Villamuriel de Cerrato

It’s another car park at the end of the town that is free. This one includes free electricity. We had the end spot next to some picnic tables and view out over the fields. We are now in rural north Spain. We did our last supermarket shop. Now we are not in the EU there are many things you cannot take over the border, so we had to buy carefully, any food left over will have to go in the bin. Normally we would make sure we had enough food to see us through the first few days at home. It’s nice to have this much easier and better system! We did a walk along the canal, listening but not seeing all the nightingales and warbles. We may have heard the aquatic warbler which is an endangered bird. The next day we cycled to Palencia (which I cannot say without singing “Valencia” a song played non-stop during Las Fallas). We got a menu for lunch given that we have only a few days left. Here English does not serve you well, but people seem to try and understand my Spanish. The poor waiter had to list thrice the desserts he had but he understood my request to repeat them which was good. In Palencia about one in three shops were closed down, I wasn’t sure if this was the impact of Covid,north of Spain dying, or online shopping. It’s probably a mixture of all three. Of course all the shops were closed for lunch. We always do this, arrive in time for lunch, 2pm, then at about 3:30 start to wander around and of course everywhere is closed until 5:30 . We cycled a large loop to get to Palencia, the landscape is surprisingly flat. We had to climb onto a plateau and then it was like cycling through the fens, flat and field after field of grain crops with the odd rape seed field looking rather colourful. A nice place to stop but nothing exciting to thrill.