I left Castrojeriz at 9:30 in the morning but still got stuck in rush hour traffic.

The next 3 days were spent crossing the meseta, one of the two large plateaus in Spain. It is about 75 miles wide and almost perfectly flat.

There are buildings that are very similar in construction to the California missions, which I’ve never seen anywhere else in Europe.

These underground houses are a common sight and made me glad I wasn’t walking here in the summer – it must be very hot.

It is interesting that in Spain there are no buildings outside of the villages. All of the farmers live in the villages and even their barns and equipment sheds are in the villages, so one can walk for miles between villages without seeing a building. It is also rare to see a tractor in Spain that isn’t a John Deere.

This morning I arrived in Leon, the last major city until Santiago. It is about 2/3 of the way across. It has a massive Gothic cathedral that was built when Leon had only 5000 residents. It is hard to believe that a town with the population of Durham could build something so impressive. Like many buildings in Europe it incorporates materials from Roman buildings that were on the site previously. If you look closely at some of the columns I’m pretty sure you can see depictions of the Pagan gods Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, and Aphrodite.