1/3 done

We have arrived in burgos and found a great deal on a hostel. 15 euros each for a really firm mattress, a private shower and even a massage table. Its much more for tourists but the owner treats the pilgrims well and takes us walking folk in for a glorious recovery day in a great city.

Walking into the city was fairly grueling. The last ten kilometers were on a sidewalk running next to a highway through a largely industrial wasteland. The camino is interesting like that, and Spain as country in general; one stretch of camino we see fields of wheat for half a day followed by highway n-120s exposed gravel shoulder. A forested mountain pass in brief, opening itself up to rolling hills hiding hamlets spaced by a kilometer and a half. We have walked through desolate feeling vineyard access roads interrupted only by hay stacks the size of mcmansions with bales the size of a volkswagon beetle. I have often felt I am looking at mirages when a small green square appears in these arid and orange moments - a small fenced off garden ladden with brassicas and artichokes and peppers.

Ben has told me on these walks that it is not the american wilderness ideal - the landscape always shows the touch of human hands and the camino is certainly not yellow stones cousin.  He has done a lot of backpacking in the american wildernesses, and has defined the word backpacking with that experience. The camino for us is much more human, a meeting of an international identity based upon this road so well traveled ; this road that exposes so much of the Spanish human culture. 

We get done everyday and stay in hostels that take in only pilgrims, and in that only the people that have also just lived through our day with their aching feet and smelly selves. They are a mixture of nationality (Africa unfortunately excluded). And we all walk different speeds, and so there is this ever revolving door of faces and story and language. All of the sudden, you are in a city as big in Burgos and you run into friends, only recent strangers, that stop you to ask about your day, that toe that was bothering you three days ago, to say goodbye.

Life here is great. The weather is not as great as one might ask god for, but that's okay. After the heat wave and newsworthy forest fires that were ravaging this part of Spain so I think it's a good thing.

Ben has just prepared us dinner on our camp stove perched on the window sill which we will eat up before exploring the Spanish night life. One which, until now, we have only heard of through walls as we feigned sleep at times in a snoring room of our walking friends.