The Magic of the Meseta

Pretty Close to Perfect Walking Today

Donna kept remembering and talking about the “tree-lined trail” in the Meseta. Over the past few days, there were plenty of snippets of that, but she kept saying, “No, there were crops on the left, the trees, our trail and a road, but not a highway.”

Today was the day. Of the 18K we walked, at least 16K was lined by trees. Like this.

If you look closely, you can see even older, shadier trees in the distance.

The sun was on our left, so we had dappled shade the whole way. We have established a trifecta of walking conditions, by the way.

1. Flat.
2. Shade.
3. Breeze.

Today we had them all, almost all the time. Cloud cover counts for bonus points if it’s hot. Today was cool in the morning, warmer in the sun, but with the shade trees, it was absolutely delightful.

The Morning Selfie

Every morning we take a morning selfie. I don’t post them all, but when looking through them last night, I thought we need to get a little more creative.

Here’s this morning’s, as we left Sahagun.

How Fast Do We Walk?

Not very, if we compare ourselves to most of the other people we encounter. But we don’t compare ourselves. We walk our own Caminos.

My Apple Watch will announce each kilometer and the pace. We started out being happy with 3K an hour, which is around 20 minutes for 1K. (Stop snorting and laughing!)

Turns out that we were tracking around a 20-minute kilometer when we were, I don’t know—climbing the Pyrenees or carefully crawling downhill.

Now, for the most part, we average 13-15 minutes per K, which means 4K per hour. A 20K day = 5 hours. Every now and then we hear my watch say 13:05, or 12:40. Our “record” was 12:15.

This morning we decided to see if we could beat our 12:15 time and get it down to 12 and a single digit. (12:09, for instance.) When my watch announced 2k, we quickened our pace.

We didn’t talk.

We didn’t change lanes to smoother terrain.

We kept to one path, and right before the path started to go uphill a bit, my watch announced, “Kilometer 3. 11 minutes, 15 seconds.”

We stopped and cheered and were dumbfounded that we cut an entire minute off our previous record.

And that was that. We wanted to focus on the path, the trees, the Meseta.

Beauty is in the iPhone of the Photographer

We came to a vast hay field that was freshly cut, not yet baled. For as far as we could see, there was nothing man made. Donna took a picture of me taking pictures.

And here is the picture we voted the best.

We decided we love the Meseta.