Puente la Reina

Hello, everyone.

In the last post, I skipped lightly over the day we got to Puente la Reina.

The Alto del Perdon, with its bronze two-dimensional pilgrims, has already been discussed. (I did skip over the line of windmills. I'm just not that into windmills. Especially not the modern kind.) The very steep and rocky path down was, as mentioned, difficult. There were some spots where the path included steps, either alongside where the rocks just got too steep for words or instead of them.

Late in the morning the sun came out for a little while.

Those rays of sunshine were the best things I'd felt all day.
The green fuzzy looking plant in from of me here is (I think) wild fennel. The red flowers are poppies--as in "In Flanders fields the poppies grow/Between the crosses row on row...." Before we went on pilgrimage, I had always thought the poppies in the poem were like poppies in the US--carefully tended planting for beauty. Nope, they're not. They're WEEDS. (Thus, the poet was trying to depict forgotten dead soldiers.) And in some fields there were almost more poppies than wheat.
On the way into Puente la Reina, we passed a hotel that had albergue rooms in the building as well as regular hotel-guest rooms. They had a pool, too, although since the temps were in the general area of 50 degrees F, we wondered which two weeks of the entire year the pool would be usable. We kept on going to the Padres Reparadores albergue.
We wandered out in the evening to find dinner along the Calle Mayor and were served perfectly wonderful garlic soup, thickened with the bread hunks and everything. The server said it was homemade, by which I guess he meant made-here and home-style.