Big Sky Country!

Colin the Canadan from Canadia
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Excuse me if I sound pissed off but I´ve got flies all around this room that "just can´t take a hint" and the security software on this INCREDIBLY SLOW COMPUTER just decided to start to load it´s homepage without warning me and when I did notice the address bar loading another page, the stupid keyboards here don´t know that Crtl+C means copy everything I´ve just highlighted. And because I don´t know how to argue in Spanish I´ll have to pay the €2 for the last hour of nothing! So I´ll start agin...

Not a cloud in the sky!
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WOW! The Cathedral in Burgos was everything it was supposed to be. It was absolutely marvellous.

But who am I to argue with Jesus!

Bloody hell! The page tried to load again! I stopped it quickly. I don´t care what virus this computer gets now. I´ve disabled the Antivirus! It´s their fault for not registering it in the first place!

So 20 lines condensed to 2 because I´m not feeling cheery at the moment.

Burgos Cathedral
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It was the greatest place we´d been to! We´ve seen a lot of churches and Cathedrals each and every day but there are some that still give you that ´Wow´ factor! This was one of them and they had a lot of attention to detail in the stone carvings. It was almost like a church within a church. The inner part taller and so the stained glass windows were lit up despite being in the middle of a very large Cathedral. Some of the paintings were amazing. The thing I look forward to in a lot of these churches and monestries are the cloisters. They´re like enclosed gardens that monks used to ponder the world in or do gardening. Henry VIII had them all destroyed in England after forming the new church so you don´t really hear about them in UK or Aust but they´re really peaceful and serene yet simple.

The hoards walking
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After the cathedral, I met up with Carlos from Spain and we went for a few beers and tapas. He doesn´t speak English and I don´t speak Spanish but yet we communicate perfectly. I can´t guarantee that we can understnad exactly what each other is saying all the time but we cope.

So I woke up early this morning to head to Hontanas with the lure of a swimming pool with bar. That was me. Sitting in the pool drinking a beer. So I set off without breakfast as we would pass through a town after 5km and if I could wait long enough, another town 4km after that. (Max 9km for those who can´t add up!) So you can understand that after 9.5km and I hadn´t passed a single town that I was starting to think I´d repeated what I did yesterday. However, unlike yesterday, I was following all the signs for the Camino and was going with the hoards on the same track. 10.5km after leaving Burgos, we enter the ´second´town. Never been more happy to see a bakery. As I had breakfast and 10km down before breakfast, I happily headed off for the next town 8km away. I got my credential stamped by Jesus(real name), who runs a shop there, which advertises that Santiago is only 469km away which is interesting as the guidebook says 472km. But who am I to argue with Jesus? So we left civilisation as, from now on in, for the next few days, it´s known as the mesata or plateau. Which means miles of nothing! Today was 27C and there wasn´t a cloud in the sky. All you could see around you were the fields on either side of you and track you were on. And the big blue sky! Thankfully I didn´t notice the heat but I´ll probably pay for that comment over the next two days when it reaches 32C!

Great Big Nothing!
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The next place on the list of towns to pass was Arroyo San Bol or Hospital of San Bol. It was supposed to be rather isolated and from the picture in the guidebook, not much to it. Apparently it´s run by whoever rocks up first in the season and wants to run it for 6 months! When we arrived it was an oasis in the barron plains! It would be the most perfect place to spend a weeks holiday. Trees providing a lot of shaded area to camp, a decent kitchen in the building, a tyre swing, a river running through, Out-house. The place just oozed serenity! Colin the Canadan from Canadia and Damien from Canberra, sorry, Sydney and I just sat and talked for about 2hrs. Eventually we started to walk on when the two of them met some French people they knew riding by. They stopped to talk and as I didn´t know French well, I continued on. I checked in here and got my bags to my room and asked for directions to the pecina. ´No pecina. Closed´ was the reply. As I´d already unpacked and settled, I decided to stay but by the time Colin the Canadan from Canadia and Damien from Canberra, sorry, Sydney arrived, I was able to warn them, and they continued to the next town 10k down the road. We´ll be meeting up in Fromista tomorrow night though.