Unlike exiting Burgos, which takes you though a grandly scaled and heavily shaded urban park, through the university and past a well manicured suburb before abruptly entering the countryside, leaving Leon mirrors its entry, only for a longer stretch. Miles and miles of urban grit, evidence of a modern industrial economy. I left my hotel in a downtown business district, with stores, restaurants, and offices, went through the old part of the city with its historic buildings and quaint shops, and then through an endless array of apartment blocks, some clean and freshly painted, others seedy with eroding facades and mold crawling up the sides, past butcher shops, some with legs of pork hanging in the windows, others halal, bakeries, doctors offices, hardware stores, bars, and other local shopfronts. Then into more industrial areas, with metal working shops, truck repair shops, furniture factories, ceramic tile and building material distributors, stone yards, auto, truck, and farm machinery dealers, furniture showrooms. Then miles of small office parks, warehouses, empty lots, hotels, and parking lots, some of the buildings modern and made of sheet metal, steel and concrete, others older and made of brick and stucco, some in various states of decay, and some of the abandoned ones heavily vandalized. I passed through several towns, but it was more like a continuous one. All the while walking adjacent to a very busy highway, sometimes on a sidewalk (sometimes fresh and new, sometimes broken and decaying), sometimes on a gravel path nearby through the weeds, underbrush and ubiquitous wildflowers, and sometimes, precariously, on the shoulder of the highway with an endless stream of trucks, cars, and buses speeding by. It was anything but charming. But for some reason I was charmed.

For one I was in a good mood, the sun was shining, it wasn't too hot, my body was working well and my feet weren't screaming. And it just seemed so real. Of course I'd rather be walking through the impossibly beautiful medieval villages with their 13th century churches, but this speaks to me as well.

Then again I find a strange grandeur in the northern part of the New Jersey Turnpike, so maybe I'm nuts. But that relentless onslaught of bridges and oil refineries with their smokestacks with the fires at the top burning off excess gas has its own beauty. My father was a big influence on me here. In his early years he painted industrial landscapes, factories, bridges, cement works, and smokestacks, as well as urban scenes in The Bronx and Manhattan. He loved Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, as do I. It was a time when modern industry was seen as the way to usher in wealth and comfort to the masses, instead of as destroying the planet, which is how it's seen now; there was an optimism to it. I must have picked it up from him.

My walk today, starting outside of the old part of Leon, was supposed to be about 14 miles, but it ended up being closer to 15; I took a couple of wrong turns that cost me some distance. The markings leaving Leon are almost non-existent, and though people are very helpful it can be very easy to get off track. I'm pretty exhausted at the moment. The next stage, from Villadangos del Paramo, where I am now, to Astorga is about 18 miles so I'm going to break it two, 7 miles to Hospital de Orbigo tomorrow, and the 11 miles into Astorga the next. Meanwhile it's time to relax...