Phew 😯. 32km from our albergue last night. I at least have sore feet. Tom seems perky as ever and Juanita’s osteoporosis seems to have had absolutely no effect on her ability to walk these distances with a pack heavier than mine. My poor feet 😓. Mum is also in embarrassingly fine form.

Before I start describing today’s little jaunt, here’s a panorama of the sky outside last night’s albergue.

Impressive, is it not?

The storks were active as we left this morning and we saw more as we walked. They’re very beautiful birds, large but wonderfully elegant in flight.

There was only one other peregrino at the albergue last night, a very sad, gentle Italian from Venice who had joined the Camino at Leon and was intending to walk on to Santiago. We saw him at breakfast as he prepared to return to Venice to deal with a break in at his home. He’d managed to arrange a taxi but was still uncertain how to proceed. It was very sad to see him in such evident distress 😟.

The journey today was mostly along a well marked, wide earthen track.

It rose and fell gently but was pleasant to walk on. We stopped regularly for coffee and mum and I had a lovely lunch in a popular bar of olives, bread and anchovies with a small glass of red wine. We met and chatted with a very sympatico Scottish couple who have exactly the same scathing contempt for Davies, Gove et al.

At the last stop before the final 11km push to Astorga we meet a cheerful terrier who’d apparently turned up at the bar that day, been fed and watered and had clearly decided to settle in. I’d happily have brought him home with us 🤗.

To give you some ideas of the size of the skies and landscape that surrounded us on our walk today.

The rain caught us an hour or before Astorga but our gore-tex trousers and boots and permatex waterproofs were more than up to the job. Tom’s shenanigans with his poncho should really have been recorded for posterity but we were all rolling around laughing too much to have the wherewithal to get our phones out. Quasimodo eat your heart out.

This final image was taken as we approached the hotel for the night.

After such a long day, 10+ hours, we felt that we deserved a little pampering and have booked into a very pleasant little 4″ spa hotel. Dinner was an excellent peregrino menu at the sister hotel.

Time now to set my phone to recharge and to get some sleep. We’ve booked breakfast for 7 o’clock and intend being on our way to tomorrow night’s stop at Rabanal by 8 a.m. it’s a mere 20km so shouldn’t take us too long. Tom and Juanita will grab a taxi back to Leon whilst mum and I will join the other peregrinos in the albergue.

Buen Camino