Day 29 Camino Acebo to Ponferrada

A good day at the Camino coalface. A short walk of only 15km meant we arrived at our destination of Ponferrada at 1pm. Lots of time therefore to see a really nice town. We stopped off at Molinaseca, a very pretty town where we had breakfast, our first café con leche. This is an important ritual for the pilgrim where you get a small reward for walking the first 1-2 hours. Ponferrada is an interesting town famous for its castle built by the Templars to protect the pilgrims in bygone times. The castle (todays blip) is now a museum dedicated to all things Templar. Well worth visiting for 4 euros. Had time for a haircut which I badly needed as I was beginning to look like the love child of papa Smurf and Captain Birdseye. I stumbled (I do a lot of this on the Camino) into a barbers in a slightly seedy part of town where there were three heavily tattooed barbers in their 20/30s. Despite being busy, one of them agreed to squeeze me in after a 15 min wait. Slightly apprehensive, eventually a young Cuban ended up shaving my head/trimming my beard and after 40 mins I felt a new man! I haven’t been to a barber in more than two years.