Day 17 - Carrion de los Condes to Calzadilla de la Cueza

The Meseta, straight paths, wheatfields and big skies.

A strange combination today. It was our shortest day so far, so we could have taken our time. Instead, we started early and walked insanely quickly, reaching our destination at 11.30am, even after a leisurely coffee stop. 

Our hotel last night was excellent, but had no facilities for breakfast, so they provided a voucher for a nearby cafe. With a notable exception in Logrono, we've never found this a great arrangement. The grumpy man behind the bar never smiled and seemed to imply by his body language that we were some sort of foreign freeloaders. One coffee, one orange juice, one piece of toast and a bit of butter and jam. I'm sure our hotel had rewarded him richly for this largesse.

Can you believe it?

That didn't take long, so we were very quickly on our way, photographing the busy pilgrim sign on the wall of our hotel on our way. There are many distance markers along the way and they vary wildly in their estimates of the distance remaining. Adding to that, there are various alternate routes of different lengths, so who knows how far it is to Santiago? 

Here's a view of the app. I'm the blue dot, typing at Hostal Camino Real and the red dotted path is the Camino pathway. As you walk, a deviation by even a metre from the path shows on the app - very handy in navigating through cities and where there's doubt about the path.

In order to have a fixed reference point, I'm going by the Camino app on my phone, which keeps us on the path and tells us there's 383km to go (the 17 is the number of kilometres from the last marked town).

The bridge across Rio Carrion. The little abutments on this and many bridges are square on the downstream side and triangular on the upstream side, presumably to break the current.

It was a cool cloudy morning as we walked out of town across Rio Carrion - ideal conditions. 

Statues on a roundabout, flanks by posts and signs.

The road was following the highway, nobody's favourite configuration. Ahead of us, a woman crossed the road, so we followed. She was looking for a path she believed existed away from the road, but this time it was a false trail. We got into conversation with her. 

Cathie and Julie pause in their conversation.

Julie was from Montana and was one of the most talkative pilgrims we've met. We had a great conversation with her for the next 14km and we walked at high speed the whole time. We stopped for a leisurely coffee break, but even so our speed for the very short day averaged 4.3km/h - a good clip.

Following in the footsteps of the Romans.

Seventy percent of the day's journey was on the fine gravel they call sendo, most of which overlays the ancient Roman road Via Aquitana, although there was no sign of this. I let Cathie and Julie walk on ahead. I was having absolutely no problem with injuries or blisters, but I wasn't game to tempt fate. Walking too fast is an invitation for something to go wrong. Besides, I wanted to finish my overlong audio book. Cloud had shaded us the whole day and a stiff, cool breeze blew in our faces throughout - the most comfortable of conditions.

Our destination.

All too soon, we crested a rise and there was Calzdilla de la Cueza (pop 60). The little cafe/bar slightly to the left of centre was crammed with pilgrims, many of whom greeted Julie as we walked in. Seems she's a sociable figure.

We wandered around to our hotel - the larger white building on the extreme left of the picture. Although it was only 11.30am, our room was ready. Sadly, our bags hadn't arrived. We had a nice snack and a coffee at the bar, a wee doze and our bags finally arrived just after 2pm.

We showered, completely flooding the hopelessly designed bathroom, did our normal wash of socks, undoes and T-shirts and I repaired to a quiet corner of the bar to type away (our room has no desk).

We've walked ourselves into a fairly comfortable state, with moderate days on relatively flat, well-surfaced terrain. Tomorrow is slightly longer, at 22km, but we have four easy days to the ancient city of Leon, where we have our next rest day. We can even count today as a rest day, with a short morning stroll and a lazy afternoon. All's well with the world.

Here's today's Relive video: https://www.relive.cc/view/vPv4eWXNg3O

And here's the very small photo album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/CHDDcbj4ZDZVQ2bu9

As for today's music; a good deal of the day was spent talking. When I let Julie and Cathie walk ahead, I listened to the final stages of my very good but extremely verbose and over-written audio book (The Moth and the Mountain), so no rousing music coursed through my brain. I see that Cathie has been posting music though, and so I'm going to say this this is her choice: https://youtu.be/ABLT6hdgEek

I've mentioned before that the initial recording of each day's journey is done on my Suunto watch. At the end of the day, I download it by bluetooth to my phone, from where it gets shifted to Strava and Relive. I don't usually share the Suunto download, but it can be interesting as it shows kilometre splits. So here is the Suunto download for the statistic nerds: https://maps.suunto.com/move/petergibbs/62a071051a00840e6b039cac