Ourense

After a good sleep I woke just before Mirjam got up and prepared to leave, I was sad to be saying goodbye to her today knowing that I would not see her until she returned to Santiago from Finisterre on the 12th. We have planned an evening meal with everyone in our little group on Santiago for the 13th of June, it will be great to have everyone together.

The ladies were going to the sulphur baths and I did some sightseeing, I went out to the cathedral to get my credential stamped and whilst I was there I did the tour. It was interesting but to be honest not much different from every other cathedral I had ever visited. After my experience in Salamanca I couldn't help but see it as another cultural relic of Christendom dependant upon the secular world for survival. I went to see the cloisters of St Francis as much for the walk as anything else, but there was not much to see, you could walk around it and take a few photos but there wasn't much to it. However, they also had a museum there telling some of the history of the city, and that was quite interesting.

Mirjam sent back word that there were very many more peregrinos on the camino, but that was expected. In order to get a Compostela you only have to walk the last 100km and Ourense is 110 km from Santiago and so many people start their camino here. She also said that she had gone the right hand route, which is very slightly less steep, and that was the route we had also decided to go in the morning. Meg had organised for two of our bags to be transported to our next albergue, and as mine was the biggest bag, I shared it with Anita. I went out to Decathlon and bought a 20L daypack for only 10€ and put all the stuff I needed for the day in it. The walk that day was so much easier for all of us that we decided to have our bags transported each day until we got to Santiago.

I decided not to go out for dinner with the girls, I had had some pizza for lunch and wasn't really hungry, and I wanted to do some admin type stuff anyway and spend time reflecting on my camino so far and how I thought it had changed me. As Socrates is reported to have said at his trial, "the unexamined life is not worth living."

I really enjoyed our time in Ourense. It was great to have some time to do tourist type things, and to get some much needed supplies, best of all it was great to spend quality time with Meg, Kathleen and Anita, to see Julia and Guillermo and Mirjam, and to my great joy, by a random chance, I met Anne in the street, we didn't have long to chat but it was such a delight. She had been busy with university stuff and so was booked into a place with good wifi, so it was a wonderful and unexpected meeting. Much as it is a beautiful and interesting city, for me, those moments were the best thing about Oursense.Read more