Five weeks in Europe: river cruising, barging and walking parts of the Camino.

Our most recent five weeks in Europe began and ended in Paris — with a barge cruise through Burgundy, a river cruise down the Saône, and a walk along the Camino Francés — and an unexpected ending.

We arrived in Paris with four nights to shake off the flight. By the second morning, Marucia and I were beginning to feel ourselves again — moving through the city with an ease that comes when you’re not racing to a departure.

Paris First

We made our way to Montmartre in the grey afternoon light on that first day, stopped to admire Le Lapin Agile and the garden in early-spring bloom on Rue St. Vincent. After a few hours of walking, we found a café for dinner and returned to our hotel at 8 p.m. feeling victorious. The victory was simply that we stayed awake until dark, and we’d seen a bit of this lovely city. See Paris: A Soft Landing Before Burgundy

A few days later, we and several others in our group took the train to Besançon, and the trip proper began — but only after two days of exploring a city that is often overlooked by travelers. See my story: Besançon: Where Our Barge Through Burgundy Begins

The Water: Two Weeks Afloat

What followed was two weeks on the water — two different kinds of water travel that together make the case for why river cruising has become what it has.

The first week was a barge cruise with CroisiEurope aboard the Daniele, moving from Besançon to Dijon through the Doubs River and the Canal du Rhône au Rhin. Barge travel is quieter and less busy than river cruising. The canals are narrow; the locks are intimate; the boat eases along at walking pace. It is, in the best possible sense, slow. See my story: Slow Water: Seven Days On CroisiEurope’s Daniele

The second week was a river cruise aboard AmaWaterways’ AmaCello — a different pace entirely. This was the Flavors of Burgundy itinerary, sailing the Saône from Lyon to Dijon. We began with a beautiful evening cruise through Lyon. The days that followed were gorgeous and filled with excursions to chateaux, vineyards and attractions. See my story: A Week On The Saône Aboard AmaWaterways’ AmaCello

Two weeks on the water. Foie gras, côtes du rhône, canal locks, cathedral towns, good cheese eaten with wine on the top deck as the sun began to give way to nightfall. Even so, three weeks into our indulgent travel, we began to yearn for the penance we had planned, which was to walk it off over the next two weeks.

The Plan: Undoing the Damage

We disembarked at Chalon-sur-Saône, took the TGV to Lyon, and spent one lovely night at the Hôtel Silky — pitching camp in a great location at a reasonable rate. We spent the afternoon and evening exploring Lyon, a city that we’ve visited many times and can never quite get enough of it.

In Vieux Lyon, Europe’s largest Renaissance quarter, the cobblestones lead somewhere worth going — a candlelit bouchon where we enjoyed a divine dinner, a sun-warmed lane, a flower shop with a a teal bike out front. © 2026 Ralph Grizzle

The next day we flew from Lyon to Madrid on a noon flight with two checked bags and a backpack each. The plan was to walk the Camino Francés — or a portion of it. Ten to fifteen days in Spain, moving on foot through Navarre and La Rioja and into Castile, eating pintxos in the evenings, sleeping in village albergues, and burning off that French butter and Burgundy wine we had enjoyed on our barge and river cruise. The Camino was our moral corrective.

We stayed our first night at the Hilton near the Madrid airport and organized our packs. Rain gear, a change of clothes, hiking sticks, toiletries, an extra pair of shoes. Fifteen to twenty pounds each perhaps — more than a dedicated pilgrim would carry, but we are not, technically, pilgrims. We are travelers in need of a good walk.

The next morning we took the Renfe Alvia to Pamplona. We arrived to a torrential downpour with a weather forecast that promised much of the same in the following days.

The forecast for Lorca said 95 percent chance of rain — and it wasn’t wrong. The rain gauge tells the story as well as the umbrellas. So we waited, watched other wet pilgrims come and go, and saved our legs for drier days. © 2026 Ralph Grizzle

Plan B: Which Turned Out to Be Fine

We didn’t linger in Pamplona — just long enough to wait out the worst of it in the train station, an hour or so at a table having lunch. When the rain briefly relented, we pushed on, taking a bus south to Lorca, a small medieval village on the Camino Francés where Marucia’s friend runs an albergue called Bodega del Camino.

Lorca has been a stop on the pilgrimage route since the Middle Ages; King García Ramírez, the grandson of El Cid, died here in 1150, but we weren’t here for history. We were here to begin our Camino experience.

We had a private room in a house full of walkers and a few cyclists, all of them soggy, all of them in good spirits in the way that Camino walkers can be. Dinner that first night was communal and loud and the food was excellent — the kind of meal that a restaurant could not replicate because the ingredient is the company. After dinner, we took an hourlong walk on the Camino; the medieval village and the landscape outside the town were stunning. We slept that night satisfied that our Camino journey had begun.

At 6 a.m., however, we were awakened by shoes tumbling in the dryer in the room next to ours, as fellow pilgrims dried out and prepared to push on into whatever the sky had in store. The Camino has its own alarm clock, and it does not consult your preferences.

Marucia’s friend offered us the use of her car for the day. We accepted without deliberation. The rain was still coming. We were not eager to walk under soggy skies. What followed was memorable. We drove through Puente la Reina, a small town where several Camino routes converge, its medieval bridge still carrying pilgrims as it has for more than 1,000 years. Then we stopped to walk in Cirauqui, an ancient hilltop village of narrow cobbled streets that seemed undisturbed by the present century.

Next we found the Urederra River gorge — a national park of waterfalls and rapids in a canyon of improbable green, everything saturated by the rain. We walked about seven miles that day, not all of it on the Camino proper, but all of it beautiful. At a small bar near the national park, we were apparently enough of a novelty — a couple from California, speaking Spanish, on a wet afternoon in May in a one-bar village miles off the beaten track.

The Camino Francés runs on ancient bones — past a map of the whole improbable journey, up the steep stone lanes of Cirauqui (whose name means “nest of vipers” in Basque), and across two bridges that have been carrying pilgrims for centuries: the 11th-century Romanesque bridge at Puente la Reina, built by a queen so pilgrims could cross the Arga River, and the Roman bridge at Cirauqui, part of a stretch of Roman road that still forms the Camino path today. © 2026 Ralph Grizzle

We slept a second night at the Bodega. The next morning, we were offered a ride to Estella, where we caught a bus, along with many other Camino walkers all eager to avoid the rain, to Logroño. We met a Canadian lady who had shoved an earplug in her ear to drown out the snoring in an albergue. The earplug broke off in her ear, and she was headed to a hospital in Logroño to have it removed.

The choral snoring was one reason I sought to avoid the dorms in the albergues, opting for private rooms or hotels. In Logroño, we put ourselves in a decent apartment for about €90 and went to Calle Laurel that evening — the famous street of pintxos bars, where you move from door to door with a small plate and a glass of Rioja, eating your way through the block. Here we were doing what the barge and river cruise had trained us so well to do.

Calle del Laurel in Logroño is the Camino’s best argument for stopping before Santiago. This legendary pintxos street — a few blocks of wall-to-wall bars in the old quarter — is where La Rioja’s wine culture and its food culture arrive at the same table at the same time. The drill is simple and deeply civilized: you move from bar to bar, each one known for its own specialty, a glass of Rioja white or red in hand, a pintxo or two in front of you. No reservations, no menus to study, no hurry. Just octopus on a wooden plate, a cold pour of Vivanco Lías Finas, and a chalkboard outside La Tavina listing everything you didn’t know you wanted. Pilgrims stumble in with muddy boots and leave considerably happier. © 2026 Ralph Grizzle

Walking, Eventually

We did walk. We should say that because the story so far might suggest we spent the Spanish portion of the trip eating and borrowing cars and taking buses, which is not quite accurate.

The next morning we did take a bus to Azqueta but that was to hike to Los Arcos — about 8 miles on the trail, though with the approaches and departures through towns we covered 12 or 13 miles that day. We carried daypacks only, which was exactly the right thing to do.

The day started at L’Antorcha, a pit stop of sorts run by a Dutch owner named René. He understood, better than most, what a Camino walker needs at eight in the morning: good coffee, fresh juice, real food, outdoor chairs, upbeat music and a view worth sitting in. The terrace — black tables and chairs on a stone courtyard, flags from dozens of nations strung overhead, the Navarrese countryside rolling away toward a lone green hill — had the feel of a place that belongs to everyone passing through, which is precisely the point. A whiteboard at the entrance was covered in pilgrim greetings in a dozen languages: Buen Camino, Welkom, Hola. We stayed longer than we planned because René’s story is the kind the Camino specializes in producing. He arrived in Azqueta in October 2023, a pilgrim looking for a cold beer. The bar was closed, so he walked 100 meters to the La Perla Negra pilgrims’ house, where he met Helena, the owner, sitting outside with a cup of tea. He asked for a cerveza fría. He ended up staying three days, helping with the laundry, the cleaning and the cooking. He finished his Camino, made it to Finisterre, and came back. When the bar came up for sale, he didn’t hesitate. A university teacher from Holland, he left the classroom, bought L’Antorcha and stayed. The Camino has a way of rerouting people.

Within 5 minutes of leaving sunny L’Antorcha, it began to rain again.

A local in a parked car appeared on the trail — not unusual on the Camino, where the path sometimes doubles as a farm track. His window was down and he was handing out flyers for his restaurant in Villamayor de Monjardín. The rain was unrelenting. After a few minutes the restaurant owner drove in our direction, offering us a ride, which we gladly accepted. When we got to his restaurant, he went behind the bar and handed us each a small chocolate Easter egg. A stranger’s car, a wet trail, chocolate eggs in the rain. Only on the Camino.

The rain subsided, and the trail took us south and east through the Navarrese countryside, through vineyards and grain fields and occasional clusters of oak, with the snow-capped mountains in the distance.

Seven kilometers from Los Arcos, we came upon a food truck parked at the side of the path, run by an American. We stopped, as you stop at food trucks on wet trails, and fell into conversation. His son, it turned out, had gone to school at Warren Wilson College, the small progressive institution outside Asheville, North Carolina, my hometown. Who would have thought that time and place could converge on the Camino?

By the end of the day we had met three entrepreneurs — a Dutchman who bought a bar after falling in love on the Camino, a Spaniard who hands out Easter eggs to pilgrims, and an American running a food truck in the Navarrese countryside. The Camino attracts all types.

The day ran from L’Antorcha’s stone terrace and flag-strung courtyard in Azqueta to a roadside food truck seven kilometers from Los Arcos, with a local restaurateur rescuing Marucia and me from the rain barely five minutes into our hike. © 2026 Ralph Grizzle

We made our way back to Logroño. The next day, rather than walk the stretch to Santo Domingo de la Calzada — reportedly one of the less scenic stages — we took the Jiménez bus for €3.50 a person and arrived in time for lunch.

The Parador & Other Small Glories

Santo Domingo de la Calzada is a Camino town with a fascinating history. Its cathedral has, famously, a live rooster and hen in a gilded cage inside — a tradition rooted in one of the Camino’s most enduring legends. In the 14th century, a German family stopped here on their pilgrimage to Santiago. The innkeeper’s daughter fell in love with their teenage son, Hugonell, who didn’t return her feelings. Scorned, she hid a silver cup in his bag and accused him of theft. He was hanged. His parents continued to Santiago, and on their return stopped to pay their respects — and found their son still alive, miraculously sustained. They rushed to tell the magistrate, who was sitting down to a dinner of roasted hen and rooster. He replied that their son was as alive as the birds on his plate. At which point the roasted birds stood up, grew back their feathers and crowed. The town’s saying ever since: “Santo Domingo de la Calzada, donde cantó la gallina después de asada” — where the chicken sang after being roasted. The birds in the cathedral today are said to be their descendants.

We arrived in time for lunch — and, as it happened, an €11 haircut from a young Moroccan barber whose family had moved to Santo Domingo the year before. We stayed at the Parador Bernardo de Fresneda, which was the right place to stay in Santo Domingo. Paradores are Spain’s network of state-run hotels in historic buildings — monasteries, castles, fortresses — and this one, a converted monastery beside the cathedral, delivered everything the category promises. Stone floors, high ceilings, quiet rooms, all housed in an historic building along the Camino.

In the late afternoon, we hiked about five miles uphill to the village of Cirueña — daypacks, walking sticks and light coming sideways across the green meseta. Then we called Oscar, a taxi driver whose number we’d gotten from the Parador’s front desk, and he came and fetched us for €15 and drove us back down through the golden dusk, just in time to clean up for dinner.

The next afternoon we came to Burgos by bus — a cathedral city of the first order, home to El Cid and to one of the great Gothic cathedrals in Spain. Marucia went inside while I wandered the exterior and the plaza. She came out shaking her head in the way you do when something is simultaneously magnificent and faintly absurd: The interior, she said, was like a monument to the wealthy dead — chapel after chapel given over to the elaborately carved tombs of bishops, constables and noble families, gold leaf covering everything, generations of the powerful arranging their eternal comfort with the same energy they’d applied to earthly life. Which is, in its way, exactly what a Gothic cathedral is. From the outside, the twin spires do what great Gothic architecture always does — they make you feel the ambition of the people who built them and the centuries between you and them.

As planned before leaving California, we met friends in Burgos, at the Museo de la Evolución Humana, which houses original fossils from the nearby Atapuerca excavations — some of the oldest human remains found in Europe. That evening the four of us had dinner with two Australian women who were hiking the Camino. Marucia and I ordered the sopa de ajo, the garlic soup of Castile — a humble thing by description, made from stale bread, garlic, smoked paprika and broth, with an egg poached in. It was the kind of dish that’s already on our list to make when we return home.

Madrid, Made For Us

From Burgos, we made our way south to Madrid — the DoubleTree by Hilton Prado, five nights, an ideal base for the kind of trip Madrid rewards: long walks, beautiful parks, Spanish food and wine at the pace the Spanish intend it to be consumed.

Madrid was a gracious way to end everything. The hospitality of the city — its shop owners, its restaurant owners, the strangers at neighboring tables — felt genuine in a way that tourist-heavy cities sometimes fail to manage. Meals here begin with something alongside the wine, always: olives, chips, a small plate of something. At one restaurant the owner sent out a complimentary platter unprompted — pork belly and bread, just because. We won’t forget that.

We found Cervecería Alemana on Plaza de Santa Ana and ordered what you order there: a caña and a tapa of anchovies and olives. I sat at the table beneath Hemingway’s photograph — the one where he looks like he owns the place, which in some sense he still does. Hemingway wrote that Madrid makes you feel very badly, all question of immortality aside, to know that you will have to die and never see it again. Sitting at his table with a caña and anchovies, I understood what he meant.

Three Madrid bars, three good reasons to linger. At La Casa de las Torrijas — the interior all tiles and warm light — we ordered the house specialty: torrijas, Spain’s classic treat that falls somewhere between French toast and bread pudding, bread soaked in milk, fried, then dusted with sugar and cinnamon, and best eaten slowly with a glass of sweet wine. At Cervecería Alemana on Plaza Santa Ana — a Hemingway haunt that still feels like one — we kept it simple: a caña and a seat by the window. And at La Merecida, a friendly owner turned a neighborhood bar into a favorite, which is how the best ones always work. © 2026 Ralph Grizzle

On Monday evening we went to the Prado from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., when admission is free, and spent two intense hours with the great masters of Spanish art — Velázquez, Goya, El Greco — moving through galleries that were mercifully uncrowded. Two hours in the Prado at dusk, without the midday crush, is the right way to do it, even though it was such an intense experience that it left us feeling drained.

On another day, we toured the house of Lope de Vega, the playwright and poet who was, by most accounts, one of the more extraordinary figures of the Spanish Golden Age. He fathered 15 children, took holy orders late in life, and died at 72 having apparently squeezed more living into a single span than most people could manage in two.

On our last evening we ended up on the rooftop terrace of the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid spread out below us in the warm night. We shared a sangria and looked out over the city — the Gran Vía, the distant hills, the last light fading. Then we strolled back to the hotel, five weeks behind us, one morning ahead.

Paris, Again

But the trip wasn’t finished with us yet.

Our flight from Madrid was delayed 30 minutes, which made for a tight connection at Charles de Gaulle. We thought we could make it — and we ran with backpacks, which is not something I recommend in a Paris airport at our age. There was passport control, then a bus between terminals, then a long walk to the gate. We arrived at 3:20, which was the posted final boarding call. The gate agent looked at our boarding passes, looked at us, and said the gate was closed. They would not reopen it. We were staying in Paris.

The next several minutes involved the particular kind of negotiation that goes nowhere — the gate agent was polite and immovable in equal measure — followed by the longer, more productive conversation at the airline counter, where they rebooked us on the next day’s flight and told us we would be reimbursed €300 for our hotel and additionally for food and transfers. Even better: Under EU consumer protection rules, a delay-caused missed connection also entitles passengers to €600 each in compensation. A missed flight has rarely paid so well.

We had a beautiful unplanned night in Paris. We ate at Le Casse-Noix — “the nutcracker” — a restaurant we love on the Rue de la Fédération. Then we walked along the Seine to the Allée des Cygnes, the Path of Swans, a narrow tree-lined island in the middle of the river. At its western tip stands a quarter-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty, facing west toward New York. We continued to the end of the island and finished our walk in front of the Eiffel Tower just as it began to sparkle. I decided too that I liked Paris more than I liked Madrid. No knock on the Spanish capital. It is a fascinating city. But the City of Light has something that no other city has.

Madrid seduces with its intensity — the Prado’s dark masterworks, the late-night energy, the raw Castilian light hitting the plaza stones like something biblical. Paris seduces with its beauty — the kind that ambushes you on an ordinary street corner, in the curve of a bridge, in amber light spilling from a brasserie at dusk. Both cities get inside you. Both stay. But Paris has the Seine running through the heart of it, giving the city an artery that Madrid, for all its reinvention, cannot quite match.

And Paris has something Hemingway understood better than most. “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,” he wrote, “then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” As we strolled Paris at dusk, we felt what he described. Madrid dazzles in the moment. Paris beckons you to return. We will be doing exactly that in 2027 — twice — hosting small-group barge trips through the French waterways. See 2027 Hosted Barge Trips.

Our trip had made a complete circle — we started in Paris and we ended in Paris. It wasn’t Plan A to sleep in France tonight, but as this trip has proven, a good Plan B can work out just fine.

We fly home tomorrow — for real this time. But on the morning we were to fly, I couldn’t resist one more Parisian experience: a croissant aux amandes, eaten outside on Avenue Kleber, watching the city go about its morning.

What Five Weeks Does

A week in Europe and you’re still jet-lagged when you leave. Five weeks, and Montmartre starts to feel like years ago. The trip accumulates into something that resembles, however briefly, a life rather than a vacation.

By the second week you settle into a rhythm that isn’t quite European and isn’t quite American but is something usefully in between — attentive, unhurried, willing to change plans when a friend lends you a car, or a stranger on a wet trail hands you a chocolate egg, or an airline closes a gate 30 seconds before you arrive.

We did not walk the Camino as planned. We walked portions of it, in various configurations, with daypacks instead of full loads and buses filling the gaps. But the Camino is less a route than a state of mind — and the entrepreneurs, the pilgrims, the borrowed car, the chocolate eggs, the communal dinners, the shoes in the dryer at six in the morning — all of it was the Camino. We ate extremely well throughout. The decadence of France was not undone, exactly, but it was contextualized — and the five weeks together made something that neither half could have made alone.

We are happy to be going home. We are a little sad to see the curtains close on this particular journey. That tension, I think, is the best possible review a trip can receive.

I know this: I would do all of it again and hope I do.

Practical note: U.S. citizens can spend up to 90 days in the Schengen Area within any 180-day period — comfortable math for a month-long trip. The EU’s new ETIAS pre-travel authorization is scheduled to launch in late 2026 and won’t become mandatory until around April 2027. As of May 2026 the application portal isn’t open yet; when it is, the process will be quick and online, similar to the U.S. ESTA, with a proposed fee of around €20 and a three-year validity.