Once again, a very nice hotel with good food served at a nearby restaurant. We took it slowly this morning, partly because we are getting a bit weary and partly because we knew we didn’t have a very long day and had lots of opportunities to stop.
It was a very cold start to the day, around 7c, so it was a very quick walk to the first village, Población de Campos, where we stopped for coffee. We had a choice today of following the P-980 all day, or taking an alternative route along the río Ucieza. We took the latter option just after Población and were glad we did – a bitter wind kicked up not long after we left Frómista that would have (and did when we rejoined the road) made the walk even colder. We have clothes that would have kept us warm but we weren’t expecting it to be so cold and those clothes were in our bag that gets transported!
Anyway, we had another nice walk between the villages of Población and Villovieco (where we had another coffee but no photo) and again between the latter and the ermita de la Virgen del río. From there it was road or a track by the road first to Villalcázar de Sirga (town of the towpath?) where we had a lovely lunch and into and past Carrión to our accommodation, Real Monasterio San Zoilo.
The meseta (roughly described as the part of the journey between Burgos and Astorga) is described in the guidebook as a being a bit barren and featureless but so far it mostly seems to be very fertile farming land with frequent villages with a few dry areas in the higher sections. Perhaps it will change but perhaps the author hasn’t seen the wheatbelt or the Nullabor Plain!
The rain yesterday really cleared the haze and the Picos de Europa, which we passed to the north of on the Camino del Norte, are clearly visible directly north of us.
A fairly comfortable 21 kms today to take us to 369km with the route video here.
steelewalking 