Chapter 23: Double Feature, Sahagun to Leon, and Everything in Between.

We have reached the last major city of the trip, Leon. Leon is amazing, but let me tell you how we got here.

From Ledigos, the town where we stayed with the Priest and his helper Paul, from the last entry, we began our walk as normal. The day was very windy but quite nice. Gary, Becky and I had planned for our longest one day trip yet, 30 kms to Reliegos.

30kms was…a lot. Reliegos was sort of nestled into the side of a bunch of mountains and therefore can’t really be seen like most towns on this walk. We began to become a bit agitated at around kilometer 27, wondering if indeed we would ever find this elusive little town. The weather was lovely, and so we were able to sort of take some solace in that we were no longer walking in amongst hail and rain. We stopped fairly frequently, which was nice. Becky and Gary even had a bottle of wine to split on breaks, which meant that Becky was able to be half drunk for some of the walk…certainly her most chatty bit.

When we did finally hit Reliegos, we had our first panicked moment of the trip. There seemed to be absolutely nothing in terms of accommodation. We walked on tired feet up and down this little town, looking for an albergue with beds. Eventually we hit the point where we split up trying to cover more ground, as other pilgrims were coming into town and potentially picking the right place first.

Becky, in all of her infinite wisdom, hit upon a place with three beds (and exactly three) left. The reviews for this place were….not awesome, and being honest, we had tried every other place before this one, believing it was our last option.

In a classic lesson of “Don’t listen to everyone else” we quickly learned that this place was absolutely lovely. The owner, who had been labeled “surly” and “ornery” by the reviews we’d read, served us up the best pork tenderloin we’d had, and even included ice cream at the end. He did, however, kill the heat around 9, so Becky froze. She…was not happy. She woke up in a less-than-pleasant mood, and around 10am she came around to being pleasant and her typical, happy-go-lucky self. We also, around that time, happened upon a place where you could get coffee…coincidence? Probably not.

As we walked along, we somewhere lost Gary. He was, sadly, without a phone, and had damaged it, and was incommunicado. We tried to find him again in the next town, but sadly he veered left when we veered right and we ended up walking without him for a few hours. Because he was without phone, we had made his reservation for the next night, so we would absolutely have to meet up with him again.

Oddly enough, we ended up in a coffee shop owned and operated by…our “Not so surly” Albergue owner. He fed us a lovely breakfast and we ate and got back on the road. We ended up running into Gary, who wanted to press on while we wanted a schedule of breaks and stops more frequently so we promised him we would meet him at the cathedral in Leon, hoping the square was small enough we would run into each other.

Becky and I had a delightful walk. It was dotted with small towns and cows, fields and mountains, and as we happily marched along, we found that we were gaining ground at a pretty good pace. Becky found the end of the trip a bit arduous and was feeling some long distance pains by the time we strolled onto Leon, but she was a great trooper about it, and as we rounded the bend to the cathedral, we found our Australian talking to an American and having a lovely time. He’d had wine and a burger and was in good spirits.

We checked into our Hostel for the evening and Gary and I went out to get him a new phone. We were successful and managed to find him something that would work. We headed back to the hostel where Gary wanted his own Siesta and after a few recuperation hours we headed out for pizza, each of us downing an enormous amount of delicious grub. We even ran into Nick, who we chatted with while we ate pizza.. it was truly a

We knew the next day would be a rest day and we’d seen precious little of Leon, so we all headed to bed excited for the next day.

The next day would be a bit odd, and I finally experience my first true disaster moment on the trip, but I’ll include it on the next one as this is getting all a little long.

Thanks for keeping up with us and I’ll write the next one this afternoon. Becky is siesta-ing and all is well. Stay tuned and we love you all!