Rest Day Redux

We’ve planned a well-deserved rest day here in Burgos, even though it further complicates our ability to make it to Santiago de Compostela in time. I blame it on my fellow pilgrims to anyone that will listen, but the truth of the matter is that I may not be Benjamin Button (I stress MAY not be). Of course, just because we’re not leaving the city that doesn’t mean I’m able to post up in the hotel. Still plenty to do.

Efe Bomba is still down for the count so the boys and I start at the cathedral. Every town we pass through here has a big, old church but Burgos and León have by far the biggest and we could the tower of this one for miles walking in yesterday. It doesn’t compare to St. Peter’s or Sagrada Familia, but this is the first time the boys have seen anything like it and it is fun to watch them take in the scale and history.

Nothing impresses them more however than this – a pizza vending machine we find wandering down a side street in the old town. Swipe your card and 3 minutes later, out slides a hot pizza. How can a simple cathedral compare with that?

We spend the rest of the afternoon tackling the the finest Burgos has to offer, including the restaurant that serves only one dish – four mushrooms stacked on a slide of bread – and grabbing a photo with the giant sausage.

After days of packing and repacking luggage, and then dropping a small fortune to ship it from town to town, we’ve also come to the conclusion that pilgrims don’t really need too many collared shirts or pairs of shoes. So, for $100, we use the post office to box it all up and ship it straight to our hotel in Santigao de Compostela. Having expderienced the USPS, it is a shockingly friendly and efficient process. This part anyway. I guess we’ll find out in three weeks if it actually works.

We cap off our time here with, what else, burgers (because it’s Burgos, get it?).

Back to the trail tomorrow.