Carrion de los Condes to Terradillos de Los Templarios

Today we walked the 25k to Terradillos de Los Templarios. We are making good progress and enjoying most aspects of our experience. Sometimes the feet pain is hard to handle, but the people we are meeting along the way and the sights we are seeing generally make up for it all. Yesterday we arrived in Carrion to see the end results of a Corpus Christi procession. The flower strewed pavement was something to see, even thought the procession had passed and the designs were all mixed because people had walked over them. It was still possible to appreciate the beauty of what the locals had designed and also the effort it must have taken them.
We also went to a pilgrims blessing in the evening in one of the local churches and that was also very nice. Again, like most good liturgy, it was releveant, well organised, not overly verbose, full of local flavour and the priest made an effort to shake the hand of every pilgrim there, which made it a very frinedly affair.
Gabriel and Madeleine are managing the walking well, despite a sore knee for Gabriel and numerous blisters for Mads. I guess when you take children on something like this, you tend to see things from their point of view and anyone who has ever had anything to do with teenagers will know that they are largely interested in the fairly basic ingredients of life. That doesn't change just because you come to a foreign country. So one of our major preoccupations is finding food. Three meals a day. And when they need it! The other occupation is finding accomodation that has good showers and, if possible, friendly people that they can talk to despite the language barriers. They are handling the changing conditions, scenery and people very well and we are extremely proud of them. I'm sure they are learning lots, although as with most pilgrimages, it is impossible to be dictatorial about what it is they should be learning and the significance of the many wonderful historical aspects of the camino pass them by. This is fine by us. The important thing is that they learn about pilgrimage by experience and they are truely doing just this. They are learning about the hard bits, how the feet hit the dirt as you put it Mark, and about the fantastic bits and they have had many very positive encouraging comments from fellow pilgrims.