Distance traveled: 20.5 km

Raúl and I made sure we were the first ones at the cafe serving chocolate con churros when it opened the following morning. Talk about a breakfast of champions!

It was still quite early when we got moving – that is the moon, still high in the sky!

We encountered a small chapel just past the edge of town and decided to pop in. (Raúl, unlike me, had been collecting stamps in his pilgrim passport from churches and other places as well as albergues. He had to buy a new passport in Astorga to accommodate more stamps!) We were only inside for five minutes of prayer, but when we emerged, full daylight had replaced the dark, and we took that as a sign that God had rewarded our stopping for prayer!

The next couple of hours passed peacefully through a handful of towns, on a path gradually increasing in elevation and consequently quite foggy in certain places.

As you can see, the road was quite crowded; we weren’t sure why. While it had been a few days since I’d been able to look in either direction without seeing other pilgrims, it hadn’t been nearly this packed at any point before, and it wouldn’t be like that again until the last couple of days before arriving in Santiago.

In one small town, we encountered the Cowboy Bar, which aspired to be a little outpost of Texas here in Castilla y León:

At this point, we’re starting a gradual climb into the mountains that I had seen way off in the distance on my way out of León. I hadn’t had a good climb since the day I left Castrojeriz, so I was looking forward to this next challenge!

There was a stretch not long before our arrival in Rabanal that was pretty tough – it went uphill through the woods on a pretty uneven path. Raúl flew ahead of me (he builds climbing walls for a living, so he’s quite sure-footed in such circumstances!), and I did my best to keep up while relying more than usually heavily on my trekking poles. It really got our blood flowing!

We arrived in Rabanal in time for a late lunch. Raúl and I grabbed seats in the sun outside a cafe and waited for Mark and Adam, who were somewhere behind us. Mark had already told me that I could take the room he’d reserved for his sister Becky, who’d gone on a day ahead with Javier, so I was planning to stay. Raúl had been more inclined to continue on to Foncebadón, which was another 5.6 kilometers up; the next day would be tough and long, and he thought it would make more sense to get a head start. Ultimately, he ended up staying – he walked with me and Mark to check in at our guest house, and the owner told us she’d just comp us the third and final room!

Mark had heard about this guest house in advance. It’s called the Stone Boat (which has significance later on the Camino; stay tuned) and is owned by an American woman who did the Camino years ago during the winter and found it so transformative that she felt called to come back. She bought this house and turned it into a three-room guest house. The rooms are simply and very comfortably furnished, and she gave us real wax seals as stamps in our passports as well as homemade banana bread to take with us the next day.

Raúl ended up having another good reason to have stayed in Rabanal rather than going on. Rabanal is home to a few Benedictine monks who perform their various sung prayer services in a tiny, you-can’t-believe-it’s-still-standing church at the other end of the small town. I went to the late afternoon and then evening services, both of which consisted almost entirely of the monks chanting in Latin. It was pretty different from anything I’d experienced before!

Mark, Raúl, and I joined Adam and a couple of people staying with him at the albergue run by the British pilgrim organization (they serve afternoon tea everyday) for a very nice dinner that evening. Everyone was excited for the next day, when we’d finally arrive at one of the most famous points on the Camino: the Cruz de Ferro (Iron Cross).