Day 16. I{m in Castrojeriz. 439 km to go

Well, 15 days of walking and one day of rest.

I started in St. Jean Pied de Port with 764 km to go. Now I have 437 left. Tomorrow I will go to a town called Fromista. Check the map. It{s starting to look like I have covered a big chunk of Spain. http://www.ongerwaeg.nl/images/lenssen3/krt-2.gif

I can{t recall whether I wrote in here that my new plan is to head to Finisterre, the end of the world, which is about 80K past Santiago.

I{ve entered a part of Spain known as the meseta. People have been talking about the meseta with a tone of dread for days. Here{s what one guidebooks says: "The vast expanse and huge skies of the meseta are striking and strange, swinging from depresingly monotonous to exhiliratingly infinite in the space of a km . . . Mostly your senese will be overloaded by an endless flatness." Maybe I{m not far enough into it, but I{ve been pleasantly surprised to find sweeping fields of wheat with poppies dotting the landscape, cupped by rolling hills. The Camino winds through the fields and occasionally a convent or a town rises up to greet us out of the wheat. I have had much more monotonous experiences than this one.

Today a Spanish man taught me a song about poppies.