Wednesday September 10, 2014

We had a good nights sleep, and left the hostel at 8:45.  Salamanca is a big city, but we were able to find our way out of it very quickly (28 minutes) our quickest time ever of finding our way out of a big city.

Today\’s route was much the same as yesterday a few more rolling hills, but still on the empty highway.  The plateau is becoming a little boring, I need a change of scenery.

As we came down this hill, we spotted this small Tower.  It has religious significance and as we are on the pilgrim\’s route, we stopped to take photos.

I tried the gate to see if we could get into the Tower, there appeared to be a couple of wasps in the lock and one stung me.  There were a few choice words, which weren\’t very religious.

We arrived in Zamora at 12:30 and found the albergue straight away.  This albergue opened at 2:00pm.

While we waited for the albergue to open we went to the Tourist Information office and had some lunch by which time the albergue was open and we were able to get into our shared dorm room and settle in.  There were 10 other pilgrims on bicycles and 2 pilgrims that were walking.

The ladies shower room only had one working shower.  While I waited for the shower, I decided to do a hand wash and used a spin dryer.

For those people who do not know what a spin dryer is, it is a small cylindrical machine.  You put the clothes in to it, put the lid down, put a small bucket underneath the spout at the bottom, you turn a lever to lock the lid into place and then it starts spinning.  After about a minute or until no more water is coming out of the spout at the bottom, you unlock the lid, allow the machine to stop spinning and there you have spun dry clothes.  Of course they still need to go on a line, but it is much better than trying to squeeze the water out of the clothes with your hands.  The lady Dutch cyclist, who was about my age, was very happy about being able to use it, but the young Spanish guy decided he wouldn’t risk his clothes in it, obviously had no idea what it was.

We then went for another wander around another beautiful historic city and got some groceries for dinner.  Breakfast is included at the albergue.

\”The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music – aaaahhhh\”.  Many years ago Lynne my co-worker at Lehman & Associates (as it was then called) went to Toronto, dressed as nuns, to a Sing-a-long Sound of Music show.  Our habits had this kind of winged head dress – this one is for you Lynne.

Zamora is another walled city. It lies on a rocky hill near the border of Portugal and crossed by the Duero river, it has 22 Roman (christian) churches.

We had an early dinner and Ralf went to find the sports store for some electrolyte and met some locals.

Ralf had a lovely wander around the City, he was a little late back because he found the medieval part of the city that we hadn\’t found earlier.

It was getting quite late by the time he came back to the albergue and I had forgotten to tell him that it closed the doors at 10:00pm.  He made it back before curfew.

I updated the blog and we were going to check our route in to Portugal but Ralf didn’t get back to the albergue until 9:30 and I was already getting ready for bed.