Leòn is an amazing city and today we planned to explore it. A kind of a Nero day. We got a pretty good look through it yesterday afternoon and liked what we saw. Today we got a chance to really explore.
We were up and out late, about 9:30. The town was very quiet, like an American city on a Sunday morning at 6:30am. It was cold, about 40°. We walked up the street the Camino followed stopping for a pastry and a soda, then stopped at an outdoor shop that had just opened at 9:45 and bought Sally a sea shell necklace. The seashell is the symbol of the camino. It is silver.
We wandered around a bit, ending up at the cathedral again, then began a Rick Steves’ tour. This was not an audio tour, but a tour you read from his book. He led us to some of the highlights of the downtown area, which we enjoyed.
We stopped for lunch to get a hamburger, our first of the trip. Unfortunately, it was not made from ground round. It was some kind of processed meat. Sally did not care for it, so I ate the burger and she ate the fries that came with it.
We decided to follow the route of the Camino through town since we missed it coming into town, having rode the bus, and would miss it going out of town tomorrow as we planned to again ride the bus to the outskirts to avoid walking through the streets. We walked about a mile of the route through town, weaving in and out of the streets, hitting the major churches and the old pilgrim hostel first built in the 12th century. It was gorgeous and amazing. After completing the walk through town following the Camino we weave and wove back through town on another route to our room and took a break. Sally took a nap. I performed my duties for a zero day and did absolutely nothing. Well, I wrote in my blog and wrote a Thomas the Truck story for Robby, but I didn’t get my butt out of bed for a good number of hours.
For dinner we walked back to the cathedral and stopped at an Express grocery store and picked up groceries for a magnificent salad for dinner. Back at our room we prepared the salad, then stepped out to the Plaza de Santa Maria to sit on the border/bench and eat. The food was as good as the atmosphere.
Dinner done, we called it a night and returned to our room. What a wonderful city! Narrow streets. Wonderful people and shops. No traffic. Little tourism so not big crowds of tour groups.
The Camino de Santiago runs up this street.
Sally looks over the shoulder of architect Guadi
Typical marking on the street to show pilgrims the way
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