Two days in a row that we both liked the walk. Not easy as in the small (1000 meters) mountains. Freezing in early morning now and warm as sun rises over hills. Not easy but beautiful and almost all off road.
Few pictures on this post as we have no T-Mobile signal and virtually no Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is sufficient for a text but not for putting in pictures. Picture addendum tomorrow.
Entered Castile y Léon today and both the signage and direction arrows improved dramatically. Castile is clearly marketing the Camino.
The road is an old Roman road going back to 217 BcE. All along the way there are military markers essentially vertical posts of concrete marking the route. When we put in pictures they will be in the pictures.
A detail from a few days ago or weeks is now clear. The reason that all the churches are closed is that there are virtually no priests available. Careful examination of the paper on the front of a church will tell you which towns have masses on which day. None have mentioned pilgrim masses which are frequent on the main Camino route.
The Casa Rural tonight is all ours. The owner makes dinner for us. Paella. The town, the largest for the next couple of days, has one bar and almost no people. The next two each have less than 100.
Due to minor injuries, remote mountains and upcoming days of rain we modified our route for the next few days. Will skip the rain and mountain walk and go directly to Salamanca. We will end up with four days in Salamanca.
Boog's Blog 
I see on the map that you are directly west of Madrid now. looks as though Salamanca is about a halfway mark to Compostela?
Yes and no. Depends of course on the route. We are past the halfway mark of walking. Then N-630, know how you like road numbers, says we have 405km to go from Salamanca (every km is marked with the remaining distance on the Ruta de la Plata N-630). Total of the route is just under 1000km.
Since Sevilla,I’ve been adding each location as noted on your posts on a Google map. Am using the “walking” setting so unsure whether it shows the routing along a main road or is actually following your camino route – the former, I suspect. Still, it gives me a good sense of pace/progress. Google thinks the distance was 412 km as of La Calzada de Bejar; seems about right.
Google walking always takes roads. It takes the largerst road that is not the autovia. This has gotten us confused a few times so now I understand it quite well. Apple routes the best walking, taking across farmer fields that are not the largest road between points A and B.
As to distance, a Google search led to: “ Characteristics of the Vía de la Plata
Its 596.5 miles are divided into 38 stages on foot and 16 by bicycle. Its shortest stage (the 9th) has 9.9 miles. The longest, 23.9 miles. ”. Of course we have used taxis on the longer stages and have had a few accommodations off route. Why? We had the agency book better than ten to a room bulk bed or similar dumps. QB will correctly say we got off route and still got many dumps.