19.1k I had to say goodbye to my personal camino guide who has walked with me on and off from day 1. The extra lenghth of his guidance was unexpected and we didn't walk together everyday, but when we did it was a good matched pace, but this is a whole story for another day. His parting gift was the symbol tau carved from olive wood, this is the sacred symbol from the antonine order whose monastry and hospice founded in the 11th century we walked by yesterday. The symbol is for divine protection against evil and sickness by using the power of tau (love) and comes with the wish for me for health and strengh to take care of some difficult tasks awaiting me.
I leave the village late after desayauno with Antonio and his wife which consists of a hot tall cafe con leche, a slice of tortilla, fresh bread and "the best olive oil all naturale".
Then una hora or so of electronic trabajo and I am ready to andar the steep 100m climb to the top of alto mostelares under cloudy skies with windmills moving but slowly in the distance. At the top I turn into the local photographer, for a young French couple, an older sprite frenchman with matching front and back packs weighing 14k who started his camino on aug 30th from Nantes, a young man with blue kerchief of unknown nationality and due to the work of the Spanish sun I am taken as italian. On this barren plateau there are 2 hearts laid out in stone, one for ana and one for natasha. The clouds now look like soft pillows and the view on the other side of alto mostelares even more spectacular of the winding path across the beige meseta as far as the eye can see. I realize that the camino has completely romanticized me, I feel very happy and practically run down the hill, like the tgv as jaque referred to my walking pace a few days ago.
The meseta goes on, I pass the frenchman who has now donned a white cap and he reearanges the solar phone charger on my backpack so it stops clancking.
Across the rio pisuerga there ISA romanesque stone bridge with 11 arches originally built in 1072!! And there are birch trees planted in perfect rows and it doesn't matter which angle you look at, all you see is straight lines and about now I discover that my pedometer is no longer counting every step, and after some walking and counting it seems like just random steps, which explains the low count for yesterday when the engineer assumed i had accidently reset it during the walk. Not sure what the problem is, maybe because my pants are loose, I must have lost a ltttle weight. I will have to estimate for the dql team since we are in number 4 position in the healthy pfizer step competition.
The landscape changes and there are fields of green leafy vegetables that i don't recognize something between spinach and kale and I this is the vegetable that was in the sopa verde i ate last night.
More windmills now still, under a hazy sky, but the solar panels in the distance twinkle and it is good to feel the sun again as I walk Into the vilage where I will stay tonight, in an alburgue that had a good description in my book, but turns out to be even better, most enchanting and tranquilla.
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