Even after all of these years traveling to the Camino, today I learned a valuable lesson.
My day started at 3:30 am on Wednesday 8/27 getting up and ready to leave at 5 am for a 7 am flight. So far so good. My flights were uneventful and we even arrived in Barcelona almost an hour early. That is actually the problem. We arrived at 6:30 am Barcelona time, but that is 9:30 pm in Sacramento, so I did not get much sleep on the plane. Then I compounded that by the brilliant decision to take a train from Barcelona to Madrid and then from Madrid to León which is where I am tonight. The trains were great. Traveling at 180 miles an hour on a train is really cool. The problem is that there was a layover for both trains. So I had to wait almost 4 hours to catch the train to Madrid, which only took 2.5 hour to travel between the two cities, and then another 2 hours for the train to León. So that means I did not arrive in León until 5pm which makes for a 27 hour travel day. Terrible choice on my part.
As I write this it is just past 7pm and I am doing my best to stay up until a reasonable hour.
Tomorrow, Friday I start walking from León. There are still fires burning in Northern Spain. Our train was supposed to continue on to Oviedo but could not due to a fire.