The Deep Blue Sea

Yesterday I took a bus tour out to the coast.
Finisterre is the official end of the Camino, the end of the earth - where the 0.00km Camino marker sits. Many people walk the extra 90km from Santiago to Finisterre. I’m not one of them!
I love the ocean, so it seemed a fitting way to end my trip.
Bag packed, I headed off to the meeting point with my swimmers, a towel, and a much lighter backpack than the one I’ve carried for the last few weeks.
It was so nice to just sit on a bus. Even nicer that on my end of the bus there were no English speakers, so I could stare out the window and daydream about the almost five weeks that have just passed.
Ponte Maceira is known as one of the most beautiful villages in Spain, and I can see why. It was like a cottage garden in a river.
It was our first stop. I was heading back to the bus when a small but mighty non-English speaking woman dragged me back to do a photo shoot of her. I kept telling her we were late for the bus, but she grabbed me by the top and would not take no for an answer. First, she posed in many different ways while I took photos on her phone. Then she grabbed me again while she got her real camera out and repeated the whole photo shoot. No thank you, not even a smile. I watched her do it to other people all day.
The coast was beautiful. I can’t complain about the weather I’ve had, blue skies nearly every day.
Beautiful fishing villages, the smell of the sea air. It took me back to being a kid at Batemans Bay on family holidays. I’ve been to the beach many times since, but a particular smell yesterday took me right back to that time.
I made some new friends who I shared a local seafood lunch with
Trish from England, an older woman who had walked the full Camino on her own. She was a ceramicist.
Gorgeous young Carol from Hong Kong who has just messaged me to see if I would like to ‘hang out’ again today
Simone from the Netherlands.
And Tony from Taiwan.
I think the young ones must have been missing their mums, because they hung around me all day.
I had packed my togs and imagined I would soak my weary body in the salt water, but there weren’t really any opportunities to get close to accessible water. Each time a swimming friendly beach flashed by, I felt a bit disappointed. There were many rules on the bus, and I suspect salty, sandy passengers would have broken most of them.
The last stop at Muxía was beautiful, but the ocean had chopped up. As desperate as I was to get my feet in the water, I didn’t want to be the Aussie tourist swept off the rocks in Spain after walking over 500km, so I just took it all in visually instead.
I was tired and a bit flat yesterday. I think after being on the move for so many days, I was always destined to hit a brick wall once I stopped.
I also left Baz’s photo at the memorial at the end of the earth.
That was emotional.
He walked my journey with me, and it felt like time to let go. He loved the ocean, travel and adventure, so this place felt right.
At the cross, with the sky wide open and the ocean nearby, I said a quiet thank you xRead more