Day 34: Entrepeñas to Otero de Sanabria

Today is marked as day 34 but I won't get to complete the way to Puebla de Sanabria, and so it's just a half day really. A few months ago, the new station serving Sanabria was opened, not in Puebla,  but 6km away in the middle of a woodland near a village with 45 inhabitants (on a good day). It was opened before completing any signage, or an access road, and it doesn't appear on Google maps. However, all the trains to Madrid go from here. So, there was no point walking past to get to Puebla only to get a taxi back. So, when I return to do the next section, I'll begin from the station in Otero.

Today began from the nice little Casa Rural that I had shared with my Norwegian companion, Kjartan. We agreed to walk the first bit, in the rain, back to the village and the bar where we had eaten the night before. After breakfast we parted company but but before we took a photo on our rain gear 

The village where we had breakfast is called Asturianos, apparently after the people who came from the north in the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. I had determined to wait at the bar for an hour and read the news and have a couple of coffees so that I wouldn't have to arrive at the station too early. It was a good opportunity to chat to the bar owner who gave more insights into the lack of life in the villages and the difficulty of trying to foment anything new once the critical mass of people and infrastructure has disappeared.

The rain continued all morning quite relentlessly though it was that sort of fine rain and not so much of the wind, so it seemed more bearable. From Asturianos I walked on the wet clay path to the village of Palacios de Sanabria. They lied. There are no palaces. But there are two bars and a shop which puts it at serious advantage locally. 

As the rain had turned the clay path into a very slippery surface, and given that I didn't know exactly where the station was, I decided to walk by the side of the national road. It isn't very busy, as I have said before, but the spray from vehicles got me really wet. Thankfully the IKEA poncho kept a lot of it off. 

And so finally I arrived at the new station and am writing this sitting on my very comfortable seat on the high speed train, looking out at the terrain I have walked through these past eight days whizzing past me at a rate of knots. I'm tired now and looking forward to getting home, but no doubt will start getting excited very soon for the next section of the Camino!