May 18, 2013

We’re expecting an action replay of yesterday, both in terms of weather and terrain, so we start the day with a modification to the waterproof footwear – insulation tape around the ankles to hold the plastic bags in place. 

We are absolutely right about the action replay – we have short bursts of sun and then sudden, sharp showers of icy cold rain.  The bin bags keep getting put on and then off again as we turn uphill and get too hot, as do the gloves and even sometimes the jackets. It is very hard to get any rhythm going with all the stopping and starting, but even so we make quite good progress overall.  We are travelling another of the Camino de Santiago routes (the Spanish route of the Via de la Plata from Sevilla to Santiago) in reverse, so consequently we keep seeing cycle tourists and walkers going the other way.  We stop and talk to one or two of them – they find it strange that having cycled up to Santiago we have turned around and are now cycling back, most people go one way only and use other forms of transport to get home again.  We can see that we’re going to have to explain what we’re doing quite a few times yet as we have about another 800 kilometres going the ‘wrong way’ to do.

One cyclist shows us photos on his camera of where we are heading for – absolutely white over with snow.  At lunch time the bar owner tells us that they have never seen cold weather like this before at this time of the year.  Still, we’ve adapted now and really we not too bothered. It does seem like a lifetime ago that we were looking for the shade to pitch the tent in so it wouldn’t get too hot – will we ever get back to that?

The countryside has opened out into a wilder type of mountain landscape – more like Scotland – desolate when the icy rain starts but suddenly transformed with a burst of sunshine into beautiful purple covered slopes.  We stop slightly short of our target distance for the day because we come across a nice looking hotel.  If we pass it by you can be sure there won’t be another one.