Ponferrada

Ponferrada has a huge Templar castle overlooking the town, we go check it out in the morning while Ann gets some work done on her term paper..the castle is in great shape, built in the 1300's, and repaired/remodeled many times..
We leave at noon to Villafranca, a sunny (off & on) ride across this lovely green valley, small farms with neatly plowed rows of peppers, wheat, grapes, and fields upon fields of blood-red poppies. Dad and Ann fell back taking photos of an elderly burro, Tom and Brian got farther ahead...I was all alone on a single lane road surrounded by poppies. Stopping to take a photo of a field of them, a car driving by pulls over, out leaps an older guy who asks to let him take my picture...I'm thinking...sure, take my photo, then take my camera...but no, he knew his way around the Nikon and got a couple shots of me, gave the camera back, shook my hand, saying "Buen Camino!", dove back in his car, and sped off. This all took less than five minutes..it was a bit surreal..
Villafranca is a very old town in the foothills...where we stayed in an old convent. This was a huge building, not sure of it's age, at least 200 - 300 years. We got to town late, so the refugios were full...Ann found us a choice of either the Bates Motel, a scary place by the highway, or a spot with only two rooms, a single and a double. This would require Dad and I to share a bed. I said "give me that guidebook!...what about this convent, it has 150 beds and some private rooms."
BaddaBing!
Really, really nice, huge echoing halls, 15' ceilings, we got lost in there several times. There were chairs on the landings with the ghosts of stern nuns in them. I could hear the "shush" and tapping of the rulers, as the nuns and nun-wannabees bustled about. Given the choice of working in the fields and dropping babies all your life or going to a convent, I can sympathize.
Imagine! Learning to read!
Most women had no choices whatsoever back then, with no food to feed them, it was the convent or die.