Stage 25 – Villares de Orbigo 38km / 271km

Rain. We decide that if I do a long haul and skip a stage stop and Di takes an extended mother’s day break (and not walk 38km in the rain), we can gain ourselves an extra rest day somewhere together, perhaps even Santiago de Compostella. At about 33km, at the end of maybe 10km of dead flat, gun barrel straight, drizzle and mud, I started to reflect on the wisdom of that decision. Di’s reflection, at about the same time, reclined under a warm dry blanket in our albergue room with a lovely local white and a good book (after a brief bus trip), was considerably more favourable. She texted me, just as my sodden boot came down in sizeable pile of donkey shit, ‘this place is great!’

The blessed virgn held the rains at bay for a good hour and a half this morning, roughly the time to get beyond the city limits. I take this as thanks for paying the cathedral entry fee and wondered if perhaps we’d paid the full fee rather than the pilgrim’s discount, I might have gone dry as far as Villar de Mazarife, not sure.

There’s a park just on the other side the Rio Bergnesga, leaving Leon with trees full of peacocks. Certainly there was one tree with one very happy peacock and five peahens, but it sounded like there were heaps of them. Maybe there were, who’s to say?

I stop at a bar for an espresso then hit the road aiming to stop every one and a half hours (about 9km for me). At La Virgin del Camino, an outlying suburb, you can choose to follow the highway or take the alternate root out into bush and farmland. The latter is a little longer but you avoid the constant traffic noise. I took the alternate root and didn’t see a soul for about an hour, until Chozas de Abajo.

Here, like in many small towns, the locals have rerouted the path arrows to channel pilgrims past their establishments with additional encouraging signs such as ‘bar’ painted in large yellow letters on the road.

The holy path, on this particular diversion, takes me to a lovely little Cafe in the middle of town which serves a stella jalepeno tortilla (im gonna pay for that tomorrow….or sooner. But Ive got my trowel, so…) and great coffee. And seeing that I’m 3 hours in, it fits my scheduled stop. Happy days!

Beyond Chozas, the gently undulating, lightly wooded hills interspersed with some smaller wheat fields gave way to long straights of dead flat, irrigated fields, and I started to get a sense of why some people bypass this stuff. For the first couple of hours i practiced a walking meditation ive being playing with, I sang my way through another hour or so (nobody around see) then after that I decended into a rather morbid ‘when’s this shit going to end’ mantra (a much less resourceful walking meditation) as various parts of my body began to scream obscenities. My right second biggest toe was particularly abusive and I resolved to give it a good talking when we arrived.

What finished me in the end (almost) was the number of ‘Orbigo’ towns. Arrival at the first Orbigo lifted my spirits like only the end of a long hard journey can. Somewhat dubious but nonetheless excited to hang the boots up, the second Orbigo, rolled by without a familiar albergue in sight and when the third heavily albergue laiden Orbigo’s pretty cobbled streets ended in a dirt road disappearing to vanishing point across kilometers more flat fields, with no Dianne, I began to despair.

The Buen Camino app, of course, shows exactly which Orbigo our albergue is in …but maps are for wooses.

Di poured me a red and Michael our host prepared hot pea soup and chorizo pasta for our small party of three (us and a German character Marcus). Hot food and hot showers do wonders for the soul.