Alone in Rionegro del Puente

We had a long day today (28 km), and it was hot, but there were many very nice parts. We started out walking along the Tera River, through cottonwood trees and it was cool and breezy. But by 11 or so, the sun was really beating down, and we took rest stops in two of the three little towns we walked through. Not one of them had a bar or store, but we managed to find shady spots -- one on the stairs leading up to the church's bell tower, and another on a bench in the shade near a reservoir.

The town we're in now has two bars, no stores, no pharmacy, but luckily the bars serve meals so we will get something to eat. There is a new albergue, done beautifully in a very old stone building. There are two floors with rooms of beds, a balcony, modern bathrooms, kitchen, drying patios, reading rooms, etc. -- and two pilgrims! We think some cyclists might arrive, or maybe two old German guys who were in our albergue last night, but this is really kind of weird having no company at all. We will lock the door when we go to bed, for sure.

As we were leaving our last little town of the day, something de Farfón, we saw a sign for water with an arrow pointing to the left, and there was a fountain. As we went to fill our bottles, a head popped out of the garage door speaking English. Turns out this guy and his wife (maybe from South Africa, we weren't sure of the accent) and their two daughters are renovating a fallen down adobe house and making a home in this town, where there are three or four other inhabitants. They are home-schooling their daughters and hope to open an albergue in their house within the year. The man was very nice (we didn't meet anyone else), but it seems like a pretty daunting task. The woman who owns the bar here in Rionegro knows all about them and thinks they're nuts. I'm not sure what I think, but I did think about their situation as I was walking the last 6 kms of the day and decided I wouldn't want to move my family into a town with four other people and the nearest grocery store 45 km away. But I sure hope they make it work.

Tomorrow we will have another long day, and we're hoping that this afternoon's torrential downpour (which began after we arrived and gave us an excuse to go drink beer and eat potato chips) will cool things down a bit. We'll be in Palacios de Sanabria, which sounds like a very regal place but all we're hoping for is a grocery store.