Polientes to Susilla

Now that my 40+ kilometer days are in the rearview mirror, I have had to break up this stage into two short days. Accommodations are very scarce, but the Casa Rural Mate is about halfway.

Some camino forum friends reported very bad conditions on parts of this stage., but having had basically no rain this year, most everything is pretty dry..

I started rather late, almost 830, because my hotel included breakfast, and because it was not clear whether there would be any other food options between now and my destination. I also had to carry my food for this evening, so that added a little more weight than usual.

This was a surprisingly pleasant walk. It went through at least four little villages, and in nearly all of them, I stopped to chat. Once with a señora, watering her flowers, once with a guy picking green beans in his garden, once with two kids who were going to help their dad harvest potatoes. And at least three or four churches with little bits and pieces of Romanesque! — windows, arches, corbels. So there were lots of reasons to dilly dally, at the one church closest to my final destination, I was pretty sure I had seen some more of those X-rated corbels, and sure enough an online source confirmed it. I’m no expert in erotic carvings,, but these did look very suggestive from afar. I noticed that there was a fair amount of what looked like damage on some of them, and it reminded me what an old man once told me outside a similar church – that the priest had told them when they were young to throw stones at those carvings because they had no place outside a house of worship and we’re disgusting. Looks like the boys of this town might have had some success with that.

My Casa Rural is really nice , and after a shower, I took a walk to find the anthropomorphic gravesites that are about a kilometer away. It took me a while, and several attempts up and down a rock face, but I finally found them. There were at least 20 in different groupings, and, sadly, but not surprisingly, a large number of them were child sized.

So ends another really pleasant day. And the cherry on top of all of it is that I have learned of a surprise visit tomorrow in Aguilar. Did someone say Moratinos?!Baca lagi