Grandas de Salime

Day 29
Started in grey and wet bluster with lots of complaints from the walkers but none of them from my mouth! I love weather. I love the changeability of temperature, atmosphere ... of the feel, the challenge of it all. And it really really helps that I have great kit ... I even sang a little song to my super storm umbrella.

Stumbled across a friendly Italian gent, Eduardo, while he was sheltering from the rain under the decrepit roof of the porch of a tiny chapel, and we walked most of the way together. He's carrying his tent and everything, impressively for a 73 year old, and - can you imagine - even including 'Prince of Wales' tea, which he then provided for me in his billy can at a little lunch stop we made. And he generously granted me a sliver of his precious parmigiano reggiano, brought with him from Italy and obviously the biggest treat of his hike! All I could offer him was black chocolate.
Yes, he's smelling the moss (see pic). I like weird.

A short day, 17km, essentially one huge up and one long down, followed by a little up-down. Now you know. All remote. The reservoir is (or was) the biggest in Europe, Eduardo told me, built in 1948, and villages up and down the valley had to be lost to the water. Isn't it a remarkable decision to do this? A bit like the HS2 project, at least for those who lose their homes, but there's something that feels really ancient and archetypal about it, intriguing, haunting, romantic even.

Joy (China/ London) shared a room with me at the monastery on Day 12; she just turned up at this hostel. Surprise!
Everyone else seems to be new. I find that also surprising, almost more so: I might meet no-one all day, or, as today, leapfrog many others (Danish, today, for the first time, and Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, don't know what else), but there must be a finite number of people out there!
There's just one week left of the usual 'stages', the last 160km or so before Santiago, and I've been planning accommodation a bit more in advance than up till now. We will join the French Camino for two or three days at the end, which will be very interesting and, according to the talk on the ground, possibly awful. There could be several hundred or more pilgrims in any one town, some of whom will have walked a similar distance to me, from St Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees, but others only the last 100km, which is the distance that justifies receiving the Compostela certificate from the Cathedral. We will all be wanting a bed, and food, at the same time!

My application for Italian citizenship has at last at last at laaaaaaaaast been accepted, after months of hassle and anxiety about all the hoops to be jumped through, and the documentation required. I've had to deal with additional elements of it several times in the last month, for hours in fact, on the road, when I was wishing I could be paying attention to nature and beauty and la-la-la ... as you do, on the Camino. (Thank you Luca for all your patient help). One of these days I shall be accepted as an Italian/and therefore also as a European. That day there will be beers all round, whoever I'm with!Les mer