Camino de Santiago (Frances)

We walked 15 miles today of gentle ascents and descents. We started at 6:45am to beat the heat...and we did. We walked alone until the last couple of hours when we encountered a couple with a toddler and a couple of young ladies from South Korea. We all were walking to Trabadelo as our stopping point. They are all very sweet.

Since we left so early, we didn't have breakfast until we got to Cacabelos three miles later. Yes, that's the name of the town. We had the requisite café con leche and I had a croissant while Pat had a Napolitana (a chocolate croissant). It wasn't close to the amount of breakfast we've become accustomed to. I was hungry one hour later. We'd bought a loaf of bread last night and had a package of cecina (beef jerky) from Astorga to snack on when we walked through Villafranca del Bierzo a couple hours later.

We're back walking among the vineyards whose grapes have been harvested and we watched one bodega getting ready to crush the grapes.

We dragged ourselves into Trabadelo at 1pm and had a snack before checking in at Casa Susi. We prefer booking private rooms but Casa Susi comes highly revommended. The shared room has ten twin beds, but no bunk beds so I think it won't be too bad. The downside is there are only two bathrooms/showers so we rushed through bathing to not keep others waiting. There's a pretty river running along the property so we cooled (froze) our feet for a while. Dinner at Casa Susi is supposed to fuel us well for the big climb to O'Cebreiro tomorrow. I hope so because so far today, we've burned more calories than we've consumed.Read more