Tercero día - domingo el 18 del mayo
Tercero día - domingo el 18 del mayo
This was the worst day of the entire trip. I was awake essentially all night long. My heel throbbed incessantly. The guy in the next bunk had a percussive cough that went off LOUD every 10 minutes or so. Every time someone went to the bathroom (and in a room with about 50 people, that happened frequently), the light shone in my eyes. I was awake at 01:20 - still awake, I should say - and awake after 05:20 when the first pilgrims set out, nor was I asleep all of the four hours between. In short, I didn't sleep well. I woke Stanley at 06:30 - he hadn't slept well, either, as it turned out - and we were packed and on the road by 07:00.
Immediately we left Rabanal, the way turned upwards, and we climbed for four hours solid, part of the way on roads and partly on gravel track. I was blown out. Every step I took banged the raw skin on my heel, and I was hurting. Stanley was having a hard time trying to ascend at my slow pace, so we spent most of the morning with him several hundred meters ahead of me, stopping periodically for me to catch up. It was cool all morning, but as we approached the Cruz de Ferro - simply an iron cross atop a hill built by pilgrims who each bring a stone - a cold, wet wind came up, too much so to be pleasant.
We reached the crest of the mountain we were crossing at 11:15, so we stopped there and had our picnic lunch and a 30-minute nap before heading downwards on the western side - another 11 miles. We expected it to be easier than the uphill. Hah! Not too long after we had started down, though, the cloud cover that had protected us all morning broke, and the sun came out bright and hot. Surprisingly enough, I did better in the afternoon than I had in the forenoon - the declines were steep enough that my heel seldom touched the back of my boot - and with the troubles Stanley was having going downhill, I was almost able to keep up with him.
The last 10km of our walk today really stretched out. When we came sharply down off the mountain trail into El Acebo, I thought we might be mostly done with up and down for the day. El Acebo is a village built almost entirely from rocks, with a very old feel to it, but very well kept up. Leaving it, we spent most of the next two hours on the 8.5km to Molinaseca, our 5 km/h flatland pace having degraded substantially with the terrain and our fatigue.
Molinaseca stands in sharp contrast to El Acebo. Almost all of it is new construction, and because it sits on a small river, doesn't quite have that sunbaked air that we have felt in all these other places. We were told later that for some festival in the summer, the river is dammed here for a few days to make a large swimming hole, and that a kazillion people show up to enjoy it.
Although we were now only about 5 km from the outskirts of Ponferrada, a modern town not very appealing to me, it was all uphill-downhill-uphill, and required another two hours. Call us wimps, but we took a break in the middle. We did finally drag ourselves into a hotel about 17:00, and just lay around the entire evening, having washed our clothes and put them to dry over the bathtub. All in all, this was a tough day for me, but left us facing almost all shorter days for the duration.
Thank you, Lord, for sustaining us today.
Today's walk: 32 km (20 mi) again. Three-day total: 100 km (62 mi).
