Life's a Stitch

13.8 including 1.8k diversion to a grocery store.

This day was the most challenging yet, at least for me. At 2:30 a.m. it hit. Major GI disturbance plus a fever, which lasted all night long. I was torn – take a cab to the next destination or attempt the walk.

C made sure that we could stay until the later checkout time of noon and was sent back to our “stall” with lemon verbena tea. I went back to bed with some Tylenol, which brought down the fever, and some other appropriate meds.

I thought of the two pieces of advice KC, my SIL, gave us before this Camino. When faced with tough times you can ask yourself what a pilgrim would do and if the going gets really tough everything is solvable by going a bit above budget. At 11:30 I elected to be a brave pilgrim knowing we would be going through several villages where I might be able to call a cab.

One guide book described this as the most beautiful point on this Camino and I couldn’t bear to miss it. C slowed his pace for me. I was so relieved we scheduled a rest day tomorrow in Ponte de Lima. Initially I thought it was too soon to have one after only five days.

It lived up to its reputation.

On the Camino, the sight of mountains in the distance gives you that uh-oh feeling. You squint your eyes looking for the tracing of a vertical trail populated with what looks like ants going upward, really pilgrims in the distance. Looking on our map there is a steep climb in our near future. 

it was a relaxing trek past cornfields, vineyards, olive and walnut groves, the only traffic was the occasional farm tractor and trailer filled with vats of grapes.

And there were mushrooms! If I wasn’t so sick to my stomach and if I knew we had kitchen privileges in the next town, we might have picked some of the puffballs. There was also chicken of the woods, but it was beyond its prime. This is a picture Marcus took yesterday.

The presence of St. James, the namesake of the Camino  de Santiago, appeared regularly.

We arrived in Ponte de Lima at our guesthouse, an old two story stone building about the size of a school with 20 classrooms. A wing has been converted to five guest rooms, but we had it all to ourselves.

Tomorrow is a much needed rest day.