Camino de Santiago – Part 11
September 14, 2024 marked day 12 on the Camino. The day started bright and early at the San Francisco de Asis Albergue in Leon. It was a large Albergue and had its own cafeteria, where I had breakfast. Then it was back on the road in the nice and flat Meseta section.
I passed through Astorga where I had lunch. Astorga is a gorgeous city I would be happy to return to. It was a fashionable city with a lot of nice restaurants and stores. I might compare it to Santa Barbara in that way. Besides lunch, I took my time walking about the city center.
After a pleasant visit in Astorga I traveled a few more hours until I reached the small town of Rabanal del Camino. It was a hot day and I was ready to stop at the first place I saw, which was a place call La Candela (the candle). There is no good term in English that I know of for such places, but it was a small bar/restaurant with about six rooms for rent.
That afternoon I did laundry and then walked up and down the main street of the town. Nice place. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet anybody more than briefly. As I have mentioned in earlier parts of my Camino story, I regret not staying in Albergues more often, which offer better opportunities to get to know other pilgrims.
That evening, I could start to see more clearly the end of my journey. At this point, I had no plan of getting back home. After much thought, I booked a return ticket home on September 21 via American Airlines, necessitating two connections in Barcelona and Chicago.
I apologize for not keeping up with my weekly puzzle feature the last two newsletters. The reason is I am running low on puzzles. The last puzzle asked was on Dec. 26, 2024, as follows.
“A large block of granite is moved using logs as rollers. Each log has a circumference of 1 meter. For every revolution of each log, how far does the block advance?”
The answer is two meters.
Why is this? It moves one meter because the roller made a full revolution. Thus, the roller moved one meter. The second is that the point on the top of the roller moves twice as fast in the forward direction as the center of the roller. Consider a wheel with a circumference of one meter spinning at one revolution per second on a fixed axel If a fly landed on the top of the wheel, it would move at a horizontal speed equal to one meter per second for that brief moment it was on top of the wheel.
So, the block moves one meter because the roller moves one meter and another meter because it is always on top of the roller, for a total of two meters.
A similar puzzle is “A car is traveling at a speed of 60 miles per hour. What part of the car is moving at 0 miles per hour? The answer is the point at the bottom of the tires.
Next, here is the new question for Jan. 16, 2025. How many X’s can you place on a tic-tac-toe board without forming three in a row?