Day 20 - Difficult to stomach

Everybody set off separately this morning but come lunch time we'd all found each other again. Out lunch stop was next to the longest preserved medieval bridge. A noble Knight from Leon who had been scorned by a beautiful lady once threw down the gauntlet to any knight trying to cross the bridge and kept this up for a whole month. I imagined him to be something like the knight in Monty Python's 'Quest for the holy Grail' ("It is but a flesh wound!").

In the afternoon we walked up and down a couple of hills. We walked past a statue of a pilgrim and stopped to have a closer look. Underneath was rocks with messages on them and as I looked closer I found a message from my Camino Dad!

The guide book had a teacup symbol on top of the second hill and this teacup turned out to be a strapping buddist man giving out free drinks and fruit from the front of his house. I later learned that he had cooked a whole dinner for Eddy as she had not eaten very much that day. On saying goodbye I said I would come back and help him one day.

We arrived in the largish town of Astorga and being a Sunday the shops weren't open so we went out for dinner. On a recommendation from an American Pilgrim at the Hostel we headed to a bar near the main town plaza. Our route to dinner was via a walkway on the edge of town with a view of the surroundings mountains and was full of older Spanish folk slowly promenading. The main square was even more full of life, jostling with all ages eating, talking, walking, playing football and generally enjoying their Sunday afternoon.

We settled into the recommended bar which had some rather good cider on tap and everytime we ordered a round they threw in a small plate of meatballs. When the menu arrived we had no Spanish speakers in the group so I typed the options into Google translate. One of the options came up as corn which two of the group ordered believing this to be a safe option. What turned up was not so much corn but a bowl of cow stomach. One portion got sent back but I swapped my fish dinner for the other as I love a new experience and this was a dish I had not tried before. It was like an edible anatomy lesson giving me a sense of the texture and appearance of the various microstructures inside a cow's stomach and the taste wasn't too bad either.