Riego de Ambros

(Molinaseca to Las Angustias: 22.7 km; 34,953 steps, plus 3860 later)

Philippians 2:12-18
v. 14 Do everything without grumbling or complaining.

Uh huh. How, then, am I supposed to discharge my miserable fatigue? “Come to me, you who are weary and burdened,” says Jesus (Matthew 11:28), and so I will. I am so very tired, Lord. I am tired of walking. I am tired of junky paths and rocks underfoot. I am tired of carrying this pack. I am tired of carrying the poles when I don’t need to use them and tired of taking pictures and tired of friendly greetings with passing pilgrims. I am tired of getting up at 6 am and trying to quietly get ready in the dark. I am tired of squeezing out my laundry as hard as I can and tired of it not drying anyway. I am tired of potatoes. I am tired of the search for restroom facilities. I am tired of people smoking in my space and tired of not having any space. I am tired of chewing as fast as I can and not being able to properly compose my pictures and rushing through the day because we have to do the kilometers. I am just tired. The rest and the motionless sitting in the sun we had on the plaza in Leon seem very far away. Please, Lord, energize me and refresh me again.

**********************************

The bathroom facilities in this albergue are quite adequate even though they are in the basement. Breakfast was OK–orange juice, a hot drink and two big slabs of tostada with plenty of butter and jam. But the smoke! People started puffing on the porch before dawn and the smoke was sucked into every open window and door of this otherwise lovely albergue.

We had a nice enough walk into Ponferrada, mostly downhill but not too steep. We took selfies by the castillo in the sun then spent over an hour walking around looking for an ATM, a grocery store and a bar with bacon and eggs. Ha. How about a bar with a chocolate croissant? Nope. Finally just a bar with a WC would do.

On our way out of town I found three leftover overpriced pastries in a tiny tienda and bought two of them. Soon we were on a flat but surprisingly busy minor road lined with large garden plots, mostly harvested. Little ermitas were scattered along the route. We stopped in a little bar in Fuentes Nuevas across from a tiny hermitage rebuilt in 2003 and ate our lunch at a table outside on the road. “Don’t mess up this grocery bag,” I said as we spread out our supplies. We had cut a tomato on a plastic bag the other day and had to toss it, and you usuallly have to pay for plastic bags in the grocery store. Things were fine until Maurice reached for the bread, knocking over my coke bottle, then, grabbing the bottle, knocked over my glass. Saved some coke. End of grocery bag.

The road continued. There were more garden plots and more little towns. One church was open with a lady outside giving sellos and collecting for the church restoration fund. A cafe advertised “sandwiches and lids.” Lids? With all the hundreds of native English speakers walking by each day, how hard would it be to check your translations?

(above & below)  Church in Fuentes Nuevas

On we marched. Step after step. Left, right, a-gain. My toes hurt. My shoulders were sore. I was so tired. I was running on automatic. I did not think. I did not feel. I was just a walking machine.

We passed a winery. Maurice got a taste with a tapa–this one a potato-filled pastry–and I sat down for a minute. Another hermitage was open as a museum with its sponsoring French group giving sellos. On the way into Cacabelos we had seen signs, billboards even, advertising a real hotel with a buffet breakfast. What if we stayed someplace like that, I thought, just for one night? I was stressed and Maurice needed no persuading, but once in town the signs disappeared and we made a fruitless search for the hotel before getting back on the path, rueing the delay and all the pilgrims who, now ahead of us, would get the next albergue beds.

We continued toward the edge of town, where our guidebook said Cacabelos’ municipal albergue in Las Angustias had “rooms for two arranged chalet style around a church.” Well, didn’t that sound cozy and quaint? (Makes you want to come and try it out yourself, n’est-ce pas?) But what did it really mean? We followed a sign through a tall iron gateway and found out. The yard on the sides and rear of the church was ringed with a stone wall, and against the wall, facing the church, was a lean-to arrangement of plywood and particle board, divided by walls that didn’t reach the peaked ceiling into 35 rooms, each of which had two beds, a beat-up small table between them, and two closets which were inaccessible when you pushed in the double doors (which only locked from the outside) to gain entry, light or air. The bathrooms (separate for men and women and with a reasonable number of showers and toilets) were in the middle of the arrangement, at the rear of the church, where the yard widened for clothes-washing sinks and picnic tables. It was basic, but at only five euros apiece for our own room, what a deal. Around the picnic tables a family was drying their tent. The young parents rode bikes and the father pulled a trailer with equipment and the baby. They had come from northern Europe and, with no albergues in Belgium, had to camp along the way.

Entrance to the Cacabelos municipal albergue is through the gate on the right

There was no food at the Cacabelos municipal, though, and most of the eateries nearby that we were interested in were closed. But pulperias abounded, and they featured callos too (and if you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t want to know). We finally found a bar, run by a transplanted Brit, with frozen and reheated entrees. Then we fixed up our beds and snuggled down for the night with the provided horse blankets on top of us in our cool yet cozy cube.