Life's a Stitch

24.4k

You might notice that there is no post for the section from Betanzos to Hospital de Bruma. As we need to arrive in Santiago tomorrow, we skipped a stage via cab. It was a section with an elevation gain of 673 meters and a length of 25k. 

So we started with a morning that was cloudy and chilly.

It was mostly an area of farming. We passed a house with a combination mail and bread delivery box. What a luxury to have fresh good bread delivered.

It felt as though we were walking through Old MacDonald’s farm. There were ducks, chickens, and horses. Cows:

Sheep:

And Old MacDonald himself. We had a very interesting conversation with a farmer. He lived in England for 20 years, so his English was good. An older gentleman, he was lamenting the death of the small farms and villages. He explained that his mother raised ten children here with no electricity or plumbing in a 200 year old house. He showed us the creek where she did the laundry by hand. His main point was that they were very happy. Then modern times encroached and people started leaving the area to pursue other lives and the houses and farms are left to die. He was sad about the future of the area. Chuck and the farmer:

We’ve seen some strange things on our Caminos. The two that stick out were sculptures of giant ants and churches with statues of Jesus with real human hair. This time it was a gruesome human eating dinosaur:

It’s boar hunting season in Galicia. We heard the gunshots and saw the vehicles with the dogs. You can only see one sweet dog face in the truck. There were several snarling hounds in there, ready for the hunt.

We spent some time with a man with his own pack of dogs. 

 

He explained in Galician (did you know that Spain has five official regional languages, not dialects of Spanish?), that he takes the dogs up the mountain for hunting. It takes more patience with us when someone speaks Galician, but I understood when he told us to wait because he wanted to give us apples to eat on our way. He brought us a bagful.

Our feet are sore today. I think it’s a combination of walking on pavement and marbles aka millions of acorns and chestnuts.

 

Maybe the reason it took us seven hours to get to our destination was the amount of time we spent looking for mushrooms. Just maybe. 

We found a few porcini and luckily enough, our alburgue has a shared kitchen with an oven where we were able to dry them.

it’s our last night on this segment of the Camino. Tomorrow it’s on to Santiago with 2.5cms (1”) of rain predicted. We’ll finish the way we began in Porto, Portugal.