Azofra to Santo Domingo de la Calzada

Okay, I didn´t walk that far today. Not as far as I´d planned. The weather was much better today, cloudy and breezy and in the 80s instead of 90s, but I struggled through the last 2 k here with an achy foot and it just seemed like a nice place, so I decided to stay. That´s the beautiful freedom of the road. I´ll figure out later if I´m going to have time to actually finish on foot or not. It´s just that the place I was going to stay, another 6km along, is a town of 350 people and the refugio is sleeping on matresses on the floor of the church, and it says capacity 20 in my book but someone else said they don´t turn anyone away. But I walked into this nice medieval old town (after passing some ugly factories) and thought, "Do I really want to spend all afternoon in another small town, with only a mattress on the floor?" I think you have to break up the small towns with some bigger ones, and this is the ultimate pilgrim stop... so I stopped.

The city was actually started because of the Camino. Santo Domingo was a priest from 900 years ago who dedicated his whole life to the pilgrims, and he decided that there needed to be a better road and stopping place between Logroño and Burgos. So he cleared trees, flattened roads, built bridges, and created pilgrim hospitals and hostels here. The hostel I´m staying in tonight is actually the longest-running refugio on the road, because Santo Domingo´s house is in the back of it and he used to host pilgrims there way back in the 1100s. However, the part that is open now is a new building, just opened this year, with nice facilities and a very sincere staff. During the orientation they go on about how some people are just in the hospitality business to make money off the pilgrims, but that´s not the right spirit, and so here it´s as it used to be - you pay what you can or what you wish. And if you can´t pay, you can still stay.

The whole city is having a ¨jubilee¨year because of the 900th year since Santo Domingo´s birth? death? so there are nice new signs everywhere in three languages explaining the old buildings and banners on all the buildings. (It also means you can get special indulgences from the pope if you go walk here and go to mass; you get a special jubilee certificate. Crazy.) I´m writing from the pilgrims´¨library¨where they have free internet for pilgrims! They also have some kind of touristy museum here where you put on a brown pilgrim cloak and "take a small taste of what it´s like to walk the pilgrim camino." It´s 3 euros so I´m trying to decide whether to satisfy my curiosity or stay away.

The cathedral in the center of town has a memorable story, too, the reason for people telling me it was the chicken church. Inside the front door, there´s a shrine with a window and two live chickens are kept inside. (Don´t worry, they swap them out every week or two, no animal cruelty.) So the story is, apparently, in the 15th century a German pilgrim was falsely accused of stealing, and was sentenced to be hanged. But Santo Domingo held the boy up on his shoulders and kept him from dying. When someone told this to the judge, who was eating dinner at the time, he said, "that boy is as dead as these chickens on my plate." At which point the chickens rose up with a crow. So that´s the miracle of the chickens, and so this town has chickens in the church, and Santo Domingo has chickens carved into his crypt, and one of the symbols of the town is the chicken... Good story, huh?

Today I feel like I´m on vacation, because I got here before 11, and have been relaxing and poking around town ever since. It´s nice. But I´ll be ready to move on tomorrow.