Today could have gone either way. It was a 15-mile day, and the question was whether Rich’s ankle and my Achilles’ tendon would withstand the trek.
Fortunately, the answer was “yes.” The path was mostly flat, with five towns between our start and our destination where we could take off the packs and sit for a spell.
Actually, much of the hike was on gravel roads that reminded me of the road I lived on where I grew up, and the walk was like a hike from my house to Callender, Iowa, not that I would have done that when I was growing up. It was the 70s and cars, you know?
Our trek today took us past field after field of sunflowers. Back when I worked at The Kansas City Star and Kansas was making a bad choice about the design for its state quarter, I wrote the story abou the process. As part of that, I did some research on sunflowers and discovered to my surprise that Kansas is not the nation’s top sunflower producer, even though it calls itself the Sunflower State (and the sunflower design was far superior to the one that was chosen.) Wikipedia tells me that sunflower oil is used in Spanish households for cooking because it’s less expensive than olive oil, which explains all the sunflowers along the way today.
When I was a kid, sunflowers were one of the primary weeds we pulled when we walked through soybean fields pulling out weeds. My Aunt Mildred could spot a sunflower a quarter of a mile away, and she always made certain that no one on the bean walking crew missed one. I wonder what she would have thought of the sunflower fields here.
Our destination today was Belorado, which has several cathedrals. My favorite is the Church of St. Mary, for two reasons. First, they’ve constructed permanent nests at the top of the building for storks. The second is the statue of St. James (Santiago) with his head under his arm, on his way to Santiago. (H/t to Shawn Norris for sharing the legend of St. James walking from the coast to Santiago with his head under his arm.) It just doesn’t get much better than that.