Santa Croya de la Tera

A beautiful sunny warm day today ... feels so good to soak in the sun, to be warm.

I have started heading west towards Galicia ... saw the snow-capped mountains today, and the road has become more winding and hilly. This is a relief. The meseta is beautiful, with the bright green new fields and the blue, blue Spanish sky ... bluer here than anywhere else. And it's thrilling to be in the middle of nowhere, seeing nothing but sky and fields. But the mind can go a bit crazy there, and I was looking forward to ignoring a track to the left ... it was the only landmark listed in my guidebook.

There is nowhere to paint arrows on the Meseta, so whoever does this is very creative. Sometimes they arrange rocks, or find one of the larger stones in the gravel road. Sometimes it's on a piece of cement overgrown with weeds. When I get to an intersection on the Meseta, I must simply stop and wait for the arrow to appear, for it always does if I stop looking for it.

Today I am at a lovely albergue which has been advertised ever since Zamora. The people who run it are very friendly, and it is clean and well-equipped. There was a shady little hut on the way here, after climbing a large hill, and those of us who stopped for lunch there decided this would be a wonderful place to stop for the day, and I am glad we did, for the owners have suggested places to stay along the next stretch that were not in any of our guidebooks, and it makes the next stretch possible.

Also we were rewarded in the evening with a tour of their bodega. Bodegas are hobbit-like huts in the hill, built over a century ago for storing wine. None of us expected these small doorways to open into a big room with tables and benches, and a floor downstairs with the wine cellars. The inside of the bodega was quite large and comfortable ... a real treat to see the inside of the bodegas we've been passing for the last while.