Author: Wynette

I was going to call this post “Day in León,” but Charlie suggested the above. We spent the day in the very nice city of León. Our hotel is just around the corner from a building that Gaudí designed and built. (One of the 9 that exist in Spain, most of which are in Barcelona.) Last time we were here in León, we spotted the building right away but didn’t know it was a Gaudí right away. At the time, it was owned by a bank! Now it is a museum about Gaudí plus a small art gallery on the top floor. We spent a couple of hours there today. We’ll see another Gaudí work (a bishop’s palace) when we walk through Astorga in a few days.

We decided to eat Japanese food for lunch today. We’ve had lots of Spanish food already and will be eating it almost exclusively the next few weeks so decided to do this as a diversión. Enjoyed it.

Then we went to a self-serve laundry. It was very modern. There were a couple of rather small washing machines. I thought, “I guess sometimes people want to wash a really small load”, then I noticed the sign. (See photo below.) It translates to “Washing machine dedicated for the garments of your pets”. That was a new one for me!

Here is where we stayed last night and tonight. It cost 56 euros* (vs 45 euros at much plainer place night before last). It’s a beautiful charming place. And has an outstanding restaurant. Some of the best food we’ve ever eaten on any Camino. Everyone is so nice to us.

As you can see from these photos, we aren’t exactly roughing it.

*Well, they only charged us 50 euros when we checked out.

Our hotel in Bercianos (photos in previous post) had a bar/restaurant downstairs. Because of our jetlag and the excellent sun-blocking screens in our room, we slept till 9:15. This was our first day of walking so we hurriedly got dressed and went downstairs for coffee and breakfast. I was bold and asked if he could make us fried eggs and toast even though no menu advertised they were available. He didn’t seem thrilled about it but said “si”. He disappeared in the back and after not too long he brought us the eggs. They were perfect. After we were done I told him “los huevos fue perfectos” and asked him if he had cooked them. He said “no” and something about the house out back (I had trouble understanding his Spanish) so I decided that he said his wife who lives in the house behind the hotel made them in their house. (She’s the one who checked us in the night before.) We had noticed some chickens in a pen behind our hotel. So maybe he was telling us the eggs were from the chickens at the house behind the hotel. Anyway, they were delicious with the bright orange yolks we’ve come to expect in eggs in Spain. He turned out to be a friendly man. He asked us how far we were going to walk “today”. Mansilla? Reliegos? It was complicated to answer since we planned to do our taxi-two-step that Charlie described in a previous post, more complicated than my Spanish could handle, so I just said “Mansilla”. He said he thought that was too far for us to walk getting such a late start. So I said, well maybe Reliegos. That satisfied him.

Many many pilgrims have written books about the Camino. I’ve read dozens of them. Some are quite good, others so so. I’ve enjoyed almost all of them. One of my favorites was A Furnace Full of God by Rebekah Scott. She is an American woman married to a British man and they moved to Moratinos, a tiny pueblo on the Camino on the Meseta. They open their house to pilgrims, especially those having problems finding places to stay. She talked about how the women in Moratinos started crocheting “covers” for the trees on their town plaza. We walked through Moratinos on two previous caminos (2013 and 2014) but we never saw the tree afghans. I think those were started after we were there. Well, I think it must have caught on elsewhere because when we walked through El Burgo Ranero yesterday morning, we found trees wrapped in the colorful covers. El Burgo Ranero is about 15 miles from Moratinos (2 days walk for us). But we didn’t go through Moratinos this year. We started just past Moratinos.