Rest Day in Villafranca del Bierzo

This is really a lovely mountain town. It’s cute and very picturesque!

We are taking our last rest day here before slowly climbing upward toward the mountainous town of O Cebreiro the next day. Sadly this is the last day we’ll spend with Lisa and Lisa who we really like. They are going up to O Cebreiro in just one day. Very hardcore! It was hard to say goodbye to them tonight 😢. And we loved our host Dani (Daniel). We got a great group photo!

Today we got our laundry washed at our hostel where they offer laundry service. We also got haircuts! Then we went to the grocery store for trail snacks. We are always looking for something compact, durable, and relatively calorie dense but having enough sugar for a jolt if we need it, and we got some sugar crusted peanuts as well as some jelly beans. The supermarket was small by American standards, pretty large by rural Spanish standards, and well-equipped. I posted some pictures of it today.

We tried to visit both of the town’s churches and both were closed. One of them has a Puerta de Perdon, a door through which medieval pilgrims too injured or too sick to complete the journey to Santiago could walk or be carried to see a priest who would offer them absolution despite their inability to finish their pilgrimage. There is another Puerta de Perdon in León, which is maybe five days behind us. These days neither door opens other than on festive days so modern day pilgrims need to just keep on truckin’!

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We were looking at a cool building and walked to the door to see what it was. Turns out it was a natural history museum! Yay! The collection was odd. There were lots of paper mache giant costumes worn in festivals and a collection of dusty taxidermied birds, mammals, and a few other critters. The building belongs to an order of priests who were missionaries and they brought back specimens from their missions. There were also specimens from near here. The woman who staffed the place took us to a room full of big paper mache costumes to see a video about local wildlife. The viewing space was weird. But the video showed bears, foxes, small and large deer, lots of birds, and some sort of ibex looking animal. Maybe we’ll see some wildlife on the last part of our Camino!

We bought new gloves for David, hooray! We ate pizza for lunch with Lisa and Lisa. And now we’re chilling out in our room, trying to allow our sore parts to rest a bit.Läs mer