A few days later...

Another few days of walk, walk, walk. Stayed in Astorga in the attic of a great Alburgue, near the church. Toured the Gaudí Palace, sampled some local special pastries...Yum! Then we walked to Foncebadón... We would have stayed in Rabanal, which is a lovely village, but for some reason we were on a roll so Kristina said "let's keep going!". (That was the Ibuprofen talking I think) We walked another 7 Km's to Foncebadón, a small rustic, mostly abandoned, village in ruins. It was looking pretty bleak but then we saw a bar and a small church of some sort. We stayed in the "Parish" Alburgue with 18 beds crammed in one room. Parish places are generally 'donotivo', and come with a humble but adequate dinner and breakfast. This is our second "parish" Alburgue and we've come to the conclusion that these places are very unique and interesting. They also seem to attract a certain "crowd" of very interesting folk. One older gentleman that stayed in our Parish place (think Santa with a grey/black beard and lots of hair) decided he needed to wash Everything!!...Except that extra small speedo and his fanny pack, so he ran around for most of the afternoon/evening in well... Nothing. Also, the building is small so all socializing, drinking, journaling, laundry is done outside on the front porch. After dinner 8 of us pilgrims went to bed because hey, who wants to be maneuvering in a tight space when naked Santa is trying to crawl into his top bunk. The other 10 pilgrims, and Santa and the 2 hospitalaros had more wine to finish off... Turns out Santa is also an opera singer! So the crowd was outside the door belting out some opera! They finally settled down and went to bed too. That was all good till everyone went to sleep and then the snoring began. 10 out of 18 of us snored like, well... Drunken opera singers!! I have never experienced ANYTHING like this before...(nor will I ever again for that matter). There was no escaping it. One poor guy woke with a scream in the middle of the night...probably the same nightmare I was having. One rule of this Alburgue was that you couldn't get out of bed till 7:00am. (That's actually a great rule!). So at 7:00 the hospitalaro woke us up by turning on a CD of some type of church music. Now, it's dark out, colder than the devil, crazy choir music is playing and we're in this old stone building in the middle of the mountains... It's starting to feel like the "Shining". Kristina and I got up and we were out of there! We did not care that we had to walk for an hour in the dark and freezing cold.

Now we are in a great village...Molinaseca, in a great hotel in a room for two. Our room looks out over the old bridge and the river. What a nice feeling.





On the bridge in Molinaseca.











This farmer came to town with a trailer full of grapes. He's an expert tractor driver as he maneuvered down this narrow street and backed this trailer into a doorway barely wide enough for the trailer. Also under this same building is the pig stye with his pigs.

Location:Camino de Santiago,Molinaseca,Spain