Boente

I wouldn’t say things are fully back to normal (I probably need another few hours on the table for that) but, all in all, I feel pretty good this morning so I guess the pain was worth it. We’re definitely on the home stretch now so even though the alarm clock still goes off way too early, once we hit the trail and see the distance markers quickly counting down towards zero, spirits run high.

We bolted out of Palais de Rei to get ahead of the crowds so the is a necessary stop in a quiet little village a few miles in for café con leches, croissants, and a couple glasses of freshly-squeezed OJ. The guidebooks say to get at least two stamps a day on this section as they can get a little picky when it comes time to issue the compostela, so we make sure to get one of those as well.

The horde has defeinitely thinned out and we can go for fairly long portions is relative silence. Every so often we come across a cluster of bodies though, including a few who you can’t help but acknowledge their level of commitment. Respect.

We knock off a couple more towns before finally rolling into Boente. There is something about this stop that must show up in the German guide books as there are more Germans at our albergue than I have seen anywhere on the camino (and we’re not even staying at the German albergue with the huge beer garden on the other side of town).

After a short break by the concrete cube they call a pool, I head to the patio to take care of a few conference calls back home only to find one of my AirPods has gone rogue. Big shout out to the Pension KM66 in Palais de Rei for tracking that down and sending it in a car to Boente at no charge. I guess that nun back on the meseta really did bless this journey.