There’s not much going on in Boadilla del Camino, but whatever does go on, Eduardo would likely know about it.

He’s a fascinating man, is Eduardo. The host of both the En el Camino hotel and En el Camino albergue (we stayed at the latter but dined at the former), he seems to have an eidetic memory. When two people we’d walked with earlier this year showed them a photo, he immediately recalled Jeff’s name – despite not having seen him in over a year.

Perhaps it’s just that Jeff is interestingly memorable, who knows? Given a restaurant owner in Castrojeríz recalled Jeff from last year (she even knew who he’d visited with), maybe it’s the Jeff equivalent of the Lynx effect? 🤷‍♂️ 😀

As we left the town, we walked alongside the amazing Canal de Castilla – a 5-6km (or so) long canal running all the way to Frómista. You can even take a boat trip along it… although the sketchy timetable wasn’t helpful (my guess is they run one boat a year 😅).

After just over an hour, and with a lot of thunder reaching our ears over the never-ending plains, we arrived in Frómista. It’s a small town, but – crucially – one that had open coffee shops ☕️. The thunderstorm had caught up with us and it had just started to rain, but – after a quick dash (sans ponchos) – we made it to aforementioned coffee shops to wait the 30-or-so minutes for the storm to pass.

By the time we left Frómista around 08:30, it was already 22°C – and climbing fast. The rest of the walk (large clusters of bugs and midges aside) was spent walking alongside the road to Carrión de los Condes – where we arrived in 33°C heat). Beers and shade kept us cool after showering, even when it got to 35°C).

Carrión de los Condes wasn’t having their annual flower festival this time (we got lucky in 2024!), but it did have a nice enough restaurant attached to our hostel that sold me plenty of foie gras 🤤.

The walk from Carrión de los Condes is truly boring: almost 18km of straight roads with not much going on – although thankfully one food truck after around 4-5km or so. We opted to walk past Calzadilla de la Cueza at the 17.3km mark this time, and push on to Ledigos at just over 23km. The albergue was awesome (we’d stopped there for coffee in 2024), with a nice bar and sun loungers (which were repurposed as shade loungers given the heat climbed to 37°C 🥵).

Leaving Ledigos the next day, we chose to take the alternative route to avoid walking alongside a road – but also to take us past a few more interesting sights like the old storage buildings built into hillsides (known by everyone as “hobbit houses”).

Arriving into Sahagún was great – because it’s considered the halfway point along the route, even though we’d passed 400km of walking the previous day before Ledigos. It also meant we could feast at the amazing Restaurante Luis… some might say we over-ordered 😅.

No overnight stay in Sahagún this trip, we’ll reserve our next rest day for León.