27/05/2024 – Walking the walk 7

Day 12 - We were dropped back at St Juan de Ortega around 8:45am and started on our way. Anyone starting out to walk from Villafranca would never have caught up with us. The next place to sleep was 6km up the trail, so we would never have caught those who went on the day before. We had the trail pretty much to ourselves today, which was awesome!

It was quite flat terrain, the start of the Mesetas that we enter properly on Tuesday. Even so, we both found it super-hard. We hit the outskirts of Burgos (our rest stop) around 20kms, but it took us another 7km+ to get to our hotel. We walked two sides of its airport, then through kilometres of industrial park and out-of-town shopping, finally entering the city proper, only to find ourselves hosteled on the far side, over the river, up the hill, by the University lodgings. We were both so pooped when we arrived that we just crashed for a couple of hours.

But, we have now showered, acquired beer, bread and cheese (nowhere local is open, it being a Sunday evening. Our hotel doesn’t do meals). We are sitting on the bed in companionable silence chewing and starting to feel human again!

I, for one, was very grumpy going through town. I thought very uncharitable things about everyone I passed; about our booking agent; about the traffic lights installation team, for making me stand on my feet waiting to cross (albeit, they included a truly uplifting animated “moonwalking” green man). I definitely failed on the “forgiving my debtors” part of my daily prayers.

Carey and I hadn’t spoken since about 1pm. If you can’t say something nice... But, now, I definitely hear a little humming going on beside me (and know I am returning to “decent person” status). We’re set for a quiet, but friendly, evening.

Day 13 – We are already resting on our laurels, (and our soft hotel bed), after a successful morning. Through a combination of goodwill, Google translate and pantomime, we both have new hiking sandals, which is simply blissful! After that, we hunted down a copy/print shop and, similarly, got our final set of luggage tags printed. Finally, we tested the way back to the Camino for tomorrow and admired a good portion of the Old Town. It is chocolate-box lovely: all espaliered avenues, gorgeous sandstone monuments and bustling tourist establishments, offering rosaries with their cappuccino, staffs and shells with their prix fixe lunches. I had a quite lovely, multisensory, incense-assisted pray to ambient Holy music in the Rococo Cathedral.

Mindful that tomorrow we start another 10-day stretch, we acquired snacks and headed back for a culturally appropriate “siesta”. We are grazing tart, juicy tomatoes and chocolate, sipping tetra Pak wine from our toothbrush mugs (don’t knock it till you’ve tried it), and enjoying watching the rain roll in on the people outside, which, for today, doesn’t have to include us!