Hornillos del Camino – October 11, 2016

The breakfast room at the hotel today was another example of New European design – a 20 foot square room with 6 tables and four walls of floor-to-ceiling mirrors.  No matter where you looked you could see yourself eating breakfast. From different angles.

It was 1˚C and dark at 8 this morning as we left.  As fall moves on, and as we move west, the mornings grow later – and colder.  The first village was off track, so it was 11 AM before we hit a good coffee stop – and the first toilet stop.

One of the foods usually available at a bar is a croissant style pastry rolled around some chocolate, such that the chocolate sticks out both ends.  I call it a chocolate hot dog, and am quite addicted.

We also opted to make it a lunch stop, since Vic spotted a bocadillo that actually included lettuce and tomatoes as well as ham and cheese.  It also was to be the last watering hole for 10 km.

The trail climbed up a couple hundred meters to put us officially on the meseta – a large level plain – call it Saskatchewan.  We will be on it for days.  The area is grain farmed – I can’t tell what kind of grain from the stubble.  The stubble land looks normal, but where the land has been tilled you can see that the soil is at least half rocks.  It must be hell on farm machinery.  Of course the path eventually dropped steeply down from the mesita to a river valley, and we’ll probably have to climb out again tomorrow.

Hornillos del Camino is, as is obvious from its name, another Camino town.  The original Way runs up its only street which has not been straightened or widened since early medieval times.  The town church is very nice (the guide book says undistinguished), said to be 16^th century, and has the gilded retablo to prove it.  At least its columns are merely serpentine and not grape encrusted like the ones further east.  The arches of the dome are distinctive with figures of children’s heads between the roundels, rather than cherubs or bosses, as is more common.  Portraits of the sculptor’s (or the financial donor’s) children, perhaps?

The hotel here is again a family home design, but devoted to renting out the bedrooms to pilgrims – four on the second floor, and presumably four more on the third.  The lower floor has a lounge and a kitchen and a couple private areas, none of which seem used.  It seems intimately tied in with the bar next door, where the whole family works.  They must live yet somewhere else.

The 21 km today went okay, tomorrow will be another 21, possibly this time in the rain.  We have been so fortunate so far, it can’t last forever.