

Our preparations for next year continue with a variety of walks. In Clumber we found a beautiful walk; down the lime tree avenue, past the house, right around the lake, through the woods and back to the lime tree avenue. A total of 12kms. There are no steep hills but we can find them elsewhere.

The weather has been kind to us until this week - although we did manage a 12km walk, with hills, before the rain set in. We tend to carry about 3/4 of our Camino pack weight at present, partly as we are using our small packs which hold less. We'll put the weight up early in the New Year. We are also checking out our gear, for wear etc. New mid layer socks as they are the ones which wear most but otherwise we'll take the same basic kit that we took last year.

View across the lake

The lime tree avenue