Ok so here we are a full day off, just hanging around the castle. We even found a place to stay tonite near the castle. My thoughts are that a day off is not good……ones mind wanders to, ……other things. I know that sounds rather melodramatic, but I feel more focused when doing the same thing each day. When you are walking each day you just focus on where you need to get to today, if you have enough snacks, and if you get there before the early meal. (If you do not, you have to stay awake until after 8, for dinner, which seems late for us. )  A day off makes me miss my dog…… So many lovely dogs here.

I love castles, especially the outsides of castles. The “insides” eventually get around to the nitty gritty of what actually went on there, and I usually find some part of it, depressing. Take today’s castle, for instance…… Turns out there was/is a basement/dungeon where they just threw “other nobility” down into, such that they would eventually succumb to their wounds, from the fall?
Captain bringdown!!! The outsides are gorgeous though. No moat for this castle though as it has a river around parts of it.
We head out tomorrow, and there is a lot of “chatter” about the condition of the trail with all the water. It is hard to interpret, as much of the information is a week old.

So tomorrow is today …….

Most everyone else stuck to the road today, with the poorly marked trail, and the water on the trail. We took the trail armed with an app,”the wise pilgrim” app for the via de la plata trail, which works like other map apps showing you exactly where you are on the map in relation to where the trail is. This app has saved us a few times already and worth the 99 cents we invested in it. We did run into a group of pilgrims who had all wandered ankle deep into the water, they had the app but were not using it.

Tomorrow  we have plans to get to Lubian, which is 19 km, and 320 meters higher than we are here. (Which is 1049 feet). Not dreadful, but perhaps harder than what we have thus far encountered.

we did have an encounter with a field of bulls today, although the picture does not do the circumstance justice, we were not into hanging around for a better shot.  No fences in the vicinity………