Interesting day today! We need to get our bag to reception by 8am each travel day to be picked up and transported to the next town, so our normal routine is to get up and be ready for breakfast just before 8am (remembering the sun doesn’t come up until around 8:30am). Well, we did that today and the breakfast room was jam packed with people – we’d had the buffet the day before and it wasn’t that great so we grabbed a couple of yoghurts, turned around, returned to our room and set off in search of breakfast!
After a fairly quiet km to start, we hit a phalanx of noisy walkers and wondered whether Ponferrada had become a popular starting point hence the big crowd? Anyway we stumbled onto a very quiet cafe – Bar Compostilla – in the town of the same name at the 2.5km mark and had a very nice (perhaps the best?) and relaxing breakfast, hoping to let the masses go past us.
The surrounds started as very nice large estates that would give Dalkeith a run for its money, then to suburbs and finally semi-rural as we passed through the villages of Columbrianus, Fuentes Nuevas and Camponyara in quick succession. We stopped briefly at Fuentes Nuevas and then again at Cacabelos a bit further on. Each time we either lost walkers ahead of us or left them behind in the villages, so by the time we reached our final stretch into Villafranca, we had lost most of the crowd
We’re at a lovey Paradore in Villafranca and because we had left so early we made it here for (an early) lunch at just after 2pm. We weren’t happy with the breakfast situation when we left but it resulted in two very nice meals that we would otherwise have missed!
We think we now have less than 200km to go – 23km today for 568km in total and the video in the normal place.
steelewalking 