A day with no rucksack

It was lovely striding out with no rucksack after a long hot soak in the bath, and lancing my blister with a needle (thoughtfully provided by the Parador) and disinfecting it with eau de Cologne (ditto) before covering it with a plaster (I had to buy that myself).

Los Santos de Maimona 

Once past Los Santos de Maimona the landscape is fairly flat and dull.  Either vines or olive groves, occasionally both mixed.  The grapes were mostly harvested for wine but a few still had grapes, either for raisins or eating, and I enjoyed eating a few – it’s a lot of years since I last had a grape hot from the sun straight off the vine.

A few people were working the vineyards, and I went past one couple of men who had sheets down and were on ladders harvesting an olive tree – they didn’t see me coming and gave me a very cheery, but slightly surprised, “hola”.

For part of the road somebody had put kilometre markers showing the distance to Almendralejo: it’s very good for the morale to have a definite sign that you’re getting closer to your objective, especially when there is little else to judge distance by.  To the east were the impressive-looking hills of the Sierra Grande, and to the south I could see the (very) gradually receding hills around Monesterio (was it only yesterday morning I came over those? – I’m sure other, more experienced, long-distance walkers have noted the way time goes into slow motion when you’re on a serious hike, but this is my first one and it’s still a bit of a surprise).

Church of the Virgin of the Valley at Villafranca

Shortly after Villafranca de los Barros, I saw a couple of hen harriers looking for prey.  There didn’t seem to be much, despite the frequent fierce notices warning about the hunting being private.  Getting into Almendralejo was a relief.  I started a minor row in a bar by the Plaza de Toros by asking whether there were any trains back to Zafra – the consensus (well, consensus is too strong a word, majority perhaps, as there were just the usual three people smoking enthusiastically in the bar, although unusually one of them was female) seemed to be that I’d be better off going to the bus station 20 minutes away, rather than the train station round the corner, but nobody really knew.  If I’d listened to the discussion any longer, I’d have missed one of the few trains from Merida to Zafra, and been able to go back to the bar to let them know there are 3-4 trains north and south every day (including one a day all to way to and from Sevilla).  But I jumped on the train instead - a very comfortable train, in fact, with the landscape that had taken me 6 hours to walk through melting backwards in 20 minutes or so.