Camino de San Salvador Days 1 & 2

May 26, 2023

I headed out the door around 7:00 since I knew it was going to be a long day.  I didn’t know what to expect in terms of other pilgrims or the trail conditions. I had bought a pdf book that is a guide for the Camino de San Salvador which I kept open on my phone along with the Buen Camino app. It felt like it took forever to finally get out of León and it was all pavement. My left knee felt twingy for some reason which made me slightly panicked.

I finally reached the end of the town and headed onto some trails. You could see the beginnings of the Cantabrian mountains in the distance!  It was fairly undulating terrain with some sections of steep climbs. I met a man from Israel and his girlfriend from Singapore. They both had Hyperlight Mountaingear backpacks like mine and they were so excited!  I guess they are very unusual/hard to get outside of the US. The girl even had our picture taken from behind showing our backpacks. She said she wished she had a white one like mine.

I also met a Frenchman named Marcel. He is older than me and is a fast walker however would take a lot of breaks when going uphill so we were together quite a lot. I finally made it to La Robla after almost 18 miles. Kind of a hard way to start a journey but accommodation is few and far between so you don’t always have control over how far you’re going.

I was going to get a private room at a hotel but there was no one there so I just went to the municipal albergue where I met Antonio. He was the first to arrive and I was second. At the municipal albergues, you get to choose your own bed (private albergues will assign one to you) so we got the best picks for the night. We went next door to the cafe and had a bite to eat. Antonio speaks zero English and barely tolerated my simplistic Spanish. He would just use his Google translate if there was anything he needed to tell me, like what the waitress was saying.
There were 16 beds at the albergue and 8 of them were filled that night. And that was the only place to stay in town so that tells you how many pilgrims were on this trail.

May 27, 2023

Well, I started everyone’s day off right by having my alarm go off at 6:30!  I SWEAR I had turned it off the previous night because I’m just not that kind of person. But, there I was!  Most everyone started to get up at that point anyway so I got up and was actually the first one to leave the albergue that morning.

I had gone to the grocery store the previous night to get food for lunch and dinner for the next couple of days since there weren’t going to be any services available. Today would be the day the Camino headed into the mountains! The elevation profile was a long and steady climb followed by a very steep climb with a little descent into Polodura.

We passed through a couple of small villages and did a bit of road walking to the village of Buiza. I filled up my water at the fountain in Buiza then it was time to climb! What started as a steep dirt tractor road through lush meadows full of grazing cows eventually turned into an even steeper path that ascended to the rocky outcroppings of the mountain tops. It was breathtaking, both literally and figuratively.

After heading downhill for a bit, I could see a town in the distance and assumed that was Poladura, tonight’s destination. But it wasn’t. The trail went in a different direction. I was hot and tired and ready to be done for the day. Eventually, I came to the small village of Poladura where I was staying at the only place in town, the municipal albergue. Once again I was the second to arrive and picked a prime bunk, showered, and ate my sandwich for dinner. And then the rain came. This would be the nightly routine while in the mountains and my motivation to leave early in the morning and hopefully arrive before the rain started.

The hospitalero opened up the ancient church that was next to the Albergue so we could go inside. There were eight of us in the albergue that night, mostly the same crowd as the night before. And, I made sure my alarm was turned off before I went to bed!