Today I hadn´t planned to walk 38 km, but.... this morning at 5 a.m., all the people in my room started getting up, packing up their packs and generally making noise. So at about 5:45, I decided I might as well just get out of bed and get going. I left the albergue at about 6:15 (having heated up a cup of water for instant coffee in the micro-wave, which stopped working mid-cycle, so I´m sure there were a lot of unhappy pilgrims this morning). The first 20 km of my walk were magical -- first, you leave town next to the lagoon where all the frogs (hence the name Frog Burg) are making lots of noise, croaking is the term of art I think, and then for about 20 km, it´s just a nice off-road track. The mountains are constantly on your right, the Picos de Europa, a major mountain range that goes across northern Spain, and it is just wonderful to watch the sun rise as you are walking along parallel to the mountains that are about 30 km away.
But after about 20 km of nice, quiet, scenic walking, I arrived in the town of Mansilla de las Mulas, at which point the Camino changes dramatically.
The next 18 km are next to the highway, with a lot of noise and not much charm. I had planned to stop, but when I got to the town where the albergue was, it was 11:30 a.m. and I was 14 km from León. A lot of people I had met in the albergue in Frog Burg hopped on a bus to avoid these last 14 kms of walking along the highway. But there is something in me that is hard-wired and will not let me get on a bus, so I slogged on into León. I have to say that things have improved vastly since the last time I walked this way -- we no longer have to take our lives into our hands when we cross the national highway several times. The government has re-routed pilgrim traffic onto pedestrian bridges back and forth over the highway. I´m sure it added several kms, but it was worth it. They increased the safety many times over but unfortunately couldn´t do anything to increase the aesthetics. It was a really ugly stretch.
But now I´m in León, and will spend two nights in a hotel where I´ve been before, with Dana, and with David. My treat for making the 38 km was that I would stay in a real hotel, not an albergue. The Posada Regia is one of those places I´m a sucker for -- old stone buildings with creaking old wooden stairways, it´s so nice! And the public library is very welcoming to peregrinos, so I will be back tomorrow on my down time between visiting old churches and plazas. The León cathedral, IMO, has the world´s most beautiful gothic stained windows. Some would argue for Chartres, but I´ll take León any day.
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