Monday, September 9, 2013

September 8th & 9th - Leon to Villar de Mazarife

After a leisurely pack up in our hotel (we had spent two nights in the Tres Reyes hotel in Pamplona) we made one more visit to the Iruna cafe where Hemingway hung out (awesome art deco building from 1888) before making our way to the train station.  Apparently Jamie had booked really nice seats completely by accident (being the cheapest ones) and we enjoyed a lovely four hour ride to the fine city of Leon!

We were a little nervous at this point because we pulled into town around 5:30, and as mentioned in our previous post we were burned before!  Luckily, Leon is a city of 130,000(versus 400) and it turned out even the convent run albergue (hostel) had plenty of beds left.  We actually discovered that people either are a.) more spread out at this point or b.) much fewer in number either by chance or from dropping out as our subsequent night's stay in a small village had far fewer people.  More on that later.

OK, so Leon was really beautiful, clean, and old and like Pamplona just loaded with ancient structures and beautiful churches.  Since we hadn't actually done any major walking for several days we decided to stroll the major sightseeing spots in the evening so we could get an early jump on the next day.  Of the sights the one that really stood out was the cathedral, which just so happen to be catching the sun perfectly as we entered.  Very gorgeous stained glass windows, which apparently is quite different than many Spanish churches which tend to be on the darker side.

We enjoyed a pilgrim menu dinner at the convent restaurant (menu in Europe means a set of courses),which was quite nice (delicious turkey) and we made a friend from Germany who is biking the trail.  After dinner we stayed up chatting and Shannon joined a little guitar sing along by getting her ukulele out.  Quite a nice reintroduction to the camino!

We had decided that, not knowing the hostel situation up ahead, that we would wake up first thing in the morning and be out for 6:30.  All was going to plan but Shannon couldn't find her wallet!  After tearing her bag apart a woman from her dorm brought it to her - sweet relief!    After a simple breakfast of bread and coffee (really missing American breakfast at this point...) we were on our way!  And so were many others!  We could see how we missed the hostels on our day two, as there are a whole lot of early birds and it was sort of a big rush out of the gates.

Today's plan was a pretty easy one, only about 13ish miles over very flat distance.  The drawback was that it was virtually all road, which we are finding to be very hard on the feet. We made friends with another german during the walk, by the name of Catherine.  We stuck with her for a little bit and stopped in a tiny town for a picnic lunch.  We think that she went a bit further as we didn't see her in town.

We were fairly surprised when we looked at our watch and saw it was only about 1:30 when we pulled in to our destination, a small town with three pilgrim hostels.  To our delight there were plenty of beds at the very first one we tried (and I'd say the place is less than half full tonight).  We did some laundry, chatted with pilgrims, got some groceries (at the best shop in Spain! the lady working it was extremely nice and we seemed to understand most of her Spanish somehow), and checked out the tiny town.  And resisted the urge to touch the tiny kittens that live in the back (Jamie is allergic sadly).  We had a great pilgrim dinner (the best one yet I believe) which included our first paella in Spain which was exciting.

Tomorrow we have a couple of options that are less than ideal for hiking; we can go ten miles or twenty.  The hiker in us won't be too satisfied with ten, but our physical fitness at this moment means that twenty is certainly a push.  And given that our huge jump along the trail has given us a lot of leeway time, I'm thinking the ten would be a wiser choice.  We'll see how we feel tomorrow though.

Beautiful hostel tonight, great showers, food people, and weather.  Can't really ask for too much more!

We'll try and be more consistent with the blog from here on out!

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