There was a bird, or a collection of birds, that sang outside our window ALL night. Not that we are complaining, mind you, it was all quite musical, but it never stopped. In a similar vein, the owner/cook of the hotel was a bit of a character. ‘Nuff said.
It was a 24 km walk today, one of our longer ones, and we are quite exhausted. I picked up a blister on the bottom of my foot -the first one in four trips. I’ll live. Before we left Canada we were on a pre-Spain training regimen – walk 10 km a day and drink a half bottle of wine with every meal. Strangly enough, only one of those has proven to be adequate for the trip.
The weather was fine – we were stripping off layers in the first few hundred meters, and were down to shirt slevees for most of the day. Even a touch of sunburn. It’s shorts for tomorrow. That is, if I can get out of bed.
After a short stretch on pavement we were back on the old Roman road, now a farm track between the fields. We saw two or three vehicles and four or five pilgrims for that whole section. Not a place to turn an ankle, say.
Most of the fields are tilled – are they fallow, or just not planted yet? We are still on the meseta, that vast stretch of prairie in central Spain. It is like leaving Winnipeg with Saskatchewan to look forward to. We commented last fall on the lack of houses on the fields. In Canada the prairies were homesteaded, and building a house on the land was a requirement. The olive oil guy in Toronto told us that the meseta lands were still small family holdings, probably stemming from medieval times or earlier. The actual owners lived in the towns and rent the land to a real farmer who farms the land assembly.
We took a wrong turn (in my defence, I say we neglected to make a right turn) and ended up doing the last 5 km on the new Camino with its row of planted, all dead, trees. Apparently they are trees that can stand heat and drought, but not this particularly cold spring. They budded out and froze. They may recover with a second flush of growth. It also brought us into the town on a different route than expected, that momentarily confused me. Until Vic straightened me out.
We spent the rest of the afternoon with an Aussie couple that are doing the Camino before an extensive tour of Spain. They had snow on the early part of their walk.
So, off to nurse our (my) wounds before an early night.
Incidentally, the main church around the corner is 18th century and locked. The other town church is a couple blocks away, far too far to walk in our condition. We are suffering from a lack of churches to visit.
You must be logged in to post a comment.