25.2km
The difficult thing about planning on the Camino is that you can’t walk until you’re tired nor can you simply set a daily kilometer quota. You stop where there is accommodation — accommodation that is to your liking, available, and before your body collapses from exhaustion.
While most villages are separated by 3 to 8 km — a distance that can be traveled if it must if accommodation is lacking or full — occasionally pilgrims encounter a distance that must form the bulk of a day.
It is 17.2km from Carrion de los Condes to the next village of Calzadilla de la Cueza. Anyone not starting in Carrion is advised to stop in Carrion, which is not such a bad idea; there’s lots going on here.
Legend has it that Carrion is where Moorish overlords required neighboring Christians to surrender 100 virgins every year.
Today there’s a lot of various types of pilgrim accommodation: municipal and parochial, convent and monastery, private and extra privacy. They all advertise a lot too.
It’s usually been my practice to never give credence to anything hawked by adolescents on the side of the road. I don’t want to encourage the behavior and I wonder what the rest of the marketing budget must go to.
In this case, I was charmed by one casa rural’s strategy to station two hawkers on the way in to the city: one a village or two away and another at the city gate. I liked the idea that a casa rural, usually relatively luxurious, was being creative about how to accommodate pilgrims. The graphic design quality of the flier was pretty high. And, they’d do my laundry.
It took a little convincing to get the proprietor to understand that would be fine to be in a room with four other people. How could she not understand that I was sleeping with a minimum of 20 people a night?
Made my to the room with an en suite bath. Met the Hungarians who didn’t speak a word of English but wanted to make sure I ate their strawberries and young Germans who were out until very early in the morning. Doing what, I don’t know.
As for me, I went to la tienda for some cheese, chorizo, and bread – nourishment for the next day’s walk – and went to bed early.
Goat anyone? 