We left our albergue at close to 7:00 this morning. A little later than we had hoped. We had planned to be up at 5:00, and off by 6:00 but that didn’t happen.
At 6:00, the albergue host woke the house with music. It started off quiet and became louder. That mixed with incense was a little different, but neat. The music was something that you would hear during a mass.
It had rained the night before, and it was nice and cool for our walk for the first couple of hours. We walked through many grape fields and by a few wineries. It was beautiful.
We walked through more beautiful villages, were greeted with “BUEN CAMINO” many times, and stopped to admire the scenery and have lunch.
The days seem to slip away quickly as we walk. We always hope to arrive at our destination by 1:00 if possible, but it often ends up being around 3:00 or 4:00 – which puts us walking in the hottest part of the day. Today was one of those days. It also didn’t help that Ciruena is at the top of a hill. A long, dry path that goes on for 7.5km. The last 5km today were especially hard. Again stopping often to drink water. I changed out of my boots and into my flip flops for the last 2km after discovering two new blisters. Lovely. Could be worse. We’ve seen many, many terrible feet that have people suffering so badly.
When we finally arrived in Ciruena, we found a new private albergue called Casa Victoria. It’s in a 4 story home, and we are staying on the top floor with 5 other women who happened to be at our albergue last night! We had an amazing meal made by the host and Karis made a new friend! The hosts daughter. Her name is Elisa and the two of them played mine craft together and used google translate to talk to each other all evening. It was very cute. I took a few pictures of the two of them even though Karis said, “MOM! That’s weird!!” And apologized to Elisa for my strange behaviour. 😉
We have become increasingly aware of our time left on our journey. We discussed tonight our bussing and walking plans. We are about 70km from Burgos, and will probably walk just under half that, then will have to bus from Burgos to Leon as well. There is another huge mountain coming up (god help me) which we must do to reach the iron cross. That’s gonna be a doozy….