Arrived yesterday in Leon and had a lovely evening at the Parador Leon - the fancy hotel the pigrims in the movie "The Way" with Martin Sheen stayed in. Just packing up this morning to head to breakfast before staring out. Today is about 20 kms. Should arrive at our next hotel before 4 when it is expected to have some showers. The hotel is lovely and used to be a jail back in the day. Leon is a sleepy little town with a lovely river walkway. Will check back in this evening with an update. Gonna be a great day for my 64th birthday as well. Cindy has done a wonderful job putting this trip together.
Started just after 9am this morning. Nice day for walking as it was overcast and somewhat cool. Nice to get our first day under our belt. Walked just over 13 miles( 20k) or according to Cindy's pedometer just over 30,000 steps. Finished our first day around 2:30pm .. had a hot bath to ease the tender muscles and now just having a soda and catching up on some emails and stuff before dinner @ 7 ... tomorrow we will have to trek about half todays distance to get to our next hotel. On the walk today there were a number of people on the Camino all very friendly wishing each other a "buen Camino". The locals all saying hello to the " pilgrims" which we are now officially too since 9:08 am this morning when we started the trek. Lovely wild flowers along the way along with churches, very cool small houses built into hills( see pictures), crucifixs and a beautiful blue , cloud sheered skyline. Really a day to remember as Cindy had organized it to start on my 64th birthday. Quite special and I thank her for her thoughtfulness and love for this day and in fact for putting our whole trip together for Europe and South Africa for the next several months. Well that is about it for Day 1 on the Camino.. it was just fantastic!~!!!!
