A really classic camino day.
Last night was great fun - communal dinner for 6 with a whole lot of fairly inaccurate translation going on, mostly by me. We were one Dutchman (speaking English and French), two Irish, one Spaniard (speaking Spanish and French) and one Argentinian (Spanish only). And me. The slightly drunken descriptions of the historical oppression of the Irish people / Spanish minorities were slightly beyond my language skills. As was the translation of the Irish saying that the quiet pig eats his fill. Anyway, everyone seemed perfectly happy to monologue away in his / her own language while agreeing vociferously with the others...
Would have been a lovely night's sleep too, if not for the snoring of the Argentine. I pretended he was a large friendly tiger purring. It seemed to help my mental state, if not the actual decibel level.
A beautiful walk today in much colder weather, including odd spots of rain and hail at the end. There was a fantastic 12k stretch of path through ancient broadleaf woods and then high sandy pine forest, cold and sunny, no-one around. These are the 'montes de oco' (goose mountains) - notorious in the old days for pilgrim-preying bandits.
On through small villages to our current location in Atapuerca, famous for ancient hominid finds. As yet I have been unable to find out how / whether we can visit, but we may have more luck this evening when everything opens post-siesta.
In the meantime we have a (currently) quiet and small room in a nice albergue. The large loud spanish group is also here but, thankfully, in a different room.
More unsettled weather forecast but wonderfully my feet now fit inside my boots again so the wet-weather sandals-and-socks problem is currently on hold.
Later - there's apparently no wifi in this town so I shall post a day late anyway... Nice afternoon and evening playing rummy, 21 and one-card poker in a surprisingly busy bar, and then a communal dinner in the other albergue in town. Camino dinners can be strangely like business dinners when you're jetlagged - depending on the company they can be either super fun or an exercise in just feeding yourself while waiting for it to become a socially acceptable time to go to bed.
It snowed throughout dinner! As yet it's not settling but it's cold enough to I think. Certainly strange when we're all a bit sunburnt from just a couple of days ago. Strange (and cold) experience to walk home through the slush in sandals.
Tomorrow the walk into Burgos, a big city by our standards. (Advance warning for the low-tech Jenny tracker!)
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