Travels with my Donkey

more falling back through the field, and tying three plastic bags and a small bush to the tape didn't help. 'That's not a donkey,' said Evelyn as she passed, 'that's a carnival float.'
    The meseta had never been a more disheartening treadmill, but if there was one thing this pilgrimage had taught me it was the value of simple pleasures. Ambience and old bread should by rights have made lunch a dire ordeal, but there was salad dressing, and a bench, and the sum of these meagre parts was happiness. A small, bright-eyed woman approached as I agitated my vinaigrette,- a hesitant exchange of conspicuously accented 'buen camino's revealed our shared nationality. 'It's great this, i'n't it?' she said, the wind gusting her Lancastrian words away across the drab flatness. Ten minutes earlier I'd have thought she was mad, or from Blackburn, but with smooth concrete under my bottom and the flavour of the Mediterranean in my glistening chops I found myself nodding in hearty assent.
     
    Mansilla de las Mulas was so named for its mule market, and I suppose for that alone I should have stopped there. Certainly everyone else had: walking through its largely intact medieval walls and past a galleried church I spotted the blind Japanese chap following his tiny wife into the refugio, and looked up to see laundry and familiar faces in every window. But even though progress was now down to the agonising end of the sloth scale, and it was gone 4.00, I didn't. I couldn't. León, the last city before Santiago, was 19 clicks off and I didn't want to get there late the following day.
    There were two reasons for this. One was that I had a bed waiting in the Parador San Marcos, the palatial former HQ of the Knights of Santiago now transformed into what the Confraternity guide called 'one of the great hotels of the world'. The meter would be running from noon tomorrow, and I'd clearly need all the hours God gave and I'd paid for to reappraise those simple pleasures before dispatching them one by one down a marble bidet. And the other was that my bed was a double, and next door were three singles, and that these remaining berths would, by late afternoon, be occupied by my wife and children.
    Total Shithouse had supplied the inspiration. By walking on to the next town while his incapacitated wife got there by bus, and meeting her with apparent success every night over a long period, he'd shown that a two-speed camino was logistically feasible. It was Birna who'd first raised the possibility of a half-term family pilgrimage, during a phone call from Burgos: I can't pretend I wasn't slightly surprised by her enthusiasm, but I did pretend my money was about to run out when she asked how many other paradors she could book us all into along the way. A hire car and ruinous mobile telephony would be required, and the sort of head-melting to and fro associated with that riddle about the farmer crossing a river with a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain. But it could and would be done. This was more than just a slightly odd holiday story to tell in the playground. There were four young souls at stake here. How's a chap to enjoy a gilded afterlife knowing his wife and kids are down there in the fires of purgatory?
     
    The route out of Mansilla was fairly wretched, sometimes separated from two lanes of baying traffic by a strip of brambles but more usually by nothing but a fading white line. Horn-happy Sunday drivers shot past, almost grazing Shinto's ears with their wing mirrors. One shrieked to an oblique halt 100 yards down the road and began reversing waywardly towards us; I saw the French plates and was ready with an appropriate gesture before the camera appeared.
    The N601 sliced rudely through a town with neither appeal nor accommodation, picked up more traffic from a busy tributary and headed towards Puente de Villarente. Just before the twenty-arch bridge that introduced the town, I was joined on the hard shoulder by a little old man in his Sunday best. 'Hotel?' I asked, and promptly found myself being chivvied up to a decaying façade embellished with topless neon cowgirls. It was twenty minutes before he'd tottered out of sight, and so twenty minutes of foolish loitering before I could politely begin my search for more acceptable accommodation.
    An hour later, having passed the bridge and a hotel with a pool full of yesterday's guacamole, I was wondering if I ought to turn back to the fly-blown bordello. I was still wondering when I peered through