Sahagún to El Burgo Ranero
We had some breakfast and left the hotel around 8:30 am. Today’s leg mostly followed a road. The trail was tree covered which I appreciated. The temperature was fairly cool today, but shade is always nice when walking.
A mile or two from town, we ran into our lady friend from Munich that I talked about a couple of days ago. She had injured her knee, so for the last couple of days had been taking taxis from village to village. I told her it’s great to see her walking again and she said her knee was feeling better. There are a few people we’ve encountered with knee injuries, but a lot folks complain about blisters. If they’re not complaining, you know they have them because you see them hobbling down the trail. Again, we’ve been very fortunate and have not had any blisters. I knocked on wood after typing that sentence. We stopped for a break in a little town, Bercianos del Real Camino, in an albergue with a nice little cafe. They made sandwiches and such but I was interested in a tortilla - not the Mexican variety made of flour but the Spanish tortilla made with egg and potato. They didn’t have any so, I settled for a beer. Shocking, I know. Back on the Camino we passed a couple that we had seen a couple days ago. They’re Spanish and they have a small dog with them that weighs only five or six pounds. Their gear was in a cart that was attached to a belt around the woman’s waist. As she walked, the cart was pulled behind her. When I passed them, the dog was in the cart standing on top of the gear, looking out like he was Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. I’m pretty sure the dog was thinking, “I’m the king of the world!” Once we got to our destination, El Burgo Ranero, we stopped for some lunch. I talked with some people that had stayed in our previous night’s hotel and they were taking a taxi back because they could not find a room here. Continuing forward would have meant a total of 23 miles for the day. They asked if we wanted to share the taxi, but I told them we had a reservation. Our hotel is located off a highway and I was a little nervous as it looked like a huge truck stop. We arrived during lunch and their large restaurant was packed. It was not clear where to check in and every time I asked, they said, “alli” (there), but it was difficult to determine where “there” was. We finally figured it out, but they then had a difficult time finding our reservation. Once they found it they said it had been canceled. “No,” I assured them. We were staying in the hotel tonight. But as I said that, in the back of my mind I was thinking we, too, could be taking a taxi back to last night’s town. They came back and said, “Yes, I see. Sorry.” After handing our passports to them, they struggled with their scanning equipment and we waited while they tried to get it to work. As it was taking a bit of time to check in, the guy just gave me a key, kept our passports, and said, “Go to your room.” Nervous about leaving my passport, I was like, “Uh, what room number?” Not confident with my Spanish, I was walking down the hallway praying I really knew that ciento nueve was 109. It was - the card key worked! And the room is great! It’s clean, has a big shower, and it has air conditioning that works! Score!! But it was an adventure getting to this point. Update: we got our passports back. Tomorrow we head to Mansilla de las Mulas.
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AuthorsGreg and James live in Pleasanton in Northern California and are on a pilgrimage on the Camino De Santiago in Spain. Their adventures are captured in this blog. Archives
October 2021
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