Day 18 - Belorado to Villafranca Montes de Oca

551 km to Santiago de Compostela

The house where we stayed last night is very old.  Our room was OK  it very cold.  The Spanish are a lot more stingy with heat than we are.  We had a little portable heater but it was not quite enough.  Our bathroom was down the hall so it was a very cold trip in the middle of the night.  Our hosts were very nice, a woman from Nicaragua married to a Dutch.
They got up at 6:30 am to feed us breakfast of orange juice, toast and coffee.

We started to walk at 7:30 am.  Again we met our South African friends Hendrik and Sophia and spend time with them on and off.  We talked to a Spanish gentleman from Madrid, Goyo, who is just doing a few days of el Camino, we talked to a couple of young Koreans we have seen before.  So today we were not alone. 

We first  crossed the village of Tosantos, from there we could see in the distance a church built into the mountain, it is the Ermita de la Virgen de la Peña.  We continued on to Villambista and to Espinoza del Camino.  There we stopped at a bar, Brenda wanted a hot chocolate and we sat next to an old lady in her 80s so we were talking to her for a while.

The uphill is tough so we decided to stop after only 13 km (only 4 1/2 hours),  because what follows is another 14 km of tougher hills and there is nowhere to stay, no water, no villages.

The name of this place is  Villafranca Montes de Oca.

We found a fancy hotel with an albergue attached to it.  We got a single room for a reasonable price. Much nicer than what we had the last couple of nights.  We do have to cross an 8 bed albergue dormitory to to get to our place but so far there is only a South African lady, Sheila, there.

We had lunch a bar called el Pajaro, the bird, it is a nice restaurant and the meal was excellent.  Started with octopus cooked in its ink over rice and followed by deer stew, nice local wine and flan for dessert.
 
Tomorrow we will climb the Montes de Oca.  The mountains of the wild geese. There are actually three peaks each higher than the previous one and the last one, el alto Carnero, is over 300 metres higher than where we are.

So now to rest the afternoon and another short but difficult day tomorrow.

Holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now and in the our of our death.