Walked today: 7.6 mi. Camino’26: 122 mi.
We began our walk at 6:00 a.m. to hopefully catch a pretty sunrise as we climbed Alto de Mostelares. We walked for a mile before leaving Castrojeriz and then began walking across ancient wetlands via a still functioning Roman causeway. At the end of the causeway were the ruins and reconstruction of a Roman bridge of the 1st century.
Immediately after crossing the bridge the path began a sharp rise upward to to the pinnacle of Alto de Mostelares.
We walked steadily with an occasional hesitation to catch a breath until we reached the top after a 700 ft climb.
Once at the top, we allowed ourselves a 2 minute bench break, then proceeded to walk along the mesa for a quarter-mile, before carefully descending down on longest and steepest slope of Camino 2026, so far.
Once at the bottom, injury-free, thankfully, we continued a normal walk for the next 5 miles.
Immediately after the Chapel was the Puenta del Fitero, commissioned by Alfonso VI in the 11th-century to unify the territories of Castile and Leon.
(Itero de la Vega was known as “Fitero” in the Middle Ages.)
The Puente del Fitero is considered one of the longest on the Camino Frances.
We faced nearly a 4-hour wait to check in, so we spent the time watching and greeting pilgrims that walked by or stopped for r&r before moving on. We chatted with pilgrim friends from Switzerland, South Korea, Alabama and England that we had met over the past week that were catching and passing us today… that we may or may not see again.
We had breakfast, assorted drinks and snacks. Linda sat with our day packs on the terrace, while Jim (growing more impatient) took a tour of this very limited facility village (pop. 177) looking for potential sources for food for our main meal. He returned after a 20 minute exhausted search, empty-handed.
The restaurant menu options of our albergue are few, including a skimpy pilgrim dinner at 7:00 p.m,, so as we watched the supply of ready made bocadillos began to dwindle, we purchased 3 different variants.
Some of the ingredients in our three bocadillos were: iberian ham, sliced cheese, cream cheese, smoked salmon, avocado, pulled pork, tomato and lettuce.
From this collection of sandwiches we created a main meal to eat immediately, while we waited and the rest to take for later consumption in our room, which was finally ready for check in at 1:25p.m.
Once we got into our room we began our routines and had a reasonably smooth afternoon and evening.
Reflecting on day Day 18, the difficult walk seemed less difficult than our memories from seven prior caminos. Perhaps an interesting trend is developing for walking the Camino Frances in your 80’s.
Jimandi 