Author: Charlie

• Feeling near as faded as my jeans

The Meseta is a high plain in north central Spain, flat but not as flat as SE NM or west Texas. Many pilgrims do not like it and some skip it but we like it.

The Spanish rail clerks did not know Sahagún as we said it ”saw haw goon”. We wrote it down and they said, oh ”saw ah (barely said) goon”. I guess people in NM might not know of the place Wynette grew up if you said it ”tay haw tum”.

Now I’m starting to feel bad about making fun of the French for their linguistic strictness.

Restaurants in Spain typically have a fixed price menu like this, always a good bargain, with a few choices for each of two courses, bread, water or wine, and dessert.

We got there at one pm, way too early for lunch in Spain, so we had the place to ourselves.

We had some things we only use on the plane to and from Spain. We mailed them to the hotel where we plan to stay in Santiago on April 4, the end of our camino.

The flight from Dallas to Madrid went well. We managed to sleep 2 or 3 hours on the eight hour flight. In Madrid, we got a rookie clerk at the Renfe (Spanish rail) ticket office at the airport and he got us on the wrong train (slower) from Madrid to Palencia. Not only slower but it ended up being two hours late so we missed the connection to Sahagún, where we had planned to spend the night and then start the Camino.

So we canceled our hotel in Sahagún and stayed in Palencia (where we missed the connection) our first night in Spain, a nice town to stay in with beautiful churches and good restaurants. The next day we went to the Vodafone store and got Spanish phone SIMs and then went to the post office and mailed some stuff to Santiago (things we needed for the plane but don’t want to carry on the Camino). We took the 4:27pm train to Sahagun, which was only 30 minutes late, then a taxi 7 miles to Bercianos where we had planned to walk to and now we were back on schedule, so not too bad.

We walked 7 miles today (Saturday) and then started our “taxi two-step”, a taxi to Mansilla de las Mulas to stay in a lovely hotel with a very good restaurant, tomorrow a taxi back to where we were picked up and then walk the 9 more miles back to Mansilla and a second night here.

We’re finally going back to the Camino after two years of COVID! This will be a reboot of sorts so we are walking the Camino Frances again, this time starting from the middle, at Sahagun.