Life's a Stitch

Cluelessly we took an early bus back to Santiago. Clueless as we thought we were trying to get to the airport for a 5:00 flight and we weren't aware that the bus wasn't an express. Both errors worked out well as the bus took the beautiful coastal route and arrived in plenty of time to enjoy the city in the sunshine.

We had our last lunch as pilgrims in our favourite restaurant where we said goodbye to Denise and Greg last week. Then we hit our regular bar for a Serrano ham bocadillo-to-go and a huge hunk of chocolate chip cake to take with us for dinner on the plane.

At the airport it's easy to recognize flight bound pilgrims in their uniforms – zip off pants and quick dry t-shirts. We're all experiencing the shock of re-entry back into a fast and noisy world.

There were fascinating realistic miniature replicas of Santiago long ago and the cathedral.

If we wanted to we could photoshop ourselves in and replicate our arrival sans scaffolding.

Keeping costs down, we're at an "A" for adequate hotel in the city with a cruise terminal/water view within walking distance to the city and beach. The nice woman at the desk gave us their best view room knowing we were in Camino recovery mode. Yes, the view is nice but the noise of traffic and the city will take some getting used to. I'm missing my donkey and roosters.

You might ask what's walking distance after walking 20k per day? C jokes that after walking for 750k, sometime I'm going to say I'm going out for a walk, and he won't see me for a few days. In this case we have about an hour's radius as our target for exploration. We'll also do some hop on hop off bus touring.

The cab driver, seeing our back packs and poles, told us she had done two sections of the Camino. Then, from what I could get from her Spanish, she has friends who have done many pilgrimages, that walking has become their full time occupation. I really enjoyed it but my toes are not ready for that!

Tomorrow I'll post what we carried in our packs that we couldn't live without. If you have to live with only 15lbs of stuff, what would you choose to carry?