It's not really the home stretch. I've got almost another two weeks but today it occurred to that after today I will probably only have one more Friday on this Camino.
For the past 10 days or so I've been in the land of big grain. This time of year everything is gold, orange and brown on the central plateau (meseta), so last night when I arrived at Granja de Mor(blah blah) I was satisfied that I had reached the technical end of the Via de la Plata and today would begin something called the Camino Sanabrese.
The only things that I know about this route is that A: It's greener and hillier than Via de la Plata, it approaches Santiago from the south rather than from the east, and that it's all new to me.
The last two days have provided me with some great visuals. Yesterday I saw what may be the most classic Spanish landscape I've encountered. It's the ruins of an old military fortification. I think it was first developed in the mid 1100s and stayed relevant until the early 1700s. It's called Castrotorafe and is humungous. There's a castle at one end of it and I ended up taking a very wrong turn near that castle. I knew it was a wrong turn but I had gone all the way down to the water and was so curious to see what was around the next bend that I wandered a good hour out of my way. In my book, that is a good day!
Today I got to see more of that river / lake. It was really beautiful, maybe especially this time of year when the sun is never really overhead so there's lots of long shadows and lighting nuances.
At one point I had turned a corner by the river and there was almost zero sign of modern life. It was like a scene from Nat Geo. Deer running across fields, ducks flying around ...
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