Segundo día - sábado el 17 del mayo
Stanley woke me at 7:00. He was apparently the first one awake, but everyone started stirring soon after. I must admit that it felt delicious to have slept 9 hours straight through. We each grabbed a piece of bread and hit the road at 7:30. We had before us only a 2-or-3-hour walk to Astorga, a fair amount of which lay through farm lands, the rest through little villages - all of which appeared well-populated and prospering.
We hooked up with a fellow from London named Tim somewhere in the middle of the morning. He had biked the Camino last year, and returned to do it on foot as well. The talk turned fairly quickly from politics and the Camino to a vigorous and enjoyable (for me, anyway) dialogue about morality, moralities, worldviews, and the like, which continued for an hour or more until he stopped for coffee along the way. We continued on into Astorga, with its very attractive cathedral and the Gaudí palace (yes, the joke has been made before), where we took a scant hour for lunch - a picnic on a park bench with food we had bought in a grocery along the way - and for walking around the city, which we both agreed definitely warrants a visit when there is more time available. After stopping momentarily to fill up water, we walked out of the town and almost immediately into very sparse scrub brush, including fragrant wild lavender bushes. The Camino lay on a gravel road, and eventually on a dirt track along an asphalt road, neither very heavily-travelled. The sun was out, and it was pretty warm - to me, unpleasantly so. Our afternoon walk was about 22 km (14 mi), and we planned to do it in 2 2-hour stints. The way led through several attractive and well-kept hamlets, among them El Ganso ("the Goose"), but we saw very few people. Even though the walk was easy enough, by 15:00, I was ABSOLUTELY READY to take a break. We lay down on the gravel for an hour, during which time I could not arrange myself comfortably because my left heel kept hurting. When we were getting ready to go, I pulled my sock off and found out why: I had rubbed off a piece of skin the size of a silver dollar.
I figured out why when I thought about it: the orthotic I had inserted to mitigate the risk that my heel spur might inflame had raised my heel out of the boot's heel counter, and it was working up and down with every step. Removing the orthotic made it a lot less painful those last 2 hours.
On arriving in Rabanal, we bought some fruit and cheese for supper and for tomorrow, then found beds at a refugio. This one was really full, too. We checked in about 18:00, as late as would be prudent.
We bathed, but the weather was threatening enough that we didn't wash clothes. After visiting for a bit with Simon from Edinburgh, who was taking a sabbatical year from working to travel (he had just recently come from the Kalahari and living with the Bushmen there), we racked out about 21:30. The wind was up and it was actually pretty chilly, so there weren't many people who stayed up much longer than we did.
Today's walk: 34 km (21 mi) again. Two-day total: 68 km (42 mi).
