I will get to Sevilla tomorrow and go on to Cádiz from there.
The temperatures are rising with every day and I got myself very well burned by the sun again. (in winter what the FUCK?)
By now it was a very nice trip from Fuenterroble de Salvatierra. I felt free again and had the road nearly for myself.
After I left Béjar I found a nice bicycle-trail on some old train-tracks. Plane and offering a nice view into the valley and up the partially snow-covered mountains of the Sierra. Backtracking from some kind of dead-end I met Edru who told me that I could follow the trail all the way to Hervás and invited me to have a beer at “his” Finca. I was also allowed to sleep on his couch and met his friend Berta, who was a very good Spanish-tutor to me. The Finca belonged to another friend of Edru, who allowed him to take care of it in exchange for living there. A beautiful place in the middle of the Sierra – paradise if it wouldn’t have been for the cold winter nights.
The next day I followed Edru’s advice for an alternative route to some roman ruins. The ruins weren’t that interesting, but the road was. Rocky meadows with old oak-trees and lots of cattle and sheep everywhere I looked.
When I got back on the carretera, I saw the first Stork-colonies and wondered if I might have seen some of them up north when I left Germany.
And then all of a sudden I saw this street-sign saying Grimaldo up ahead – lucky me.
It was just about time to look for a camp-site and here was one of the two last donative-albergues on my way south.
Shortly after I settled-in, two other pilgrims arrived and one of them happened to have worked in cologne for some time.
The next day I tried to get to Calcareous, the second donative-albergue, but 90 kilometers away. So I rushed-by Cáceres, lost my “Hello Kitty”-spoon and some other less important equipment – I hope – and tortured myself up and down the hills. In the monastery offering shelter to the pilgrims I met one of the stiffest hospitaleros on the way and a nice priest from the United States, called Daniel.
The next day in Mérida I saw the second Stork-colony on an ancient roman aqueduct – quite a view – and by exiting the city entered a landscape of wine and olives – quite not a view.
But I managed to find a “quiet” olive-plantation between the road, the highway and some train-tracks and put up camp.
When I saw the name Monesterio on my map the first time showing also an albergue parroquial, I thought “Jackpot, another donativo”, but it wasn’t. Instead it was closed and would have cost ten euros per night – pretty expensive for parroquial. I also couldn’t find any water-fountains in the whole city, which by my judgment makes Monesterio a very nice place to skip on any trip through Spain. Oh I nearly forgot about the camping and the stairs. When I left the city-limits on the Via de la Plata, which seemed to join the carretera after a few kilometers, I had to realize that this access included some very nice but bicycle-unfriendly stairs followed by a washed-out path along the road.
Halfway I ran out of water and tried to ask at a nearby camping, ripping of pilgrims during the main-season by offering bungalows for twelve and tent-spaces for seven euros, but now they offer nothing at all. Fuck you very much Monesterio.
As soon as I rejected the offer to take some water from behind the next gas-station along the road, I found a very nice meat-production, offering free water to pilgrims and if I understood the guy right also informations about possible camp-sites behind the Ermita de San Isidro.
After my breakfast in Santa Olalla del Cala I met Brian, a British Hippie living now here in Spain – at least trying to. “Brexit and other useless borders” was our topic, because when he came here he was a citizen of the European Union, but now he isn’t anymore. And while he can just spend his small Hippy's-pension instead of a huge Bankers-fortune, the Spanish government asks him frequently to choose another place to spend his time and money.
Another proof for my thesis that we should stop defining new borders and start to practice a little bit more teamwork to get rid of the old ones. Maybe if our great European Union wouldn’t just be some kind of financial construct to increase the profits in northern Europe by ripping of our southern countries, the Brexit would have never happened.
And in the evening I got presented a perfect example of how this would work out: After ascending up from the Embalse de la Minilla I met Willem and Anette, a couple from my region just the other side of the “border”. I asked them if they would mind to share the picnic-area with me tonight and they replied by asking me if I would mind to share a drink with them. They offered lots of more useful things to me, like a solar light, ready-to-eat meals and a SHOWER. And I provided them with some nice stories and informations about what’s lying ahead. We spend a wonderful evening and rounded up each others journey by that.
your roving houseguest and friend
Michael