Stage 1: September 24, 2017 - Salamanca to Rad (15.6km)

On Saturday night we stayed in the Albergue de Peregrinos Casa la Calera, which is currently in the capable and caring hands of Hospitaleras Norma from the US and Christina from Italy.

Starting out on any Camino is rather daunting. You wonder are you mad to even think you can walk through Spain for weeks on end to eventually arrive in Santiago. At the end of the first day you decide you are mad but that, nevertheless, you think you have proved that you are capable of clocking up the miles day after day.

 We have enough sense to know that we are not really capable of logging up 32km in temperatures of more than 24C so we decided to break the first stage into two. We established that there was a hotel roughly halfway and set out with that as our goal.

 We thought it a relatively modest goal and took time to attend 9:00am Sunday Mass in Convento de San Estéban, a huge 16th century church near our albergue. We were on the Camino by 9:40am.

San Estéban main altar
We expected to have locals tell us that we were heading in the wrong direction but we had walked more than a kilometre before a Spanish peregrina, travelling north on the Via de la Plata, tried to help. We eventually convinced her that we knew what we were doing. About 6km into the day, we met a man out with his dog. I think he thought it odd that were travelling southwest instead of northwest but he didn't try to change our mind.

 We stopped for a snack at 7.5km and 500 metres further on we were surprised to find a bar just off the Camino on our left. We had a light lunch there and chatted to a young man who was walking with his son. The man was a professional footballer with Zamora. With his wife he had walked a large section of the Camino Frances and was familiar with the Camino Torres.

Towards the end of the day we had to leave the Camino to reach our hotel (La Rad). Unfortunately we didn't leave it soon enough. We were on top of a bridge over the motorway when we realised we should have stayed on the main road and crossed the next bridge.
This view of ancient buildings and bridge was taken 
from the bridge we shouldn't have been on
Making mistakes at the end of the day when you are tired and everything is aching is not good but we eventually made it to the hotel after being on the road for a little over six hours in warm sunshine.

The hotel was just what we needed and we were well looked after.

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