Today was our longest hike of the whole trip -- we walked 31.2 km (roughly 19 miles). Unfortunately, Linda has been battling shin splints the last 3 days, so it was tough. She's been stretching it, icing it down at most of our stops, and also applying the anti-inflammatory that we bought for my foot. It's still causing a fair amount of pain (although it seems to come and go at times, too), so she is going to do some research tonight to see if there is anything else she can be doing to help it get better. If anyone has any advice for shin splint relief, please email her.
Also, our stay last night in an albergue (a bit like a youth hostel) was interesting. As I mentioned in my last post, we had a private room with 2 twin beds, and there were 7 bedrooms with roughly 15 people in them, all sharing 2 bathrooms. All of our doors (including the bathrooms) opened onto the same hallway. So throughout the night, you could hear people making trips to the bathroom (particularly one bathroom that had a door that required a lot of force to close all of the way). Also, one of the people sleeping in the room next to ours woke up a little before 5am to start his/her day. Wanting some light and thinking of the people they were sharing the room with, this person moved all of their stuff out in the hall and proceeded to pack their backpack out there. What they didn't think about was now everyone else could hear them packing before departing. Bottom line, our stay in the albergue reconfirmed for us that we did the right thing by booking our hotel rooms in advance.
On our hike to Astorga, we crossed a bridge with a fascinating history. According to our book (and also a sign posted at the bridge), in 1434 there was a man named Don Suero de Quinones who loved a woman, but she did not love him back. To impress her and earn his honor back, he challenged all of the knights in Europe to a match on the bridge over the river Orbigo (the bridge in the picture). For 30 days there were matches, and Don Suero won all of them. Don Suero and his 10 comrades who helped him in these matches then traveled to Santiago to offer their thanks for returning his honor and for freeing him from the bonds of love. As you can see, it's a very impressive bridge with 16 arches in it. It is one of the longest and best preserved medieval bridges in Spain. It dates back to the 13th century and was built on top of an earlier Roman bridge. No cars use the bridge, only people. And from a sign at the bridge, it appears they still have jousting and other medieval matches beside it during a festival in the summer.
The second picture is of a cross that is on a hill overlooking Astorga. It is to honor Saint Toribio, who was a 5th century bishop of Astorga. Astorga is in the background, and even further in the distance are some of the mountains that we will need to cross. In two days, we will ascend to 1505 meters, which is even higher than where we crossed the Pyrenees mountains. We'll have some up and down hiking for about 7 days, before finally coming down to around 500 meters (roughly 1500 feet).
The other thing that is interesting about Astorga is it has some Roman ruins dating from the 1st century AD to the 4th century AD. The third picture is of some of those ruins. Besides just the fact that some of these walls are still standing, the other amazing thing is they created plumbing that provided 3 different temperatures of water to each of the major rooms in the house (obviously, this person was pretty high up in society to have this kind of plumbing. Not everyone had it, but I was still amazed that they even had the ability to provide this kind of amenity). Also, there were some mosaics inlaid into a floor in the house that we could clearly still see.
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