After several short days near Burgos, we are back to walking all day – today we walked 30km. We are walking through the Maseta, which is high desert and flat, but a completely different terrain than a week ago.

Today, while walking the Camino de Santiago, we crossed another ancient pilgrimage route, called El Camino Lebaniego – a pilgrimage to the monestary which holds the largest relic of the “true cross” of Christ’s crucifixion. While the Camino continues west to Santiago, this route diverges south, and again it is a reminder of the countless people who have walked this way before me. The crossroads is a lovely spot along a canal where we walk across a lock.

The sign describing the pilgrimage to the cross was my favorite part of the day. At the bottom of the English portion it reads: “If you walk for religious reasons, or you walk for cultural reasons, you are welcome. Whatever intention you bring is good.” I think this means whatever reason brought you to the Camino today is the right one – it is where you are meant to be right now.

After a very long day, when we bypassed lovely hotels and beautiful gardens and even swimming pools…

We finally arrived in Población de Campo. The albergue at La Finca is lovely, with each pilgrim having her own little private space of bed, and shelves, and light, and locker – all for 10€ pp. I joked with Mike that the little privacy curtain has super powers, and would even block out snoring.

But when we walked across the garden to the restaurant, we learned that, for the first time in our Camino, they had absolutely nothing gluten free than we could eat. We were pretty much ok if the pilgrims’meal contained pasta – we were prepared to order off the regular menu and to spend more money. But the woman at the bar clicked her tongue and said “muy dificile, muy dificile” repeatedly, and didn’t offer us a single gluten free thing we could eat. So I was ready to have peanuts for dinner, but we decided to put our tired feet in shoes and walk into town to see what we could see.

We stopped at a small hotel and asked if they had a Pilgrim’s menu. The response was an absolute torrent of Spanish (I have GOT to become fluent in Spanish) but the gist of it was, “we don’t have any pilgrims starting here tonight, so we aren’t doing the pilgrims menu. You’re staying at La Finca, right?” So Mike and I said yes, and proceeded to look very sad, and senior spoke to senora and soon decided that if we came back at 7:00, we could have dinner. So we walked down the street and killed an hour in a local bar where my elbow literally stuck to the table and we had to pull the barkeep away from his telenovelas. But after we ordered wine and peanuts, he warmed up to us. He asked where were were from, and showed us his collection of currency from pilgrims who have visited from all over the world: USA, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Bulgaria… He gave us each a shell (the symbol of St James), and wished us a Buen Camino!

So we made it back to the hotel right at 7:00, and seriously had one of the best meals of our entire Camino. The whole dining room was set, with a table just for us. A bottle of water, a bottle of wine… Senior brought a tureen of the best soup I’ve ever had – white beans and clams, still in the shell. Then a plate of tomato salad. Then pork ribs that just fell off the bone. Then dessert – but the cream dessert had a cookie crust, so in distress, senior gave it away to the front desk clerk instead and replaced it with the most delicious ripe melon. And, to go with the melon, he brought us two shot glasses of house-made after dinner liquor, that tasted like sunshine and honey. After all this, he only charged us 9€ each. We did leave an appropriate tip (trying not to be stupid Americans) and a glowing Google review, but their hospitality to these two starving pilgrims will be one of my best memories of the Camino.