Alameda Park

Waking up on Sunday, I had one foot in and one foot out of the pilgrim experience. I was in a bunk bed, but I wasn't walking today. I had to get out by eight, but my Compostela was now amongst the things I needed to pack up. I was finished, but I needed to walk the last four kilometres of it again to get to the bus station. Some are in the same boat, some are continuing on to Finisterre. What do we say now? Buen life!

She's very misty and atmospheric today, could not see more than 50m ahead which frankly wasn't a bad thing in this strange communist youth camp the albergue is part of. The complex has wifi in two areas, the reception and the bar I was in last night. I beelined for the latter, excited to spend my first morning off slow with a coffee but NO it was closed. Out of the fog I spied another door - yep, there's a dining hall of course there is, they were probably all in here last night eating a good dinner when I was eating my anticlimactic BAR BREAD.

Talking to myself was an issue before the trip but it's really been allowed to set down roots over the last thousand ks, so I made the mundane observation to myself that there's a bit going on here, and joined a queue. It was cafeteria style, sliding your tray along and putting what you wanted on it, and in all the American highschool movies I'VE seen, you pay the mean lunchlady with the dry sense of humour at the end.

When this didn't happen, and the bench I was sliding my tray along just ended, I looked around furtively and went and sat at a table. Maybe we pay when we leave? I chewed and watched, the chewing slowing as I realised this might be free. I don't think it was supposed to be, I think I just missed a crucial step by mistake, but in the spirit of no private property and workers rights I didn't bother to correct it. Branna called this character growth. I call it the juncture we'll all point to in a year when I'm in jail, because I also nicked a bunch of stuff for later. Next stop, face tattoo.

My bus wasn't until 7pm so I mooched around SdC until 11.30am before heading to the Cathedral for mass (see separate post). Resuming my mooch afterwards my jaw dropped to see Matt sitting outside a cafe. He's a great bloke keen readers will remember from Ages Ago and we'd sort of loosely discussed cycling across the Meseta, which didn't happen. He's a fancy pants and only stays in hotels so between that and the fact that I assumed he'd cycled what I'd walked, I firmly believed I'd never see him again.

I joined him and Rachel, who he'd met and walked with in the last few kilometres, for one of the best conversations of the whole Camino over the next two hours. Today was truly a litany of things going wrong/falling through/being harder than necessary and in many ways hanging around SdC until 7pm was a source of frustration but in the big scheme of things, it made this wonderful, spontaneous, open connection possible and for that it was all worth it. There are no coincidences on Camino.

We split in three different directions - Matt to the 5-star hotel in the cathedral plaza (of course), Rachel to scope out the next mass, and me to KFC. I will not be taking feedback at this time.

What followed was five hours of cock up after cock up I will be detailing in my whinge file so as to not tarnish this account or scare mum. The headline is, I laid down my head in Braga, Portugal, ready to start the next phase.Leia mais