Day 7: Muruzábal to Lorca
Well, I had better add this quick piece into the order. Muruzábal to Lorca should have come before my Lorca to Villamayor de Monjardín entry. It was such a dreadful 40C day…again…that my notes were almost non-existent. Sorry about the fuck up. :/
When Andrew and I started out from our lovely albergue with pool 😀, we began walking through the sweltering morning heat and the hum of Spanish everyday life. We passed a farmer setting up the sprinklers in his cornfields. Now, you guys know my love for the corn cob, so of course I had to take pictures of the great plumes of water as they fanned out across the cornfield, wetting us in the process. The rainbow created a magical moment, as we continued down the humid path to other wonders: Storks! Lots of storks! Storks in chimney stacks, storks atop churches, storks on hydro towers. Not sure why storks make me so happy. I suppose because they never seemed real before. They were useful as the bearer of babies in cartoons and Hallmark cards.
I nerded out over the storks, using up most of my camera storage on unclear images. And then we saw salamanders. So many little salamanders running across our path. Andrew tried to catch a few. Don’t ask why. No room in my backpack for a salamander, now that I’m packing a stork. 🙂
And we saw swallows. The swallows appear wherever we see storks, so much so that I wonder if there is a relationship between the two. Like falcons and those little birds that always seem to annoy them.
If only salamanders could fly, I’d have a theme here!
Anyway, we ended our walk at Lorca in an albergue I’d stopped at for coffee in 2013. The room was too hot to sleep in, so one guy draped himself from the bottom bunk onto the floor, and I wandered around trying to discover a cooler room. With no a/c, I was shit out of luck. 
We did not cover enough kilometres today because of the damned heat, but the little surprises along the way distracted us from our discomforts. And so did the several helpings of skewers loaded with olives, hot pimentos. and tuna fish dipped in oil.
My greatest pleasure today? Knowing that a field of corn rests at the end of the rainbow. Not sure how my Irish friends feel about that!
Ultreia,
~Penny