All roads lead to or from Rome. . .

Hey everyone,


I want to start off by giving a little shout-out to the 5th grade class at Sacred Heart Catholic School and thank them for the very nice email and prayers that I have received from them!


We finally made it to Astorga today, after many Km's on the Old Roman Road.  It is a beautiful city that I will post some pictures of as soon as I get to a computer with an SD port.


It was a long but good walk, with a total of about 30km(18.5miles) in some of the most beautiful weather I have seen in a long time.  We really can't ask for much better.   We started the day from Mazariffe at about 7:15am with the German girl and her mother, Catarina and Elizabeth, who I mentioned in some previous posts.  They have been some great company and actually some of few people we have met who are actually on the Camino for spiritual purposes.  We also met a couple from St. Louis, MO this morning and were very happy to get to speak to some Americans since there are so few on the pilgrimage.  

We got a nice cafe and had a couple of nature´s valley granola bars about mid-morning and trekked onward towards Astorga.  The walk was very pleasant, even though it was pretty chilly.  Fortunately, my newly purchased reversible fleece/windbreaker kept me warm. We stopped in a small city to pick up some lunch in a supermercado--which is the best way to go for poor pilgrims like ourselves--and stopped out of the city for a much--and then made it the last 16km or so  through the country and into Astorga.

We are bunking in an old, and if I am not mistaken, renovated palace that is now an albergue, not far from the Cathedral in Astorga.  It is relatively cheap and has some nice amenities.  The most awesome of which is the centrifuge for drying one's clothes.  Hand-washing clothes really can take it out of you, especially wringing out the water, but that is where the centrifuge comes in.  You wash the clothes, throw them in this little cylinder shaped device that looks like one of those diaper-genie things back in the States, press a button, watch it shake and come to life, and water starts pouring out of the side of it.  It comes in handy because sometimes the clothes don't always dry after a night's worth of hanging on the laundry line. Then you have to march around the countryside drying your underwear by hooking them to a caribiner on your backpack.


Anywho, I hope all is well back home.  I saw that the Panthers lost. . .but there is still plenty of season left.  God bless you all.  Much love.


Paul