Camponaraya to Villafranca del Camino

Right as I started this post, the Russian woman in the bed next to me decided to begin a SPEAKERPHONE call with, presumably, her husband. In a silent room, with me and another girl clearly having Quiet** Horizontal Time. Sometimes I am really prompted to analyse my judgements and ask myself whether I just need to fucking relax, or, more likely, if the majority of the world's population just need to fucking behave. A phone call is the absolute tamest end of the spectrum of things I've observed lately.

Anyway, let's ignore her. It was a nice walk today, good enrichment time. A lot of up and down, mostly through vineyard hills. Highlight of the day may have been stopping to pluck a ripe fig off a tree and noshing into it like a hungry little monkey.

I got to Villafranca quite early, around 10am, and was pretty tempted to push on and do another 10km or so. The problem is, I'm not really afforded flexibility anymore, as I prebooked all my accom until the end. With 500,000 pilgrims already completed the Camino this year, accommodation is getting harder and harder to secure on the fly; I've heard more than one account of people sleeping in parks or catching taxis to the next town with a room. It's a shame, because the ideal spirit of the Camino is to walk as far as you wanna walk on any given day, and be able to roll into an available bed wherever you end up, but that approach seems to be dying out. As such, I had already booked my night here in Villafranca and, if I cancelled it and pushed on, would have to knock all my subsequent bookings back a day as well.

Instead, I pottered around town and slowly made my way to my albergue, happily kicking back on the patio for a couple of hours until the room was ready. Greeted jovially by Juan, I was shown to a room without a bunk bed in sight!! Juan proudly spat on my sleeping bag, claiming I wouldn't need it, as "sheets clean, everything clean, every day" and folded back my bedding to impress upon me how serious he was about the clean sheets. He then patiently showed me how to turn on a lamp, and urged, "this 5 stars, this your home". Juan, my friend, a standalone bed, a clothes rack, a lamp, and bedside table? Say less.

Again, I was the first in the room and luxuriated in the quiet privacy for about an hour until the next guest arrived. I had a shower (GREAT water pressure) and toddled down to the supermarket where I was forced to get quite creative in order to find a lunch + dinner solution that was not the same thing I've had 57 times in a row now. You'll often get a microwave and kettle in albergues, which helps, rarely an oven or a toaster, but some places (such as this one) have nothing. As you've probably gotten familiar with by now, my usual approach is some baguette variant but today I went cuckoo bananas and branched out. Protein drink, mandarin, empanada bread thingy from the bakery, and a big packaged salad with croutons and cheese and chicken bits etc. When you're trying to feed yourself for <10 euro, with no access to cooking equipment, and limited by the pretty rigid offerings of Spanish supermarkets, you really have to work to keep the spark alive.

Anyway, that's me fam. Not much on the agenda for the rest of the evening beyond chilling all the way out.Read more