Santiago patiently waiting for us to get going in Villar de Mazarife

(Villar de Mazarife to Santibanez de Valdeiglesia: 19.5 km, 5 3/4 hours, with 1 hr & 30 min breaks; 27,271 steps, plus some more later)

1Corinthians 10:1-13
v. 13 No temptation or testing has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.

Today’s passage is talking about suffering again. But God always comes to the rescue, stepping in just when we think we can’t bear any more. He does this in little ways too: a bar with a loo when I’m about to burst, real beds without a lot of searching, Maurice’s phone with our music for the hard walks, fuentes flowing with cool water. These are little things mostly, things pilgrims a thousand years ago wouldn’t have needed but we 21st-century American weaklings do. In his tenderness God stoops to meet us where we are. Thank you, Lord, for all the ways you step in to meet us on this pilgrimage and in all of life.

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It was cold during the night in our sea green room in the Albergue de Jesus and we were thankful for the new-looking horse blankets at the foot of our beds. In the tiny bar we ate toasted crusts for breakfast. We walked out at 8:15, not in as much of a rush as usual since we had reservations for the night. Several French pilgrims who had sat at one of the bar’s tables from 3 pm the day before with a bottle of wine, talking, and who continued to occupy the table through the dinner hour, talking, and late into the night, talking, were finally moving around this morning but still talking when we left.

Leaving Villar de Mazarife

We remain in the meseta. The road ran long and flat for almost ten kilometers through cornfields, other fields and ragged pastures.

We crossed over little canals with swiftly-running water sparkling in the sun; the canals have been irrigating the farms of the paramo for centuries. Finally in Villavante we sat at an outdoor table with an omelet. A few more kilometers and we crossed the long 13th-century Puente de Orbigo, built over an even earlier Roman bridge.

On we marched to another town, Villares de Orbigo, and another bar, on its main thoroughfare, the kind of street you can amble around in to get your picture set up just right because there’s no traffic. The bar’s bathroom out in the garden was the nicest yet–marble, clean, sweetly-scented, with a changing table and a padded folding chair. There were flies, but there seem to be flies everywhere. While Maurice sipped his coke I walked over to see the church. To my surprise, it was the church we had stopped in six years ago when we drove through this area; we especially remembered it because there was a restroom inside for pilgrims, which is more of a rarity than I realized at the time. This time the church was closed, so pilgrims like us are buying cokes at little bars so we can use their facilities.

Monument in front of the bar in Villares de Orbigo

We finished the day with a pretty walk up a gentle slope on the paramo to the Albergue Camino Frances in Santibanez de Valdeiglesia. It was an L-shaped old building around a walled courtyard, all recently remodeled. A bowl on the counter of the bar was piled with just-picked green grapes for the guests, seedy but sweet. Our odd-shaped room contained eight beds, several tables and chairs and plenty of space. After we got settled, showered and hung out the laundry I headed down to a table and chairs in the courtyard to write. As I passed through the wide entryway I heard voices. It was the talking French, seated at a table with some wine, still talking; they all talked at the same time right over one another.

At the long dinner table we sat with a family sharing our room, a mother and her 8 1/2-year-old twin sons. The boys are growing so fast and there was just not much time in their busy lives, she told us. Soon they won’t want to spend time traveling with their mother. So she quit her job and sold her house and they are walking the Camino on the proceeds. They aim for about 12 kilometers a day. When they finish, they will use her parents’ motor home to travel the US until the money runs out, then she will settle somewhere and get a job. She is homeschooling the boys (though I don’t think they’re doing it on the Camino); the Germans we had dinner with last night (and who ended up here too) were horrified by this idea. “They would never allow that in Germany,” said Zirke.

Our beds are left foreground