Decisions, decisions

What to do?  The original plan was to walk from León on the camino San Salvador which crosses the Cantabrian mountains close to the Picos de Europa, and ends in Oviedo. 

I’ve already taken this route in 2017, after walking from Madrid. It was beautiful, but quite an effort.  I’m rather concerned that all the rain we’ve had recently may have made the tracks very difficult to follow. There is a great deal of elevation in both directions and some paths are very narrow, clinging to the edge of deep ravines and some through valleys where excess rainfall is likely to settle. 

There’s a lot of rain forecast for Tuesday and so we initially consider taking a second day off in León and start walking on Wednesday. Then we thought if we just take short stage (18.5 km into Cabanillas) we would arrive before rain is due to start. There was also the option to walk a few stages of the camino Frances, but I really didn’t fancy that. 

So in the event, as neither of us wanted to hang around any longer, we decided to take the short stage on Tuesday. 

Paul didn’t want to chance tricky ascents/descents in very wet weather and opted for the camino Frances, so we bade a very fond farewell this morning. 

It’s not an unpleasant walk out of the city. The path follows the river for a few kilometres and then we are walking through the suburbs – very affluent for a while, becoming less so as we walked. 

After 9.5 km we reach our first track and our first steep climb – a bit of a long-buster for me. A while later an American pilgrim catches up with me – this is her first day walking. 

As we get higher the path narrows through scrubby woodland and is lined with yellow broom and a smattering of lavender. 

The higher we climb, the greyer the sky becomes. 

We get a bit of rain on the way up but nothing too troublesome. 

We reach Cabanillas and take a short rest. It’s a pretty village with nice accommodation for pilgrims (I stayed here on my first hike on this trail) but there are absolutely no facilities in the village and it’s only 11:45.  It seems too early to stop for the day so we decide to take our chances with the rain – in reality the chances are definitely not in our favour – we absolutely know we’re in for a thorough drenching. And so it comes to pass. 

We walk some more beautiful tracks – steep ups and downs during which time comes the downpour – the sort that bounces off the ground. 

There’s lots of surface water to navigate and we’re quite relieved when we eventually reach a road at around 23 km which makes the going a bit easier. We walk through really heavy rain for maybe 10 km.  It eases soon after we reach our destination in La Robla. 

The albergue has reasonable facilities but is really cold. There’s one small radiator that has the job of drying six pilgrims’ sopping wet clothes and equipment. I’m pretty sure we’ll be walking in very wet boots tomorrow despite stuffing them with newspaper and then kitchen paper. Oh well, we knew it would happen!

La Robla is a good sized town with shops and bars. Unfortunately the Albergue is right at the far end of town so we have to schlepp back to the centre to find refreshment in the evening.