Camino Day 5

Ponferrada to (lunch in Villafranca) Trabadelo
Sept. 28
Kms 33 6 hours

Kathryn blew kisses as we passed our Castle on the way out o f Ponferrada. We picked up café’s and groceries for lunch. A typical lunch for us is a baguette, some type of protein (either peanut butter and jam or cheese and ham, water, apples and maybe yogurt.
As is a daily occurrence we got lost. An older couple behind a massive gate with a pet shizu dog directed us to the correct path so that we no longer had to bike along Spain’s equivalent of the 401. We had our lunch in the beautiful Cathedral City of Villafranca where there’s an amazing park right infront of the Cathedral. It was also crazy because the Catheral FOR REAL offers indulgences! Luther would be rolling over in his grave. The kids played at the park and we had Café-con-leche’s and then continued on our way.

About 10K’s later we stopped at a beautiful Romanesque church and met up with Paulina. She is a friend who Ruth met before we arrived in Leon who is a professor of linguistics in Prague. My kids love her, especially Kathryn who held her hand up one hilly section of the journey so that I could drag up the trail-a-bike with less weight. We arrived in Trabadelo which is a tiny town with one auberge but it was a beautiful bike ride through trails and woods to get there. We met up with the Brazilian’s in the hostel and there was a playground for the kids to play at while I did laundry. Rob splurged on some ice-cream bars and the kids were in heaven. We also met an older Dutch man at the hostel who had been biking for five weeks where he biked out his door from the Netherlands! He had a very neat trailer that held his essentials so that he could bike without panniers. He would be travelling right to Gibralter and then taking a bus home. We asked him why he wouldn’t be taking a plane home and he replied that after doing such a long journey to just arrive home instantaneously would feel too much like time-travel.