Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Looking out the window of our dorm this morning, we spied a pair of storks silhouetted against the dawn sky.
I entered the city yesterday past the cement works, and today I left via the rubbish dump. I walked for a kilometre or two beside garbage, at first exposed and then grassed over. Unlike Winnipeg's garbage mountain where years of garbage have created the city's only hill, Zamora's garbage is preserved in a series of burial mounds. What will future civilizations make of these strange shapes, I wondered.
Napoleon's army might have marched on its stomach, but the army of pilgrims marches on its feet, and some of us are suffering. I ran into Rene at the hostel last night who had left Seville the day before me. He had raced ahead covering long distances each day, but his knees had given way and he's been forced to stay at Zamora for several days. I am the tortoise, but I too was rather miserable yesterday with blisters. I have applied the latest Dr. Scholl's treatment and they seem to be better today.
Leaving the dump, i walked on a gravel road across the fields. Only one incident relieved the monotony of the day. I heard a noise behind me and turned to see a couple of young cyclists approaching. I stood aside, expecting them to pass and say, Buen Camino, but they stopped, shook my hand, asked if I wanted anything, did I have water, and produced their phones for a photo. I prepared to take a photo of them, but no, they each wanted to take a selfie of the three of us. Strange! Was I the Ancient Pilgrim. Were they keeping an exhaustive photograph record of their trip? I put it down to mere friendliness. It quite cheered me up.
My albergue tonight is a disused two-room school house, modernized, one class room converted into a dorm, the other into a kitchen and dining area. Very basic, but clean and comfortable. I thought I was alone, but then a French cyclist, Antoine, arrived. We had a meal together.
Tomorrow, or perhaps the next day, I have to make a decision: whether to continue on the Via de la Plata to Astorga, where it ends, or to head west to Santiago on the Camino Sanabres. The latter begins at Granja de Moreruela 22 kms north of here, and heads west 22 kms to Tabara. Or I have the option of walking 27 kms to Tabara on the N631 along the hypotenuse of this right angled triangle and arriving a day early.
I have been asked to explain how I left my sleeping bag behind a couple of days ago. Well, I take great precautions to make sure I leave nothing behind. At night I tie my wallet to my backpack so I can't go without it. And I have a mnemonic that I recite to myself: "Please God. Where am I? Help a lonely traveller." I place all my odds and ends on the top bunk and check this carefully in the morning. I still manage to lose the odd sock or towel when I've left them in the bathroom. But my sleeping bag?
At night, when I have to use my sleeping bag, I get it from the bottom of the pack, pull it out of its stuffsack, loop the stuffsack around a bar on the bunk, and lay the sleeping bag on the bed. In the morning, I stuff the sleeping bag back in its sack, and shove it into the bottom of the pack.
What could go wrong? Well, sometimes, out of consideration for others in the dorm who are still sleeping, I do the assembling and packing outside in the common area. My sleeping bag rolled out of sight. nd because I had stood my pack up on a chair I didn't notice that the bottom compartment was empty.
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