Burgos or Bust

With two days of walking behind us since I last blogged about the trail, I will just fill in the highlights and lowlights of the adventure. After successfully surviving our night under the altar, we walked out of Granon at 6:15 a.m. in darkness - our earliest start yet, with our eyes on a breakfast stop in a short 5 km.  We rolled through the first town before anyone was awake at the cafe.  Towns number two and three turned out to be ghost towns. With grumpy children on my tail, I picked up the pace, and we finally found breakfast in Belorado at 9:30, 15km into our hike.

I had some "kissing up" to do, so we picked a warm, indoor location with WiFi. I went from despised drill sergeant to magical mom in a matter of minutes.  We rested and milked the WiFi for a full hour, before I reminded the troops that we still  had some walking to do.  The beauty of having walked so far before breakfast, was that we just had a quick 2.5 hour jaunt to the finish line for the day in Villafranca de Montes de Oca.  

The weather continued to cooperate and stayed uncharacteristically cool and overcast for our entire hike. We had read about a hotel owner in Villafranca who had hiked el Camino and had decided to give back to pilgrims by attaching a pilgrim hostel to his four star hotel.  We found it and were not disappointed by the classy hostel.  The WiFi was a bonus, but it required hanging out in the hotel lobby - feeling like misplaced urchins intruding on an experience designed exclusively for the uppercrust.  Naturally, the kids were completely unfazed and made themselves right at home on the velvet couches and were oblivious to the stench emanating from their socks. 

The day ended with an expensive mistake, however, and the hotel got its money from the riffraff using the WiFi.  The grocery store closed before we made it back into town to buy dinner (and breakfast for the  following day), and we were forced to eat at the hotel restaurant - a delicious but pricey end to a day that began and ended with food issues.

Today, day ten on the trail, was to be a marathon. We were prepared to hike 38-40 km for our longest day yet - not really because we wanted to, but because the lodging options necessitated a couple of long legs in order to have a place to sleep at night.

We overslept and didn't get on the trail until 6:45, but we knew we had a 12 km walk through wooded hillsides to our first stop at a monastery in San Juan de Ortega, so there wouldn't be much resting along the way.

In San Juan, we refueled with coffee and hot chocolate and plotted out our next pleasant country stretch to a lunch town 14 km away, Orbaneja.  First we passed through Atapuerca, whose prehistoric caves are the source of the earliest human remains discovered in Europe.  The caves were a 6 km detour from the trail, so we decided to trust the guidebook on that little tidbit in hopes of making it to Burgos as more than simple human remains.  Next, the trail took us up and over a rocky ridge. It was on this windy hilltop that we found a cross and an enormous rock cairn with prayers from people all over the world.  There were also various stone messages written all over the field at the top of the hill.  We took turns making our own wishes at the cross and did some designs of our own in the field before heading down the other side of the hill.

NoBo

At this point, the sun had decided that it wanted to shine down hard, and it did.  We'd had a very frosty start to the morning, so the heat felt shocking by mid day.  We made our lunch stop a little earlier than planned when we realized that we had taken a small detour that brought us through a a different town than the one we had intended.  We enjoyed the break and dreaded the final 14 km that lay ahead, heading into the city of Burgos. We had read that it would be a slog through the suburbs, and, indeed, it was.  I took no photos. It was not worthy.  We walked on hard, black tarmac along the highway.  We traipsed for what seemed  like hours through an ugly industrial zone.  We walked for kilometers next to a Bridgestone tire factory.  The sun beat down, and there was nothing pleasant about those final hours.

When we finally left the industrial zone behind, my savior was a grocery store shimmering in the heat of the tarmac. It contained a candy aisle with a selection larger than anything we have seen to date. We traipsed in, spent as much money on candy as we had on lunch and plopped down in the parking lot to console ourselves.  Within ten minutes, we felt we had the energy to move again.  Brianna said, "I think sugar is actually a pain reliever." I could only nod through my melted-chocolate bliss to agree. 

It was still another 60 minute forced march into the city center of Burgos before we found the municipal hostel, but the candy made all it feel just a little bit better.  Just outside the hostel door,  we were greeted by gorgeous views of the city cathedral.  Inside, we were greeted by many of the familiar faces we have been seeing along the trail during the day and at various hostels at night. It's fun to catch up and hear everyone's stories from the trail.  Today's stories were mostly about misery. 

 

Burgos, however, looks beautiful, and we have earned a short day of walking tomorrow.  We intend to sleep in (until 6:30 perhaps) and take time to tour the cathedral before we move on.  Tonight, however, we are enjoying the more basic joys of a city - grocery stores that are open late and washing machines! Although it appears that my poor Spanish skills caused me to purchase "color enhancer" rather than laundry detergent, we will still smell like flowers tomorrow. Once I no longer need to pray for clean laundry, I will get busy focusing on more spiritual pursuits.

Cathedral LUV