Day 22: León to San Martín del Camino (Wendy)

 Stopping in big, old cities like León presents a complicated scenario for peregrinos, especially those of us who are struggling with injuries and looking forward to some much-deserved time off our feet.

On the one hand, the old cities are beautiful, full of lots of ancient structures to ooh and aah over. As Bob shared, the Roman walls and Gothic cathedral were amazing, especially in contrast to each other. And don’t even get him started on the plazas. Oh, the many plazas we visited yesterday! All great and worthy of at least six to eight hours of our time.

But, there’s the getting in and out of such architectural wonders that’s the real downer. Big cities like León usually include about a two-hour run up to the good stuff, where you’re walking through industrial areas and suburban sprawl. Luckily, thanks to some fortuitous help from some Korean pilgrims and a kindly local, we managed to miss most of this ugliness going into Burgos, as I wrote at the time.

Unfortunately, we had no such Camino angels looking over us this time. So we slogged into the city last night, and had an equally long, drawn-out exit this morning through miles and miles of furniture stores and car dealerships and little suburbs with abandoned toilets in empty lots and the like. 

Perhaps the worst part is that Camino protocol “recommends” (“requires” is too strong a word) that a peregrino not use walking sticks in the city. Makes total sense, as they take up a lot of space on a city sidewalk. However, having become something of an expert on various walking surfaces over the past few weeks, I can tell you that walking for hours on pavement is quite hard on the knees and feet. These are exactly the times when you’d love to move some of the burden into your arms.

However, we did see some more gorgeous buildings in the pre-dawn light on our way out of town. And once we finally cleared the urban sprawl, we had some delightfully pastoral scenes, including one where a cow had wandered close to the path, away from the rest of the herd. The owner was calling her and tromping through the wet field with a dog to round her up. The cow looked at him, mooed, and turned away in a very Leeroy Jenkins kind of way. 

We had lots of variations on the theme of “cloudy and rainy” today, including a crazy sudden squall that had us diving into a nearby restaurant to wait out the downpour. This gave us the chance to finally talk with a lovely young man from Arizona named Brendon whom we’d been seeing all day but had not yet chatted with. Oh, and we’re officially under 300 km now!

Happily, our little albergue tonight is self-contained, so we don’t need to venture out into the current storm for dinner, just stroll down the stairs for another delicious roast chicken and potato with red wine menu peregrino.