Camino de Santiago Day 26: Molinaseca to Villafranca del Bierzo
A lovely day walking alone again, my foot forcing me to walk at a pace that only I could
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My leg is still in bits. Voltarol and ibuprofen and some massaging works, but it’s a gentle start to the day.
Walked alone all day and loved it. There’s a couple of friendly faces on the road ahead of me but I wasn’t going fast enough to catch them. I caught up to them them in Ponferrada and greeted them, some chit-chat and a catch-up, but I kept walking.
The whole day I’d to walk at such a specific pace for my foot – not too fast, but I couldn’t go too slow either – that there wasn’t a single person in the world who would have walked at the same speed as me that day.
Seven kilometres in I reach the city of Ponferrada, it’s got high-rise downtown apartments and feels like a planned industrial city, with the standard centuries-old churches and castles of course, and then it’s never more than a couple of kilometre before the next town or village, but I kind of loved the feeling of a slow deliberate break-free from the sprawl, past petrol stations and abandoned factories and traffic and into mellow vineyards and light woods and back again through rural villages.
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Floating into villages and then out again like a tide, flowing deeper into nature and the hills but not too quickly, at just the right pace to assume a new identity – that of being in the countryside. The sun is fine, the shade is fine, each as it comes. Well, the sun is fine until it’s not.
The rise of the sun mirrors this elasticated day – a frosty 4 degrees in the morning, 8 degrees at 10, up to 19 at lunchtime. It gets slowly hotter as the day progresses and I decide to sit on the grass in the shade for a while just because I can, and because I’m kind of starting to cook.
I am in no rush. Yesterday was a lesson in humility, today I’m regaining my love of walking. The route feels like it’s got everything, towns and hills and forests and rivers to cross and petrol stations and churches and glimpses of everywhere I’ve ever been, across Europe, America, Asia and Home.
I walk from 8am to 5pm and break often. Ordinarily these would be office hours to many but I feel like it’s the most honest day’s work I’ve done in a while.
It’s a special feeling when you come over a hill and see the town you’re aiming for in a valley 5km away. It turns out not to be Villafrance, it’s the one next to it, but all the better as the actual sight of Villafranca scaffolded amongst rivers and mountains makes me gasp.
It seems that more than the geography it is in how a place attracts and makes use of sunshine and light that truly defines it.
It feels like I’m once again in a different country. Having been conditioned to a new home over the initial days of the Camino, it was all flattened out of us over the last couple of weeks, and now I’m once again seeing the world with fresh eyes, a beginner’s mind.
I choose an albergue at random from the guidebook and when I glance at the description later it’s described as ‘legendary’: the Albergue Fenix, alleged to have been the first albergue on the Camino, and which fittingly for its name, once burned down and was rebuilt. It’s run by an eclectic bunch of volunteers of all ages who really do seem to be working there for their love of people and the Camino. There’s a communal dinner with prayers and blessings beforehand. They’re in Spanish, but it feels like a secular celebration of the Camino spirit that has attracted us from all over the world to come here and share our lives with the road and the people we meet.
And inevitably, as I checked I hear a roar from the terrace above the outdoor reception area: all my friends, whom I hadn’t seen or heard from since yesterday afternoon, are already here.
This is just the Way now.
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