Denver Botanical Gardens

Denver Botanical Gardens

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Day 22 - To Astorga

We reached the 500 km mark today (about 325 miles).  We are begining to feel it. It did not rain, but the flood waters from the last couple of weeks finally gave us fits today.  The mud was horrible in spots. For the first time ever we were forced to remove our boots and put on our crocs/sandals and wade down the "road", in a later spot we decided to just walk through 200 yards of swamp with our boots on, and finally we just chose the highway for the last 4 miles. The good news was that the swamp washed the mud off our boots!
The only other pilgrims we have seen for 4 days are James and Lucas. Now we are in the Astorga albergue which has 150 beds, and dozens of folks coming and going (we have joined the Camino Frances, which is much busier than the Via de la Plata, which we have now completed). We do have a private, one bunk room tonight, but it will be a bit of a shock tomorrow to have many of these pilgrims pass us on the trail.
Since we are back on the Camino Frances, which we wrote about in 2014, I will plan to post only every few days instead of everyday as I have been trying to do. We plan to shorten our walking distances over the next few days to give our bodies a chance to recover.
Our beds last night were hospital beds, we have many different types of refuges on this trip
Another railroad bridge to cross
This is a great trail when it is dry
In English: SAINT JAMES THE PILGRIM
The last few kilometers, our friend James leads the way

2 comments:

  1. Congrats on completing the VdlP portion of your journey, and I hope the Francés is drier.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Jim. As you will see in our next post, the Frances feels much different, but we are glad to be able to do few shorter stages. The highway or the trail into Molinaseca? That will be the question for Sunday morning.

    ReplyDelete