3 bethan's tale - palencia, rain and breakfast

Palencia

Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:54:21 +0100

Hola, well we eventually managed to escape Reinosa. or in spanish ´Russia´, don´t be fooled the main street looks like Spain but actually it´s just a cunning façade, it´s really Russia, in fact back of behoynd Russia, where everybody is poor and miserable. A worm hole has opened up on earth, you think you´re entering a small skiing town in Spain, but you end up in Russia. It´s amazing!! It was cold, the people were unfriendly, the place looks like a russian council estate (if such a thing exists), you would not think this was part of the 1st world!!

Anyway we escaped, it rained atrociously and we decided to catch a train to Palencia, where although the rain continued we met a load of nice people. We got here at 5.30pm and went from hostel to hostel and around a load of hotels to find somewhere to stay, all of them were full, this German guy even drove around the city from hotel to hotel to find us a place to stay and offered up his room in the hotel that he was booked in, if he could find a place, but he couldn´t. but how nice is that! Eventually we found a hotel (at 9.30), it´s a 3 star hotel but no more expensive than what we stayed at in Puente Viesgo and far superior. Breakfast was amazing, we both had 4 croissants each, 4 pan u chocalat, 2 bowls of fruit, and I had a yogurt. and it was all free! the first time that I have reached full capacity at breakfast.

palencia is nice, it´s sunny again today, and we really should have set off - we´re going to Fromista next to join with the Camino de Santiago, we´re about 30k south - but we decided to stay another night. Last night I was really starting to get concerned when we couldn´t find anywhere to stay, apparently there´s a Chemist´s convention in town. I was envisioning having to put all my clothes on and sleeping on the railway station, but we both stayed in quite good moods - considering our near death situation (we would have certainly died if we´d to spend another night outdoors, but we are at lower altitude I suppose) luckily a girl in a hotel phoned around another load of hotels and found us a place to stay - we love her! Well that´s it really, so will write more when we do more.
Lots of love Beth