The Most Beautiful Place I've Ever Wanted to Leave

In between the big decent from the Cruz de Ferro and the big accent to O Cebreiro the Camino passes through a beautiful valley filled with vineyards and picturesque country houses. My goal was to push as far as I could towards O Cebreiro, so that I could tackle the climb on as fresh of legs as possible the next morning.


My way out of town was pleasant, as I saw a set of very entertaining murals underneath a highway overpass, and managed to find a breakfast that was both a) not tortilla and b) full of protein, which I was still craving after the big hike yesterday. After that though, the rest of the day's walk set in.


This day was long. In fact, it felt nearly interminable. Part of this was probably so many long days in a row starting to wear on me, but part of it was also the fact that the path today seemed to wind around the rim of the valley, so that instead of feeling like I was going anywhere, it instead felt as if I was standing still and the valley was being slowly rotated before my eyes.


It was an absolutely stunning sight from every angle, and I almost felt bad for wanting it to end, but after 6 hours of looking at almost the same view, I was ready to get out of there. Fortunately, in the late afternoon, the path changed to follow a highway up along a stream into the mountains. Unfortunately, my knee started to hurt.


I had hoped to make it another 7km or so, but ultimately (though not happily) I decided to stop for the night in the next village. I found a lovely little albergue run by an Australian woman and her Spanish husband, got a shower, visited the convenience store, and read for a while before dinner. We all ate together around the table, and it was lovely to meet another group of people, though it made me sad again that I'm doing long days, and would probably not get to walk with any of them. 


We also learned at dinner how our hosts had met, and it is simply too cute of a story not to share. Several years ago, she sold her business in Australia to open an albergue. He was a guest one night, and convinced her to close up shop and accompany him to Santiago, and the rest, as they say, is history.

After dinner I went right to bed, appreciative that the time change would give me an extra hour of sleep before I tackled the climb to O Cebreiro the following day.

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