Our penultimate day on Camino

Yesterday’s clouds turned into thick fog this morning. We ate breakfast at our guesthouse and chatted with Diane from San Francisco (the one in California). She is walking solo but used a tour company to book her accommodation and luggage transfer. She was underwhelmed by a few of the places she has stayed and was not looking forward to her characterless hotel in Santiago. I hope she will be pleasantly surprised.

Since last night’s hotel was a few kilometers off the Camino, just outside A Escravitude, near Padrón, we took a taxi back to the church where we’d stopped walking yesterday. While we waited for the cab to arrive we got to know our hospitaliera, Macarena. Yup. That’s her name. She is from Venezuela and came to Spain to study for her master’s degree in hospitality. Then the pandemic hit. Overnight, the tourism industry shut down. She found work in a grocery store to pay the bills until about a month ago when she started managing Casa da Meixida. She hates it. The owner owns several other properties and is apparently very dismissive of her skills and previous job experience. In short, she’s overqualified and her boss is a jerk. Very relatable. Still, she was very welcoming and professional and I hope she finds a better situation soon.

As we were riding in the taxi back to our starting point we passed hordes of pilgrims hustling to Santiago, just over 25k away. We are taking two days to cover that distance so we weren’t in a big rush. By the time we started walking, only the stragglers were left. By mid-afternoon we were virtually alone on the trail.

Walking through the foggy valley was chilly this morning, Fall is definitely in the air. The change in the weather from last week to today makes it feel like we’ve been walking longer than twelve days. We started walking in summer and now it’s autumn.

We stopped at a cafe for a bathroom break and while waiting in the inevitable queue we were entertained by a group of singing Portuguese pilgrims. Everyone in the cafe joined in, including the owner and his wife who came out of the kitchen for the chorus. After we left the cafe we kept running into them, singing a hymn in the church up the road, singing and dancing a flamenco for a man and his dog further on. They were a hoot!

On our way we met up again with two young Portuguese women we had met a few days ago, Inês and Katherine. The first time we met them they had just started their Camino and were exhausted and struggling to keep going. We’d been wondering whether they were still walking so it was really good to see them again, looking more cheerful this time. We were busy taking goat pictures so we exchanged a brief greeting and they walked on.

Later we saw them at a cafe where we stopped for lunch and they invited us to sit with them. They were full of funny stories about snoring pilgrims in the albuergues and generally seem to have embraced their Camino experience for what it is.

While we were eating our lunch in the shade we were attacked by the biggest bees? hornets? wasps? I have ever seen. Aggressive buggers. Ellen was their particular favorite and she ended up abandoning her lunch and fleeing back inside. Our lunch cut short, we took a quick photo with Inês and Katherine and headed off.

Tonight we’re staying at Casa As Bentinas in O Milladoiro, pretty much a suburb of Santiago. Tomorrow we’ll only walk 6-7k though I hear it’s mostly uphill. We were pretty beat when we got here shortly after 3:00 so it was a good decision for us not to push for Santiago as so many others did. Walking 25+k with a long climb at the end would be unpleasant.

Since Casa as Bentinas is another « casa rurale» (owned, as it happens , by the same guy as last night’s Casa Meixida 🫤) we’re a bit off the Camino and there’s not much nearby. I had just enough energy left to walk 15 minutes to a grocery store in town to grab the usual ingredients for a picnic dinner.

I’ve had a nice hot shower and picked out my outfit for tomorrow, basically whatever I didn’t wear today. Such a simple existence. We get to sleep in a bit tomorrow but hope to be in Santiago in time for the noon pilgrim mass.

Or perhaps I’ll hit the snooze button one more time.Read more