Today was anticipated to be a rough day – the first stretch is 17 km without a sign of habitation – No Services on This Route.. It turned out to be rougher than expected as Vic turned sick. She has been a little lethargic for the last day or so, and an hour after we started she began to feel very tired. She was too proud to turn back so we soldiered on. Soon we hit the ‘point of no return’ but she eventually had to rest a number of times just to just keep moving. That left us alone as the last party on the Camino. There was no turning back and no help. We eventually reached our night’s stop in mid afternoon, and she took to her bed with a bad stomach and a fever. Hope it is just flu or bad food. Nobody in Spain seems to have taken a FoodSafe course. Tomorrow should tell.
This part of the meseta is a dead level grain field. With stubble to the horizon in all directions and a dead straight gravel road vanishing to a point ahead, it is no strange sight in Saskatchewan, but most Europeans find it unsettling. It is unusual that the huge fields have no farmhouses on them. The owners and workers must live elsewhere.
The road is an old Roman road, which is why it is dead straight for 15 km. The books says that there is no local stone, and the ground is not stable, so the Romans had to bring in 100,000 tons of rock for the substrate alone to raise it above the winter floods. “In Spain the rain falls mainly on the plain”. Even 30 years ago this area was described as treeless, but since then there have been plantings of rows of fast growing poplars along all of the ditches.
Calzadilla de la Cueza is another tiny Camino town set in a small valley. A new albergue, a new hotel, and a few dozen old houses, and that is it. A full stop at the bottom of the exclamation mark of the Roman road. Most of the houses are old and run down, probably empty, many are adobe brick – mud and straw. I bet none of the people living here own those magnificent grain fields out there.
The town church is tiny, set alone on a hill a half km from town, like a pub in a temperance town. I didn’t bother going up there.
You would expect the Camino to go down the main (and only) street, as you can see the road continue out the other end from the entrance, but the yellow arrows direct you around the edge of town to this hostel. Somebody has been doing some midnight arrow painting.
Back a couple weeks ago one of the municipalities had set up km markers counting down to Santiago. At that time they were in the high 580s. There was one in Carrión yesterday that said 401. Sometime today at an unmarked and unheralded place we passed the midpoint between St Jean and Santiago. We are halfway there.
Wow! Halfway is such an achievement. Congratulations. May the febrile illness be brief and the pride in your accomplishment overshadow it very soon. Lots of good wishes – and not a little envy. Wish we were with you to share it all again – sore feet and all.