Well, will you look at that? We’re only three-tenths of a mile short of walking a Milwaukee Marathon today.
With an entirely new collection of aches and pains, tomorrow should be an interesting day. Fortunately, it’s also a short day, and we’re headed into Leon.
So why are we walking these crazy long days? It’s mostly a matter of lodging. We’re booking ahead, and when we tried to find a place for tonight, the only good option was what we thought was a 22-mile walk from Sahagun to Mansilla de las Mulas. We started at 7 a.m. and were here by 4 p.m., although the walk turned out to be 24 rather than 22 miles. And by the time we walked to dinner, we almost had walked that shortened Milwaukee marathon.
That time included second breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack, so we might have finished sooner had we not needed to power up.
Going that distance leaves lots of time to think. When the sun finally came up, we were walking through some soft silt, with the imprints of pilgrim footprints showing. I was pretty sure there was a hymn with the phrase “where pilgrim feet have trod,” and I spent some time trying to find which hymn it was when we got to our room tonight.
As it turns out I had mashed up a verse from America the Beautiful, which has pilgrim feet, and Shall We Gather at the River, which has angel feet trodding.
Google is wonderful for answering such questions, but the question in my mind tonight is whether having that information at our fingertips makes us wiser or simply better able to answer trivia questions?
I suspect it’s the later. Wisdom, I think, requires not just learning the information but making it our own, using it to challenge our assumptions and accepting or rejecting it. As far as I can see, there’s a lot more information than wisdom going on these days.
Cornfield east of Mansilla de las Mulas
Today we saw more cornfields than wheat fields — which suggests to me that we’re making the transition from the Meseta to the Cantabrian Mountains. (Being able to see the mountains was a clue, as well.) And we also saw livestock again (sheep and cows) which have been largely absent from the landscape since Burgos.
