Rest day today, so no walking (at least none with my bag on my back).

Dad took the 11.15am bus from Burgos to Madrid. It will be a very different experience doing the rest of the Camino without him. While walking, I will try and remember the words he said to me on our last day, as we walked into Burgos through the suburbs and industrial estates. “This is boring”, he said. Thanks Dad.

Before Dad left, I did give him some stuff of mine to bring back with him and make my journey easier. I no longer have my SLR camera, my mini-wordprocessor (intended for writing the blog, but which I´m mostly doing by phone), my 5th pair of socks, my 4th t-shirt, or my 2nd sweatshirt. A friend´s advice before I came on this was to bring as little as possible, which apparently I didn´t do. To make up for carrying too much, I gave my Dad more stuff to carry instead – he´s proven himself able for it.

He called me a few hours ago from Madrid. His first taxi-driver was a grumpy old man who didn´t speak any English and they needed a second taxi-driver to translate for them. He´s found a hotel now, so he should be fine.

After Dad left, I visited the Burgos Museum of Human Evolution. It´s pretty impressive. It´s situated in a huge new purpose-built building, with multi-media displays that make the ground shake, the temperature change and the lights flicker to simulate what´s being presented. Everything was explained in English as well as Spanish, which was great for me. The museum houses a partial-reproduction of the HMS Beagle (to scale); life-size models of a wide selection of early hominids; a giant brain you can walk through and reproductions of all the artefacts found in Atapuerca, which we left yesterday. Atapuerca is the site for some of the most important archaeological discoveries in Europe. In the basement, they have a lego display – that was my favourite. I love lego.

I got my haircut today. I usually shave my head about once a week and after two and half weeks, my head was getting hot and itchy. It took my an hour to find a hairdressers and I think it may have been the snazziest one in town. When I asked for a haircut, I didn´t need to know Spanish to understand “But you have no hair!” Eventually, they agreed to pretend to cut my hair for me for a nominal fee. It´s about ten years since I´ve had someone else cut my hair for me, so it was a novel experience. She even ran a little pink comb over it every so often, as if there was some hair there to re-shape. It was a nice gesture. It´s the little things that count, so I left her a nominal tip on top of the nominal fee.

I also had lunch on my own for the first time in fifteen days. The waiter spoke very good English and happily agreed to adapt the salad I ordered to make it vegetarian. When it came out, there was a long black hair lying across the top. Having just come from the hairdressers, I knew it wasn´t mine, but as the rest of the salad was vegetarian, I decided not to make a fuss.

Tomorrow I hit the road on my own, with a lighter pack. Phase Two begins. Santiago, here I come.

Buen Camino