Day 8 Planning Day in León
We awoke after a wonderful night of sleep, hot showers with real towels, and breakfast at the airbnb. We ventured out in the morning to check out an antiques market and then visited the bakery we had seen the day before to buy fresh baguette and a dozen of assorted cookies that looked too delicious to pass up!
With full stomachs, we planned out the rest of the Camino for our remaining days. We came up with a plan for the remaining 2½ weeks left in Spain. We now know we can cover about 10-15km a day. We know we want to obtain the Compostela certificate which means we have to walk the last 100km from Sarria to Santiago. We also know we want to go beyond Santiago to Finesterre and Muxia and see the coast. We also know we want to stop in Ponferrada which is just over 100km before Sarria to check out the Knights Templar castle. All this to say we have a couple of travel days to get to Sarria with a stop in Ponferrada. We know once we get to Sarria, we want to continue walking until we reach Santiago de Compostela.
After a few hours of planning, calling albergues, we took a break and headed to Gaudi’s Casa Botines about a 8 minute walk from our Airbnb. Casa Botines has an amazing audio tour that we used to learn all about Gaudi’s life, inspirations and architectural genius. The interactive exhibit showed how the house was built, why it was built in that particular spot (it's the intersection of numerous star constellations symbolizing dragons and their slayers), and how Gaudi used architectural concepts new for his time, i.e. external support beams, inner patios to funnel air and keep the building cool, turrets on the building corners to allow more light, and dragon like features symbolizing evil in the Catholic Church or casting out invaders of his Catalonian culture. We also walked through an exhibit showing how Casa Botines served as a home and businesses for it’s patrons.
We had dinner at home and ended our evening with dessert in from of Iglesia Santa Maria as the sun was setting. Leon was a great stop for us – we are more organized, rejuvenated and ready to go.
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