A600AASS Day 10 - Foncebadón to Molinaseca
23.10.22
19 Km
Best day walking, bar none. So far, at least.
The descent from Cruz de Fero was as brutal as folk said it would be. Not initially, but eventually. But before we get to that, there was a beautiful walk across the highlands, all heather, ancient oaks and lichen. Gusts of wind carried rain-soaked clouds across the sun. Every now and then it would break clean through and illuminate the trees like a heaven-sent spotlight. Cows kept gentle watch as their bells rang out across the valleys and streams of rainwater sparkled as they crossed the trail.
We stopped for lunch in El Acebo de San Miguel at a place run buy a Texan called Mike. When I asked him how he’d landed halfway up a Spanish mountain, he said “Well it all started with the CIA…” before laughing then going quiet. Then, with a slight sense of whist, he said “Sometimes you trip, you know? You trip and then you fall, and then you land. And here I am.”
His vegetarian chili was excellent.
I’m on my second reading of Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. It’s a comforting companion as I encounter my own half-time stumbling stones.
Because of the whole school thing, I tend to have a pretty strong aversion to anything G-O-D-related, and Rohr can get pretty heavy with the bible passages. But he makes such compelling sense of why shit’s going down the way it’s going down, and the parables he uses are so damn illuminating, that I can happily begrudge him his Hail Marys and Hallelujas.
Stumbling stones of a more worldly nature were my post-lunch preoccupation. Great seams of minty, milky rock formed long sections of the path down the mountainside.
Pointing my walking sticks forward to provide extra stability for my knee, they would bounce and land, bounce and land on the striated surface as I lurched toward the valley floor.
All things considered, the knee did pretty well. I yelped only once, prompting Chris to lay out his foam hiking cushion for me. But his idle announcement this evening that there are plenty of physios on tomorrow’s path tells me all I need to know.
We’re bunked down in Molinaseca tonight, grateful for the character of a small village, rather than the big town — Ponferrada — through which we’ll pass tomorrow. A mistimed snack and a miscommunication landed me early in bed while Chris wanders the cobbled streets*.
It’s been a big ol’ day.
*He later returned with ice cream. Legend.
