Hospital de Orbigo, Day 25

Today we learned that you don’t always trust the internet or apps. Thus far, we have been using an app called Guthook to judge our distances and sleeping arrangements. No problems or complaints up until this point. However, today we walked more than we had planned.

The day started off with the walk out of Leon. It was about an 8 km stretch through the outreaches if the city. Almost immediately as we started walking we met a nice guy from Kentucky. We had pretty similar paces and so we chatted for a while. Suddenly I was surprised to realize that we had already walked 10 km and it was time to sit down for our morning espresso.

During our break, we were joined by another guy from Kentucky (what are the odds!?!) and so the four of us set off for the day. Time passed quickly as we all chatted and soon lunch came.

At this point we needed to make a decision about where we wanted to stay for the night. The next town would be a 13 km walk, which would put us at 33 km for the day. It was far for us, but we all felt ready to walk a little longer and knew that we would be rewarded by a shorter walk to the next town the following day.

It was getting hotter and hotter, and later and later… judging by our average pace, I would have thought that we would have arrived by now. We stopped for a water and rest break and no one really wanted to get moving again, but we knew we had to. After what felt like eternity, we turned the corner into town and were welcomed by a beautiful bridge with flags hung everywhere and what looked to be a jousting arena set up down below. As we walked through town, we were in awe. Still, we could not believe how tired we were.

We settled into our alburgue and the man running it asked where we started from. We told him León and he responded “phewww, that’s a long walk, I can’t believe you did over 39 km today!”... 39??? “We thought we did 33?” “No, from León it is 39 km!” We all exchanged looks of disbelief, but then we figured that may explain our extremely slow pace. At the end of the day, we were glad to be sitting and had a wonderful spaghetti with chorizo and garbanzo bean dinner!