Day 20

Today we continued along the ‘Meseta’ (I remember in Geography at school talking about ‘Mesas’ – small plateaus – a bit late, but, now I know where the word comes from) through the village of Fromista where we saw a couple of unusually designed churches. One, which I will post was built in the eleventh century and is one of the purist Romanesque churches in Spain. We walked past a few pilgrims (probably at our fastest) and some walked past us (still probably at our top speed). One we passed at less than our top gear gave us time to talk a little. A young Finnish man who had just completed (I fought the temptation) his acting school and was taking a break before starting a family, has wanted to do this walk for a long time because of the challenge. He was interested in Parkinsons so we had a chat and he will review my blog. We wished him well and went up into second gear

This section was mostly on one of the common pathways in some of my photos but along the edge of a highway, which removed some of the usual serenity. After lots of wide open spaces we arrived at Villalcazar de Sirga in the provence of Palencia (land of fields) which is an area of rich soils and copious irrigation growing a wide range of crops. We’ve moved into our small hostal, our window providing us with a view of where we’ve just been and some sun to dry our clothes on a fairly cloudless day and a chill in the air

We saw the Señora Spanish stork for the second time waiting patiently for Señor stork(photo) to bring breakfast and will publish a sonnet soon on what the Spanish refer to as La Ciguena