Salamanca - Day 16 - April 30, 2012

We decided to bus forward to Salamanca and take a couple of rest days. Barb is bruised and sore and has an awful looking black eye, which fortunately nicely hides behind sunglasses most of the time. She also has a blister on her heel and has had to adjust her step and walk more on her toes so as to minimize the pain. This would cause some difficulty for distance walking. All things considered, good reason to move forward to a larger centre where we can do some sight seeing and rest up. In the meantime we can hope for better weather and when we set out again, north from Salamanca, the Albergues are a bit more plentiful and closer together.

At kilometer 509, Salamanca is the half way point for the Via de la Plata route of the Camino. By skipping forward to that point we have about the right amount of time to reach Santiago around May 24th, which is my preference, given that I would also like to walk the 3 days to Finistere, which is on the ocean and was once thought to be the end of the world.

 The day started with fog and damp weather as we set out to get the bus from Galisteo to Plascencia, which was the nearest place with a bus forward any distance.

 The bus stop was a short walk from our hotel. We had a few minutes to check out the walled city of Galisteo before we caught our bus.

 We got to Plascencia by 10:30 and had time for a short walk around the city before the bus to Salamanca left at 12:15.

The bus ride to Salamanca was very scenic and it passed through some of the places which are on the Camino. We were quite sad not to have time to explore these towns but glad to miss the steep climb up and over the mountain that would have been the better part of 6 days walk. It was just over 2 hours ride by bus!

We are going to spend at least 2 days here, so I will write more about this city tomorrow but in the meantime here are some pictures from our walk around town this afternoon. And yes, we got rained on again!

We found a real cool bar to hang out at and have a bite of supper. It was called Erasmus Brun Cafe.

They had a great selection of beers, including Duff beer which you may recall was Homer Simpsons brew of choice.