Our walk today wasn’t too long. The guide book said to go three more kilometers to Terradillos de los Templarios but all they had there was a Templar castle and two albergues with a total of 100 bunk beds. Instead of trying to reserve two of those, or racing to get there before they were full, we reserved a private room in the Albergue La Morena in Ledigos. Wow, it’s beautiful! The room has a great double bed, towels(!), a fruit basket(!!) and candies on the pillows(!!!). It’s a large old family farm house and run by the grandchildren of the original owner. The staff are awesome!

Now I had to talk about the albergue because there isn’t much to say about the walk. The first 17km to Calzadilla de la Cueza was mostly what looked like a flat farm track but under the gravel, rocks and dirt was the Roman road, Via Aquitana that connected Astorga to Rome. Cool, right? This is the longest stretch of the Camino Frances without support but we did find a pop up bar at the 7km mark. The road was so flat that at one point, we had one 10m mound to go over and our feet questioned our sanity. 200m later, there was a 5m mound to “climb” over. Just as we got to the top of that, two ladies passed us. I let out a huge sigh and complained “these hills are killing us!” They laughed. I followed that up with “This is worse than Tuscany!” They laughed harder. I like people who appreciate sarcasm.

From Calzadilla, it was mostly along side a dual lane road that wasn’t very busy but had enough cars on it to make us happy that authorities had made a gravel path for the pilgrims parallel to it. The road was mostly arrow straight and flat as a pancake but at the end had a bit of a hill that we actually appreciated. All we had to do after that was round the corner and stop in our lodgings.

After getting excited about our room and showering, I did the laundry while Melanie went out to the bar. She’s not a lush, she just happened to see Jackie and Martin who we met a few nights ago. Melanie was telling them the story from our last two last nights about Felix. As you may have read, Felix walked 45km one day to catch up with us in Frómista. At dinner that night, he told us about a French girl he met who stopped 5km before Frómista to sleep under the stars. Fast forward to the evening in Carrión de los Condes and Melanie started to talking to a lone pilgrim girl at a bar in the Plaza Mayor while I ordered the drinks. The woman was young, attractive, adventurous and… French. Melanie asked, “are you Felix’s friend?” Bingo. Fast forward to today and as I said, Melanie was telling this story to Jackie and Martin… and Felix walks by. Coincidence or not? We all had some lovely drinks in the bar’s garden.

Just to finish the Felix story, after he stopped for a bit in Carrión, he continued on to find a place to sleep under the stars. He was going to wait for the French girl, talk with he for a while and the the girl was going to continue to walk all night under the stars. We asked Felix how he slept and he shrugged his shoulders and said that he underestimated how many snails would be crawling all over him in the night. We also asked him what the French girl’s name was (we forgot to ask when we met her). Felix shrugged his shoulders and said he wasn’t sure because it’s hard to pronounce her name. Young love is a funny thing.

More tomorrow. Peace y’all, Goodnight George and Leo. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. They never even brush their teeth.