Can I spend a minute talking about time zones, daylight hours and daily temperatures? Thanks.
When flying over to Europe, I looked at the time zone distribution in Europe. Either I have forgotten or never taken notice before, but all of Europe is on the same time, from Vienna in the east to Spain in the west. Only Great Britain and Portugal are on their own time zone, more appropriate to their geographic location. If one looks at a time zone map with the vertical lines running through the countries one will see that Europe actually spans 3 time zones, yet they must have agreed to put all of the EU on the same time. This would be the same as if the US from Chicago to Seattle was all one time zone, 7:00am in Chicago is 7:00am in Seattle. This creates something remarkable. When the sun sets in Chicago at, say 7:00pm, it would still be two hours before sunset in Seattle. The sun would not set until 9:00pm.
Here in Europe, the sun sets in Vienna at 7:15pm. In Spain, where we are west of Madrid, the sun sets at 8:43pm, an hour and a half later. Spain has sun late into the evening, Austria gets dark early. In Vienna, the sun rises at 6:25am. In Spain, it rises at 8:02am. Great for the hard working Austrians to get up early and get to work and go to bed early. Great for the fun loving Spanish to stay up late in the twilight and then sleep in until the sun comes up.
The reason I bring this up is daily temperatures. We have had a week of nice cool temperatures, lows in the mid 40º, highs in the lower 70’s. The weather is changing now, with highs predicted in the upper 80’s coming. This means we want to be done hiking before noon to avoid walking in the sun in the heat of the day. Or you would think. . . . Looking at the temperature predictions given by the hour, the high temperatures are not reached until late afternoon or early evening, like 4 to 6 o’clock. Until I looked at the time zone situation, I could not understand how that could be. Now I see that 4 in the afternoon here should really be 2 in the afternoon. The time zone shifts everything about 2 hours later in western Spain. This means we can hike until 2 or 3 and not be hiking in the heat of the day.
To test this idea, at 2:00pm one day I took out my compass and found due south. The sun should have been 30º to the west of due south at 2:00pm. The sun was exactly due south-the definition of 12:00 noon. Everything here is shifted 2 hours later. Thanks for indulging me in my time zone ramblings.
We got up at 5:00am, snuck out of our room and got prepared to walk, me in the men’s bathroom, Sally in the women’s. We met in the lobby, made final preparations and walked out the door about 5:55am. We had about 5 miles of downhill before us. The Camino parallels the road. We chose to walk the road rather than the trail for a couple reasons. In the dark, footing is much more sure on the road and the road is less steep and therefore easier on Sally’s knees. At this time in the morning the road was deserted and we only encountered about 5 or 6 cars in the two hours we were on the road.
At the bottom of the hill lies the town of Moleneseca, a beautiful, quaint town. We stopped at the first red chair we saw and enjoyed a break. We had completed a little more than 5 miles in under 2 hours. Here we met Karen and Kelly, two sisters from England. On the road again, we were walking out of town next to a highway. Eventually, the way got on less traveled roads. Our immediate destination was the Knights Templar castle in Ponferrada, about 5 miles away. We got there about 10:30, paid our 8 euro and toured the castle. It was fun to see true castle, ramparts, turrets and all.
Back on the way we bypassed old town (a mistake) and ended up downtown hungry and a few blocks from any food. Downtown had a lot of tagging and was dirty and gritty. With the help of some locals we found a grocery store and a bakery, got something to eat and returned to the way.
There were three towns that begin with a C and we stayed in the second one, Camponaraya in the Medina albergue. It was wonderful. Here we met Barry from San Luis Obispo and Jen from Germany. Jen is about 31 and very knowledgeable. Barry walked into the bar while Sally and I we having a beer and a Coke and a bag of chips. He joined us, then we moved to the dining room and had dinner together. He has four daughters, is 67 and a very kind and engaging man. He is now a hedge fund manager, and formerly a college professor.
We made it back up to our beds about 9:30pm. In a room with 10 bunk beds (20) beds) we only had 7 of us. Quiet and comfortable . . . zonk.
Streets of Molinaseca
Karen and Kelly
Red chairs come in all sorts of colors
Knights Templar castle
Creative signposts show the way
Many of the small towns are nearly 100% abandoned. Cool old buildings in need of love and money.
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