Leaving Leon at dawn

(Leon to Villar de Mazarife: 21.8 km, 5 1/2 hours, with 1 hr in breaks; 29,500 steps, plus 2520 later)

Romans 8:18, 31-39
v. 18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

This Camino is hard, and it hurts, but this is a journey of our choosing, a gentle yet persistent call freely accepted. In the big picture our misery is trifling. In the Leon museums I was confronted with depictions of faithful martyrs for the gospel dying gruesome deaths. Even their suffering, writes Paul, “is not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” It’s another hint of the inexpressibly wonderful kingdom God has prepared for his children. Thank you, Lord, for your grace to endure suffering and for your promises for the future.

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The workers in the streets labored all night setting up for festivities to begin anew the following night; we heard them whenever they hammered or shouted loud enough to wake us up. When we we left the hotel at 7:50 am, carrying our packs again, it wasn’t as cold as we had expected, probably only in the low fifties. The streets were dark and empty. As we walked traffic was sparse and some streets had none at all–at a time it would be rush hour in any city in the US. We decided the upcoming evening’s fest was to be such a big event that everyone was resting up for it.

With our three nights in Leon, all “our people,” the regulars we kept seeing along our way, were surely far ahead of us. Even Regular Canadian Tom and his girls must have slipped out yesterday.

Up the road in La Virgen del Camino we saw musicians in traditional dress. For blocks and blocks along our route vendors were setting up stands: bread stacked high, baked goods, sausages, always peppers and onions, burlap sacks of nuts, followed by stalls with purses and earrings and whatever else was emerging from vans parked on the road. At the end of the sidewalk congestion, mass was being celebrated in a modern church that housed a 15th-century statue of the virgin. Farther ahead on the road buses were disgorging hundreds of people who were heading back toward town. The plaza in front of the church was full of police vans, traffic cops and emergency tents. It was the feast day of San Froilan’; obviously there were big doings not just in Leon but in the surrounding towns too. Our stop into a bar was snack-wise uninspiring. While Maurice figured out where to turn for our alternate path, I went back to the sidewalk vendors and bought six decadent pastries. We ate the almond ones immediately to fortify us on our way; they were thickly iced for extra energy.

We met up with the Aussie couple we had seen before Leon, then Maurice walked for a while with Flash from Poolesville; his airline stewardess wife from San Sebastian was not accompanying him. He wanted a break from going through the motions of everyday life in the DC suburbs, so while they were in Europe for a wedding and family visits, he thought, why not walk the Camino?

The path was mostly smooth through the paramo, flat grassland with low bushes, reminding us of the plains of Kenya and Tanzania.

At noon we had lunch on benches by a fuente in Chozas de Abajo with several other passing pilgrims.

At 1:20 we arrived on a dirt road in Villar de Mazarife, turned left and headed toward the questionable Albergue de Jesus; it looked less disreputable once inside the decaying wall, where there was a spacious and sunny garden with tables, chairs and clotheslines. An anteroom and a tiny bar led to a small patio courtyard around which were a warren of rooms upstairs and down, but not nearly enough toilets for all the pilgrims who could be housed here. We were assigned to a four-bed room across from the kitchen where, rather unfortunately, someone was cooking fish.

I was washing my laundry outside when the hostess motioned me to follow her. Would we like a two-bed room instead? It had something to do with a cancellation by a person who wanted a room with a private bath. “Turigrinos!” she sniffed. So we gathered our belongings and moved upstairs to a room containing only two beds (and absolutely nothing else, except a ceiling light and an outlet, so it was all good). With its wooden floor, sea-green walls (well written on), transom, dark-stained woodwork and a door that you had to yank to open and lean on to shut but which never quite closed all the way, it looked like a room in an old Baltimore rowhouse.

The window of our room looked out on a covered corridor around three sides of the interior courtyard, with an upper patio on the roof of the bar. Most of the albergue’s walls were covered with multilingual graffiti, trite statements that were supposed to be ponderous plus some cartoons, giving the place a sort of 70s vibe. But as I sat on the bar-top patio, eating a second lunch and swatting at flies, with the blaring of an awful radio below amplified by the courtyard enclosure, I looked at the dingy walkway around the upper story, the cracked adobe, peeling paint and sagging ceiling and felt like I was in the old Mexico of mid-twentieth century Westerns.

We guess the mattresses in the corridors were for pilgrim overflow in the summer (ugh)

I walked around the silent town; there was nothing of interest but the locked church with the thunky bell. We had dinner at the albergue with a German couple. I am thankful for our double room where we can lay things out and get ready in the morning without disturbing others. If only there were more bathrooms….