Life's a Stitch

22k of peaceful hiking, we found the solution to avoiding the crowds:
1. If you must stay in towns at the end of a stage in the popular Brierly guide, leave late. It seems most groups leave at 8:00 or 9:00a.m.
2. Even better, stay at a town located at the midpoint between the beginning and end of a particular stage.

The second strategy worked like a charm today. We left at 8:30 and had the trail mostly to ourselves. We walked through eucalyptus trees and found a giant shell marking our way.

We happened upon a large group praying together. As we approached they parted, allowing us through. We agreed that we could feel their positive Camino energy as we walked through their prayer tunnel. We'll take whatever help we can get.

Arriving at Melide, another Camino surprise. We booked into what we heard was a four bedroom house with a shared bathroom. Sometimes 35e will get you a damp room with lots of flies, today we found this treasure with a pool. OK, it wasn't swimmable, but far better than an ice pack on the foot.

Melide is famous for its pulpo (octopus). Joining our friends (Denise from West Van, her brother Greg from Australia and Pat from Colorado), we gave it a try.

It was good, a little fattier than I expected, but truthfully I'd rather have calamari.

The 50k marker awaits us in the morning.

We left Portomarin, crossing a bridge further up the river, revealing more of the landscape of the previous town.

Despite the uphills, cold rain and the noise of hundreds of pilgrims, it was a satisfying walk through a lush temperate rain forest climate similar to North Vancouver's, but with mostly deciduous trees.

We joked:
What's worse than walking uphill on the Camino? Walking uphill on the Camino in the rain.

What's worse than walking uphill on the Camino in the rain? Walking uphill on the Camino in the rain on the side of a busy road.

What's worse than walking uphill on the Camino in the rain on the side of a busy road? Walking uphill on the Camino in the rain on the side of a busy road amongst hundreds of people.

What's worse than walking uphill on the Camino in the rain on the side of a busy road amongst hundreds of people? Walking uphill on the Camino in the rain on the side of a busy road amongst hundreds of people and the guy in front of you is blasting music from his phone.

But the Camino has a way of putting things into perspective. Along came a man assisting a woman with her wheel chair on the wet muddy Camino:

We passed several large school groups. At home our kid's class trip was to outdoor school, here it's to the Camino. I bet they come home exhausted.

We've walked in and out of seasons to land in autumn in all of its colours:

One of six varieties of mushrooms we saw today:

Four more days and our Camino walking will be over. They say though, that our Camino will just be beginning as we incorporate our pilgrimage lessons into our life at home.

It's not the same Camino experience once you hit the 100k marker. The trail is now marked every .5k, a concrete countdown back to reality.

I was doing my best to stall and enjoy every last moment. C hit a grumpy patch, annoyed with the number of people, particularly the cyclists. In the previous sections there were times we would be walking alone, but most commonly we could count six pilgrims in front and behind us. Today there was a steady stream.

We passed by many farms and I admit that I've taken too many photos of cows. C likes to remind me that we have cows in Canada, but who can resist a face and a setting like this:

Our lunch break was at an oasis playing new agey music, where we joined our horse riding friends and met this sweet dog, caught halfway through a vigorous tail wag, who was more cooperative than the last one I attempted to photograph.

I know, we have dogs in Canada, too.

This is not the family mausoleum, but the area's unique grain storage sheds I had read about, designed to keep pests out.

Today's walk was along farmland right to the edge of Portomarin, where a tall bridge towers over the ancient Roman one. The funny thing is that the Roman bridge is only visible in seasons when the water level from the dam is low. Then other parts of the city prior to the flooding are apparent. Before the valley was flooded, important historical buildings were moved to the higher location, brick by brick.

Once again we are staying in a hostel over a bar in the next town over, as Portomarin was fully booked. The room is to the left of adequate, damp and worn, with a fair amount of flies. It's only for a night.

It's a holiday weekend here and there is a happily loud crowd in the bar below. I wonder how late it will go. Uh oh, they've just started to sing.

AKA, the day of the non walking wounded. The Camino is full of inspirational messages.

Pain is part of the Camino. The relentless walking takes its toll on the body: tendinitis, blisters, which thankfully for the most part we've avoided, bursitis, burning knees and fall injuries.

Resigned to our real rest day, we positioned ourselves to watch the pilgrim parade passing by. There came the Chicago duo, admirably continuing their Camino after his fall on the fourth day, arm casted and slinged.

Next arrived our Vancouver horse riding partner and her brother from Australia. She had visited the same clinic as I and received a diagnosis of tendinitis in her shoulder, requiring a rest. Luckily there were two beds available and they've joined us at Club Camino. OK I wasn't going to say anything, but this place in the middle of nowhere, is more like a mini resort. And only 45e per night!

The massage therapist came to work on me at 4:00 pm. Now that was an interesting experience. There was a little shed on the property reminiscent of a small shipping container. Unheated, there was a massage table covered with cold paper sheeting. None of the discrete draping we're used to. I'm still glad I did it but am looking forward to the Canadian version I'm accustomed to.

These are the pictures pilgrims are not supposed to send home.

The banquet room was prepared for a large family reception. Notice the interesting collection of sewing machines decorating the wall.

At lunch C was hesitant to order a beer because he hadn't earned it. So we pretended we were taking vacation time from the work of the Camino and indulged ourselves.

Another day of pastoral beauty in the sunshine into the city of Sarria, which marks the beginning of the home stretch, the last 100k of the Camino de Santiago.

Along the way we met a local donkey, a gentle docile soul used to pats and treats from passing peregrinos.

We passed the cabbage variety grown in Gallecia. Instead of in heads the leaves grow up a stalk.

We entered Sarria sadly knowing that the feel of the Camino would be changing. This is the last point where you can start and still earn your Compestela. There are hoards of shiny clean pilgrims decked out with brand new gear. I saw a group of Japanese women who, after attaching their scallop shells to their day packs, applied a fresh coat of makeup.

I stopped into the clinic to have my foot checked out and was prescribed ice, anti-inflammatories and rest. Another way in which the Camino parallels life is in my difficulty in slowing down, but I knew the doctor was right.

Following an impressive 1.5k hill, which will forever change my perceptions of uphill trails back home, we checked into a nice little pension for two nights, meeting up with old Camino friends and new. The dinner table had representation from South Africa, Switzerland, the U.S., Cyprus and Canada. The night's party bordered on sacrilegious having been introduced to the local painkilling herbal fire water.

Every country has its Akvavit. Skoal!

The afternoon of our 37th day lead us through mossy tree tunnels with the sounds of birds and the water in a brook below the path.

It was a long day. I told C that walking 20k with one painful foot only equals 10k of pain, but my patience was wearing thin when he told me that the guidebook said we had another 4k left instead of the 1k I was expecting. I am sure we are not the only Camino couple subjected to a Brierly induced spat. Reality was on my side and 1k later we descended to Samos, home to a Benedictine monastery.

The monastery tour was lead by one of the ten residing monks, the youngest age 26 and the eldest 88. The complicating factor was the tour was only offered in Spanish and French. The guide monk was a comedian by nature, his jokes somehow lost in the slowness of our translation abilities.

In 1951 there was a fire, a common occurrence in these historical buildings, this one caused by an explosion in the monk's distillery. Artists in the 50's and 60's donated their talent and time to replace historical frescos, substituting some of the saintly figures with Hollywood icons such as Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren:

We retreated back to our better than adequate accommodation, which by the way, cost less than last night's less than adequate room, but hey, this is a pilgrimage requiring sacrifice, not a vacation.

Our last glimpse of the monastery toward sunset:

Galicia in the sunshine is a place of indescribable beauty. There was almost too much to take in for one day. The morning's views were green valley vistas, the mist settling in the distance.

I was thinking of other scenes of Camino beauty and the rainbows of the other day came to mind. I realized that this experience is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and how fortunate we are to be doing this together. And just then the Camino gave me one of its quirky coincidences, our initials together with the scallop shell on a sign:

A short time later, after an absence of many days, Naomi's name appeared again on an old wooden gate.

Although we had a lazy 9:30 morning start, the shadows were still good for pictures, this one looking like a pilgrim of old:

Our walk brought us to the pastures of the bottom of the valley:

We walked past an 800 year old chestnut tree providing nuts to the villagers for over three quarters of a century.

Mobile blogging lets me post about four or five pictures, so stay tuned for the afternoon of Day 37 tomorrow.

Oh that Brierly Guide! All pilgrims who use it will tell you their annoyance with the incline charts, and even the narrative stating hills so small they won't be noticed. Anyone can tell by the scenery that's it's impossible to go anywhere without tremendous ups and downs. So up and down we went. The occasional difficulty of the afternoon was surpassed by the beauty of the surroundings.

We saw a woman on the trail who appeared to be having great difficulty. We're guessing her to be about 75 in obvious distress, with seriously swollen ankles, carrying a huge heavy pack. We learned of her Camino reputation, that if approached, she would snarl "keep your distance!" So I bade her Buen Camino and kept going, hoping we wouldn't hear of her demise en route. Maybe that was her desire. We later heard that her day's destination was a town appropriately named Hospital.

After a very steep incline not mentioned by Brierly, we arrived in O Poio, a town of two buildings. The accommodation included something akin to the lodge from the movie 'the Shining' and an alburgue that the Shining lodge operator informed us was full of chinches (bedbugs) and cukarochas (no translation needed).

We chose the former although the ground floor looked as if it hadn't been swept in years. There was a promising sign on the building that breakfast was their especialidad. The owner informed us that dinner would be served at 7:00. It was not as if we had a choice.

Prior to the Camino I read many books in preparation. Just before our departure a high school classmate recommended "Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons From the Camino" by Sister Joyce Rupp. She puts into perspective each challenge met on the Camino: hunger, pain, disappointment, travelling with others and many more. Tonight was an opportunity to practice a few of her lessons.

I retreated to the room for a sort of hot shower while C elected to warm up in his own manner. The actual texts sent to each other are as follows:
Chuck: How bizarre is this? I am sitting in total quiet on a mountain top in Spain smoking a Cuban cigar and drinking cognac?
Li: I am shivering in a room on a mountaintop in Spain with my gloves on. How bizarre is that? How about checking if we can get some heat?

My good spouse eventually left his perch on a beautiful mountaintop:

and managed to get the heat turned on in the room for a couple of hours and I shed the gloves in time for dinner.

The meal approached with trepidation, was amazingly good, cooked solely by the pension operator. Caldo Gallego, was followed by a saut��ed pork chop, boiled potatoes and a mound of delicious cabbage topped with a fried egg. So dessert was only canned peaches, but they were pretty good as well. Here is our innkeeper, cook, but obviously not a floor sweeper, with half a Rhode Island pilgrim couple we've met in recent days, another Hemmingway lookalike.

A very full 25k day, 10 on horseback. Starting in the dark, walking through sunrise, we arrived to meet our guide who would take us to O Cebriero, a Gallecian town steeped in Celtic history.

Seven of us, three coincidentally from Vancouver's North Shore, rode up the steep mountain over pavement, Roman roads, shale and rocky dirt paths, the guide all the while holding onto a horse's tail. Can you imagine the shape that guy is in hiking up to O Cebriero twice per day?

Those ears belong to my sweet horse named Moracita, which translated to Little Blackberry. And here is our shadow:

It took us two hours by horse, and it appeared most people walked up in about 2.5 hours leading us to believe it was not as difficult as legend makes it out to be, but happy to have chosen the horse option for the ability to take in the magnificent scenery.

The mountainside was plucked right from the Sound of Music where you'd expect the dimpled and wimpled Maria Von Trapp, in her convent days, to emerge from the trees and burst into song.

The town O Cebriero was out of any storybook, all stone and thatch with Celtic music in the background. There was no bagpiper as we've read about. Must have been his day off. There was a different form of hobbit type house built into the side of the hills, pallozas, in which locals lived until the 1960's. An early form of split level, the families lived in the upper parts and the animals in the lower, providing the warmth of their body heat.

Taking a break we warmed up with a bowl of Caldo Gallego, the regional soup made of cabbage and potato, very satisfying on a cool mountain afternoon.

Reaching the end of my posting-by-email size limit, I'll continue this tomorrow.

We spent the morning chasing rainbows:

This storm defied Accuweather, re-energizing itself again and again, dumping buckets of rain on our sorry peregrino heads. I've succeeded in keeping dry and happy from the waist down, but I have to work on the upper half. Stopping for lunch, even my bra was drenched. My poncho seems to behave like a wet tent, forming droplets of water on the inside.

Wonder what pilgrims look like in the rain? Multicoloured hunchbacks:

We parked ourselves at a bar for a lunch long enough to dry out the poncho. Two beers, two glasses of wine, a non alcohol cider, a diet coke and a sautéed pork loin and pimento sandwich big enough for two cost 12e ($18 Cdn). We're constantly saying "can you imagine how much that would cost in Canada?"

Arriving at our "pension" Casa Fernandez in Vega de Valcarce, we're finding that 30e buys a less than adequate accommodation meaning one bathroom for nine rooms. There appear to be four spares two floors down, outside the bunk room. I've noted that in case of emergency. One thing going for it are the amazingly comfortable memory foam mattresses.

Vega del Valcarce is an idyllic mountain town, but the European Union brought progress to Spain in the form of new superhighways. C says he wants to be nowhere near these structures during an earthquake.

Tomorrow we're faced with what is known as the hardest day on the Camino, the 700 meter climb up O'Cebriero. There is a general nervousness amongst the pilgrims, like a group of mothers-to-be awaiting their turn at induced labour. I'm opting for the c-section. C as in caballo (horse). Seriously, I'm choosing a wee bit of apprehension over a lot of pain. In reality it will be substituting one pain for another. The last time I was on a horse was a couple of years ago and as I remember, it involved an entirely different muscle set than used in hiking. Bring on the Voltarin cream!