Day 21 - Those pesky French!

We headed off from Astorga with the threat of rain, passing quite a few grand old buildings on the way, before picking up the trail through smaller and quite nice villages, all of them with bars and cafes along the way heavily geared towards the Camino trade, which we of course took advantage of.

Coffee time!

By now we had started seeing the same faces day to day. Many of them would walk past, give a nod of recognition and say "Buen Camino" as they passed, others we would have a brief chat to, but we noticed that some groups didn't seem so friendly or polite. One group we took special note of was one of around 10 older French people. We could hear them coming from a long way behind, nattering away in French, and completely ignoring us as they passed. They would then stop as a group and wait for their stragglers to catch up, meaning we would pass them. Our first couple of "Buen Caminos" as we passed were generally ignored, so we ended up ignoring them too (yes, just as bad), as the cycle would repeat a number of times as the day progressed. Our pet peeves on the Camino didn't just include the French though ... it's hard to believe but there others who irritated us even more ... something we will cover in another installment!

Our nemesis ... those pesky French!

Much of the time we followed a path that was parallel to the road, sometimes we were on the side of the road. You couldn't really call it a "nature walk" by any means -  this was mainly farmland or scrub, or walking through villages. It was pretty well marked by route markers along the way, as well as yellow painted arrows on the road or on walls in the villages.

Our destination was the small town of Rabanal Del Camino, just 20km from Astorga, so we made it to our nice albergue outside town well before 4pm. We rewarded our efforts by sitting in the sun with a drink and a packet of chips (or two), and chatted to an Irish group who had walked the Camino a couple of times before. They had used a guide both those times, which seemed a bit strange to us, since why would you need a guide if you could follow yellow arrows and knew how to use booking.com?