Moratinos → El Burgo Ranero
Distance: 17 miles / 27.3km
Elevation: +650ft, -577ft
I woke up at 6am this morning, just waking up without an alarm or anything. I checked my phone and saw that it was around time to wake up, which was kind of disappointing as I woke up often throughout the night, and didn’t sleep all that well. It was really hard to get up this morning, and we ended up being the last ones out of the hostel at around 7:15am.
Tovin and I walked about 2 miles until we got to the first town, where we stopped and took a various assortment of Caffeine, Tylenol, and Advil to wake up for the day - Tovin also didn’t sleep that well. We had a little bit of a longer stretch to the next town, Sahagún, which is where the halfway marker is for the Francés route of the Camino. We got there and waited for another couple to finish taking their photos (they only took about a billion), and then Tovin took a photo of me! He said the monument was a little disappointing, as I guess it looked larger in photos online.
We kept walking, and fairly soon afterwards got into the town of Sahagún, where we met a woman from Los Angeles named Lin, who was a retired LAPD police officer. We followed her advice to a specific café for breakfast - I got a café con leche and a tortilla with a baguette, and Tovin got a sweet coffee cake pastry that came with two smaller pastries, as well as two mussel tapas - one for each of us. Everything was pretty good!
Eventually Tovin, Lin, and I all left the café together for a while. We saw a super cute puppy that wanted to follow us, and Lin took a nice photo of us together. After we walked with Lin and talked for awhile, Tovin and I stopped to take a short break and she continued on.
We had another long stretch of nothing before we got to the next town, Bercianos del Real Camino. It was getting hot and the path didn’t have too much shade, so it was a tough stretch, but once we got into Bercianos, Tovin and I went to a café and had a snack for a little while. We split an Aquarius, and Tovin also ordered us some patatas bravas that were much better than the french fries with ketchup and mayonaise we had the first night - I was glad he got to try them before he left.
Tovin was having some issues with his knee, and so I carried his pack for a few hundred feet before he got embarrassed and took it back. The last stretch of the day was very hot, very sunny, and we were both really tired and sick of walking by the time we got to the last few miles. Just when we thought we really couldn’t walk anymore, we got into town - El Burgo Renero.
We checked into our room at the hostel, and it was just so nice to sit down. We rested a bit before showering, and then Tovin did laundry while I enjoyed a drink he had gotten for me at the bar, of his own invention; Aquarius con vodka (aqaurius is a Spanish sports drink, similar to an unflavored gatorade). It felt like a really cursed drink combination, but it was really good and is the perfect way to stay hydrated. It made me wish Aquarius was a drink in the United States.
After finishing laundry, we spent some time relaxing in our room, and I tried to plan what my next final weeks of walking without Tovin will look like. We spent a lot of time just hanging out together and being kind of sad, because Tovin leaves tomorrow and we’ve had so much fun the past few days. Eventually, we got up and went outside to explore town a little bit.
Tovin made a dinner reservation for us at the hostel we were staying at, and then we ran into some friends of ours from the night before at supper - they only speak French so it was rather difficult to communicate with them. We stopped at a pharmacy for Tovin to get some acyclovir for his lips after sun burning them so badly. He was very impressed, as a $25 tube in the U.S. was only $4 here.
We went to a grocery store in town and got a can of aquarius, a bocadillo (sandwich), and some potato chips. We also saw a cat while we were walking around, and it looked friendly and wanted attention but also didn’t wanna come to us. It reminded us of our cats - wanting attention, but not wanting to come get it. We sat on the sidewalk and were sad together for awhile, and then went back to our hostel where we had a dinner reservation for 6:30pm.
We got seated and ordered our first dishes, which was a very good and very generous portion of seafood paella. For the second course, I got a steak with fries, and Tovin got some sort of cod in sauce with fries. Dessert was a chocolate tart for both of us (although we weren't really sure what we were getting until it arrived). We took a short walk after dinner, and then just hung out in our room the rest of the evening. Tovin finished up a surprise he had been working on for me, which was a booklet of handwritten love letters for every day we would be apart on the rest of my Camino. We went to bed around 10pm and slept well.
