El Real de la Jara

I had a great sleep and was only awakened once by a loud burst of thunder and heavy rain but it did not last long. After a quick breakfast of coffee, toast and jam with Robert and Ana María, we set off, on the way out of town we met Aurelio, a Spanish peregrino and he joined us for the day.

As I had been exploring the Via de la Plata app on my phone I discovered that it had a copy of the author's GPS trace of the camino and that it identifies your position in relation to that. In short, it meant as long as I followed his GPS trace, I shouldn't get lost again (reader I never did). It added a lot of confidence in the weeks ahead especially when I was walking on my own, in fact a couple of times I was able to save other peregrinos from going the wrong way.

The walk to El Real was as pleasant as I had hoped it would be, I remembered some of it from my 2-week walk in 2018, though some of it was new to me, either Ken and I had gone the wrong way (VERY possible) or the camino had shifted and to be fair that was also possible. Like the day before, the paths were mostly wide and level with a few inclines. The view was great and the conversation was also, that said by the last 5km, I was really beginning to feel those blisters and my right hip was very sore.

El Real appears very suddenly, one minute you are walking along a wooded path and the next you are in the street, and so we all parted company in the middle of the town and went off to our various albergues. Robert and Ana María were in a private albergue as was I at the far end of town, Keiko, a Japanese lady from New York whom I had met in Castilblanco was also staying there, and over the next few weeks we would become friends and companions on the road.

Aurelio stayed in the municipal, where he met and had a great conversation with a French couple whom I would eventually meet and who would be part of my camino for a number of weeks. On our walk I had shown Aurelio how to use Google Translate, especially the conversation feature, he knew a few words of English but otherwise spoke only Spanish. Google Translate opened up a whole new world for him and he was overjoyed at being able to converse, albeit slowly with people from other countries.

We all met up with one another for an excellent dinner, then we all left to get on with whatever tasks we had to do for tomorrow. I did a little bit of shopping (fruit and earplugs), looked at the guidebook for tomorrow, though I remembered the road well, it was the walk to Monesterio that really finished my camino in 2018. So, I was feeling quite negative about it, but I remembered that it says in the Sermon on the Mount not to worry about tomorrow, for today has enough troubles of its own. I thought I should give that a go.

As is so often the case in these small villages and towns there's nothing much to do in the evenings so I wrote in my journal, packed my mochila for the next day and went to bed.Read more