The Rain in Spain

One of the things you read online when preparing for the Camino is, "it's gonna rain in Galicia". While we had, overall, some truly incredible luck with the weather on this Camino, this was the day that proved true.


We had breakfast at our albergue, a collection of things we'd bought at the store yesterday and things from the attached bar. Then it was time to hit the road. It was so nice to finally be walking with other people again, that I almost didn't mind when it started to rain. We saw some salamanders on the road, and spent some time trying to guess what the purpose of a structure we'd been seeing since we entered Galicia was.

(We later found out that it is a hórreo, a Galician granary which has become a cultural symbol.)

At lunch time we had made it to one of the larger cities for the day, and, following the advice of one of our friends from earlier on the trail, skipped the first few restaurants we saw. It's not a hard and fast rule, but generally speaking the first restaurants will have either higher prices or worse food, since they can count on hungry people simply stopping as soon as they see food. In this case, it steered us very right, as we found a restaurant with real sandwiches, the kind that came on sliced bread and contained more than one ingredient, and churros. This was exactly what we needed after a long, rainy walk in the morning, and it perked us back up.

(Not a bocadillo! Ignore the bite; I was too hungry to remember to take a photo first.)

When we set back out, the sun had come out, and the world seemed much warmer and more pleasant than before we stopped. The rest of the day was mostly uneventful, though we did pass the 50km milemarker, and soon we got to our albergue. This evening we were booked in a tiny village about a kilometer outside of a larger town, consisting of three albergues and one restaurant. We settled in, and the lady at the desk even gave us our own room since she saw we were traveling as a group, which made for much more pleasant sleep that night.


I crashed for most of the evening, since this was my first shorter day and I was still pretty exhausted. Then, once it was dinner time, we all went over to the restaurant and got some food, which was quite good and had very generous portions. I also drank nearly 2 liters of water, suggesting that I had not drank enough the past few days. Whoops.


After dinner and conversation, we headed back to our room and all went to sleep.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Camino Packing List

Image
Hello, everyone! Thanks for checking out my travel blog. :) I'm going to discuss briefly what I plan to do on this blog, and then below that I'll cover my initial packing setup for the Camino. First, about the blog. I'm going to try to write a blog post every day, as a way for me to both record memories and share my trip with friends and family. I'll try to include photos as well, since I know some folks especially want to see those. Some days might be pretty short, though! Now, as for my packing. Here's what I packed! But since that's a little hard to see, I've also made an annotated version: 1) Rain cover. Since I'm going in October, there's a good chance of rain along parts of the route, and this will keep my pack dry(er). 2) Puffy blanket. This is a bit of a splurge in terms of weight and size, but since Octobers can get cold and I don't enjoy sleeping while I'm chilly, I decided to bring a packable blanket. 3) My ...
Read more

Arrival in Spain

Image
And we're off! I have officially landed in Spain, and am on my way up to the start of the Camino. I've got some time on the train, so I figured I'd write this blog post a bit early today, and talk about the flight, my arrival, and my first impressions of Spain. My flight was extremely uneventful. It was a red-eye, leaving around 10:00 PM New York time and getting to Spain seven hours later at around 11:00 AM Madrid time. (The mathematically inclined among you may have already calculated the time difference between NYC and Madrid from this, but for those who don't want to do the calculations, it was a six hour time difference.) We were served a meal about a little over an hour into the flight, meaning that we had dinner at either 11:30 PM New York time, or 5:30 AM Madrid time — neither of those make a ton of sense, but the food was good! Some surprisingly well-cooked chicken over fried rice. Certainly better than I'd expected, given that I chose a somewhat budget air...
Read more

Settling In

Image
Starting off today was bittersweet, as we said goodbye to two of our friends before even leaving for the road this morning. It was lovely to have met them, but very sad to see them go so soon. One of the things that seems to be a constant on the Camino is that things come and go, and you never know which will stay, which you will end up meeting again later, and which are only crossing your path briefly. After a lot of the rest of the group did an early-morning yoga session and I dealt with some bank nonsense, we headed off. Today's hike was probably the first time things have started to feel routine. We were all pretty familiar with the rhythm of hiking and talking, grabbing lunch at a cafe, hiking and talking some more, maybe stopping at some historic sights or churches, and then checking in to our albergue for the evening. Today largely followed that pattern, and it was nice to feel that, while the details were still a mystery, we could all relax into the overall form of the day....
Read more