Day 17 - Stick em up

We drove the short distance to the nearby town of Oviedo which we had visited yesterday to return our rental car. M dropped K off at the bus station, returned the car then walked back to where K was waiting. The next bus to León was nearly two hours away, the train was leaving in 15 minutes so we quickly walked to the railway station, purchased our tickets from the vending machine and boarded the train. It cost twice as much as the bus (still only 12 euros per person though), but was comfortable and we didn't have to wait around to get going.


We arrived into León and were immediately struck by the number of "stick walkers" we saw on the street. Years ago on an earlier Europe trip we named the middle aged tourists who walked the street with hiking poles "stick walkers". Little did we know this was just the beginning - we knew the Camino was popular but we'd only been in Leon five minutes and we hadn't even left the train station yet.

We walked to our hotel for the next two nights, the Marriott branded AC Hotel, four star and very reasonably priced at AU$120. We spent some time organising our luggage for the Camino. We have pre-arranged for our large suitcases to be collected from our accommodation each day of the walk and dropped off at our next stop, we had arranged this all online via the Spanish Post Office (Correos). K also had her extra hand luggage case so we packed it with items we wouldn't need for the next fortnight so we could send it straight to Santiago where it would be waiting when we arrived. This way we only needed to take M's backpack with us on each day of the Camino.

We tried to book a free walking tour for the next morning but found they were only held in Spanish. That's was a bit weird, maybe all the English speaking tourists were so exhausted from walking to León on the Camino that they weren't interested in walking tours?

Around 4pm we headed into León old town and realised once again we had made the mistake of thinking places would be open at 4pm! We headed back to the hotel for a while and waited until around 8pm to venture out again. Now the streets and places were busy and there were lots of people around. We ordered some dinner which arrived in less than 10 minutes, so fast we had hardly had a chance to sit down. It's like you wait forever for places to open and then it's in and out and fast as possible. 

After dinner we walked back home to find that once again the streets were quiet, there seems to be such a narrow window of opportunity. Interestingly once we left the train station area we hadn't seen any camino/stick walkers again, maybe they were all exhausted and asleep?