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See our arrival live on the webcam of the Cathedral: http://www.crtvg.es/cgi-bin/camweb/camaras.asp?id=7&idioma=espanol
We should arrive around 3:00PM (Spanish time) mas o menos – I’ll send out 2 messages: 1 hour and another one 15 minutes before.
Hope you see us there!
16 May 2010 in Miscellaneous | 
No Comments
I’m sharing daily photos of our journeys on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frescotours
Have a look and keep an eye on us!
Saludos,
Alex
21 Apr 2010 in Miscellaneous | 2 Comments
No, we are not climbing Mount Everest! However, our photos have been selected for Editorial Everest’s newly released Guide to the Camino de Santiago. This leading editorial firm in Spain has chosen over a dozen of our pictures for this guide book that is available in 4 languages Spanish, German, French and English!
Muchas Gracias, Danke schön, Merci beaucoup, and Thank You!
Fresco Tours
10 Mar 2010 in Camino de Santiago, Miscellaneous, News | No Comments
Near the end of my June tour, as I was approaching Santiago, I realized that I was celebrating my 10 year aniversary on the Camino de Santiago! It has been a wonderful decade – walking the trail, meeting wonderful people from around the globe and becoming friends with the locals.
Over the years, I’ve seen how a local farmer would start by selling water and Coca-colas’from his garage, only to return the next year and find him making salads and sandwiches, a couple of years later, he had turned his cowshed into a small albergue. Nowadays, many pilgrims have enjoyed his pleasant hospitality and have had a wonderful place to rest, share their stories and create new ones!
The Camino de Santiago, the more things change…
Buen Camino!
Alex
19 Aug 2009 in Miscellaneous | No Comments
Spanish omelette- or tortilla española- is a staple here. Everyone has their favourite way of making it and, once you have the basics mastered, you can experiment with the recipe to achieve something like the best you have had. For me that is Pilar’s in O Cebreiro.
The main ingredients of tortilla are eggs and potatoes. Start with three medium-sized potatoes. If you have read my post on Tarta de Santiago, you will know that I am not big on measurements! Peel the potatoes and slice them finely. Carmen likes to slice them superfine which gives you a dense, homgeneous mass of tortilla. I like Pilar’s which has slightly chunkier pieces of potato. It’s a good idea to salt the potatoes before you start cooking.
Heat a deep pan with enough olive oil in it to cover the potatoes and put them to cook. You are not frying them. You don’t want them crispy like chips but cooked- Keith Floyd says it’s more like slow boiling them in oil. When they are done you put them to one side in a bowl.
At this point you may like to think of other ingredients. I like onion in my tortilla. I grate and add it straight to the mix. Some people chop red peppers into little cubes and others like ham. When you have all of your chosen ingredients together you crack three or four eggs and mix them well with the potatoes so you have a gloopy mess.
Decant the oil from the pan into pot. This pot is a standard of the Spanish kitchen. It looks a bit like a metal teapot and sits conveniently on the side next to the cooker for all those occasions you need cooking oil. We have one with a strainer on the top that takes all the bits out.
You add the mix to the pan and cook it on a low heat. This is tricky. You don’t want a high flame that will cook the outside too fast. When the bottom is done, which is easily verifiable by lifting the tortilla with a fork, you take a large plate and place it over the pan. Lift the whole thing and- oop la!- transfer the tortilla to the plate. Then slide it back into the pan straight away so it doesn’t stick there.
Another couple of minutes and you are done.
The advantage of the tortilla is it can be eaten hot or cold. It’s great with a green salad and if you are a Spaniard you will almost always have some kind of ham or sausage to go with it: chorizo, salchichón, lomo.
The meats will be another story, but I’m on the Camino right now in Palas de Rei and all this talk of food is making me hungry. Anyone for tortilla?
Jason
09 Jun 2009 in Miscellaneous, Recipes | No Comments
We were talking at breakfast about the rituals associated with the Camino. Amy had noticed the piles of stones on the mojones- or milestones- that mark the way to Santiago and Sandi mentioned that she had brought symbolic stones from home to leave along her way.
The tradition of leaving stones is genuinely popular in the sense that no one tells people to do this and they invent their own reason to explain what it is they are doing. Bob told me last year, as he was placing a stone on a marker, that he took care to find another ‘good’ stone to carry to the next.
“I started doing this thinking about my life and my problems,” he said, “but after a while I got fed up with that. It seemed selfish. Now I dedicate each stone to someone I love in my life.”
This meditation is a part of the internal change that walking along the Camino can bring about. If you are Catholic you could think of each stone as a mediation on the sins you are leaving behind you. Or in a more modern vocabulary you could see the carrying of the stone as the tangible manifestation of a preoccupation that you want to deal with and get over, leaving it behind you once you are done.
The tradition of carrying stones is much older than Christianity: it seems to answer a basic, primeval need, like picking up shells on a beach. The huge heap of stones at the Cruz de Hierro- or iron cross- seems to have its origins in an ancient Celtic practice of carrying stones to high places. Who knows what those hundreds of thousands of people were thinking. Just meditating on the place of your all-consuming preoccupations, symbolised by your stone or pebble, in the light of that river of humanity that has carved the paths of the Camino and raised a mound many metres high gives a new light and perspective.
The results can be visually enchanting. Some people wrap their stone in thread or paint it in bright colours. Yesterday I saw a heart-shaped stone with two names engraved in it and I thought of the care and love involved in the simple tasks of choosing, scratching and depositing it. You might see simple stick crosses lodged in a wire fence, each one the trace of a pilgrim’s passsing. These are not works of craft or art, but when so many people come together in the same direction the result is aesthetically delightful.
And I like to think of all these stones- like the worn-out boots I have also seen- as the living expression of the spirit of the Camino. They show that you take something from the Camino- a stick, a stone, a thought, an idea- and, equally importantly, you leave it behind.
Jason
www.frescotours.com
16 May 2009 in Camino de Santiago, Miscellaneous | No Comments
I love Tarta de Santiago. Every bar and restaurant along the Camino in Galicia serves it and I think Alex will vouch for the fact that I have tried most of them. When I got back to Avilés after the last tour I was suffering from what the Spanish call Morriña- that is a special kind of homesickness that people get when they have been away from Galicia for too long. The only remedy was to find a recipe and cook a Tarta de Santiago.
It is surprisingly easy. I’m going to give you the measurements in the easy manner that I like to approach cooking:
3 cups of ground almonds; 3/4 cup of flour; a cup of sugar; 4 eggs; half a pack of butter; a ploff of baking powder; some water; lemon rind. You can put icing sugar on the top but I think that makes it too sweet.
You start off mixing the butter and sugar until it makes a creamy paste and then you blend in the eggs and beat the mixture. Add the water, flour and bakng powder and give it whizz with an electric hand mixer. Stir the almonds in. You can use a mixture of ground almonds and almonds you grind yourself- the rougher almonds in there give it a good crunch! Stir in the lemon rind. Use the zest of the whole lemon because it really zips up the taste.
Put the mixture in a 10 inch sprung cake tin, well greased beforehand and bake in the oven at about 180ºc for 45 minutes or so. If a knife comes out clean it is done, and remember it is a question of taste: if you like your tarta with a slightly moister texture like me, you won’t want to overcook it.
This worked a dream for me and I already have the ingredients ready for the next one. The only problem is that there are four of us at home and they all want some!
Jason
07 May 2009 in Camino de Santiago, Miscellaneous, Recipes | 1 Comment
We just sprung the clocks ahead 1 hour this weekend and what a difference an hour makes!
Official sun rise and sun set in Madrid is 8:05 AM and 8:35PM, which gives us plenty of daylight to play.
In 3 weeks we are on the Camino de Santiago! Hope all is well!
Saludos from Spain,
Alex
30 Mar 2009 in Miscellaneous | No Comments
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