Carrión de los Condes to Ledigos

Today felt like a long slog but I’ve completed 25km and will have a shorter day tomorrow.

The first 17km followed the route of the Roman road towards Astorga, and so was largely a long straight section. This is also the longest stage on the Camino Frances with no villages.

Doing the 17km at night is apparently a thing (because you don’t really need to see any signs or arrows). It appeared that some of my roommates were up for that and so were packing their bags at not long after 1am, and again from 5am (the later being fairly usual for some early birds). I remained (mostly) asleep until about 6.30.

I left the albergue by 7.30 and made it across the square outside, where I found a bar open for breakfast and so stopped for a coffee and a pan a chocolat. I have a reasonable level of experience eating this delicacy (or its French cousins) but this was the first time I’ve been provided with a steak knife!

It was soon time to get back on the road and I followed the route out of a quiet and chilly Carrion, to join the Roman road. This starts alongside a minor road and then headed off across the fields as the road peeled away to the right.

Fortunately an enterprising gentleman has set up a small bar/cafe in the middle of the otherwise long service-less path. I thought it would be rude not to patronise his endeavour, and so took a small second breakfast of a ham, cheese and egg sandwich (again, similar to a croque monsieur) with a coffee, and it came with a small but freshly squeezed orange juice.

At points, you could see and hear traffic on the motorway a few miles to the north, but the view was otherwise the endless fields and sky I expected.

For most of the 17km, there was a strong, cold wind blowing from behind us, which seemed to accompany a weather front which brought more complete cloud cover overhead. It was a good job it was a tail wind but it kept the temperature fairly cool and kicked up dust from the path.

Eventually, the Camino descended into the first village, Calzadilla de la Cueza, when I had some lunch. It was a relief to be out of the wind.

Once fortified with lunch, and having wrestled with the conundrum of whether to stop for the day in Calzadilla or carry on to Legidos, which the guidebook said was 6km away, I decided to continue.

If I had realised that the next section was essentially a long uphill (albeit intermittently shady) on an increasingly pebble-y path, I might have left this until tomorrow. But the nature of a walk like the Camino is that I would still have had to tackle this at some point.

At last, the path went downhill and Ledigos came into sight (and turned out to be much nearer than the subsequent village, which had been visible first).

There are only private (and so bookable) albergues here, and I’d not booked ahead. However there were plenty of beds at the first albergue I tried.

Before being shown to my room, I’d already met a Canadian friend from yesterday, and then the other occupants who were already in my bedroom were a French couple and a friend, who currently live near Lyon but started walking from Le Puy, France a few years ago. This year they started at Burgos and are heading to Ponferrada. Once again I inflicted my ropey French on them and they very politely said that they would never criticise because they didn’t speak any other languages!Leer más