It rains in Galicia, but not all the time

After walking for all these days, I have become easy to please. Yesterday it was a great pleasure to simply be out of the rain.

I stopped early, in Sarria. I should say "we," since my decision making had become a group matter. Ben and Rachael and Mandy and I agreed that it would be good to stay at the O Durmiento albergue (privado, which in this case means fancy), and to stay together. Once up in our two bunkbed room, we all took off our wet gear, and Rachael and Mandy were content to crawl in their sleeping bags to warm up. I took a hot shower, which worked the same magic. Then I sat on the floor in the room and we talked and napped and read through much of the afternoon. To be dry and warm, to have a bed, and to have companionship--that was pretty good.

Later I went out into the city to walk around, to see the sights, to find a ciber cafe, to visit a grocery store. I came across Rachael, and we soon met up with Mandy for dinner, in a small stone restaurant. When Rachael said to the waitress "vegetariano?" (referring to her food wishes) the woman simply shook her head. Usually there´s at least some attempt to negotiate a solution. Rachael settled for fish. I had chicken with the inevitable french fries. Pretty good, not fabulous. The red wine was served at room temperature--an oddity, since it´s almost always brought to the table in a chilled bottle.

This morning I left Sarria at six with Rachael, and we walked through the dark city to the top of a hill where a stone church was illuminated by floodlights. The morning walk was one of the prettiest yet. The path ran along stone walls, beneath long, shady lines of big oak trees, through a hilly pastoral landscape. We passed numerous dairy cows, herds of sheep and goats, flocks of chickens. The narrow streets of the tiny villages were dotted with cow shit, but this did not detract (much) from their charm.

Mandy caught up with us and we stopped at a cafe in one of the villages so they could have coffee. By the end of the morning we reached Portomarin, a town above only the second lake on the Camino. We crossed a long bridge in the first significant rain of the day and climbed a long flight of stone steps and passed under an arch into the town. Ben had slept in at Sarria and would only be going as far as Portomarin (I expect, though, to see him again in Santiago). We only stopped for lunch--poor bocadillos quesos at a cafe on an arcade across from a large church.
We ran into Bart the Jesuit priest and he joined us for lunch.

The afternoon was long and less picturesque. Much of the path lay along paved roads. But the rain had ceased. The weather has been quite unpredictable in recent days, a mix of rain and sun and clouds, quickly changing from one to the other.

We three ended up walking 36 kilometers for the day, finishing up in a very small village, Ventas de Naron, where there were two albergues. We found that Bart had already arrived at the one we chose; but there were two separate buildings, an old and a new one. Bart was in the old one, but the woman at the attached bar offered us the new one--a yellow, parquet-floored room with six fresh bunkbeds. We ended up the only ones in the room, which was nice--and rare. Albergues are generally noisy affairs, but for two nights in a row this was not the case.

It occurred to me as I walked along today that I´ve had a number of different Caminos over the last weeks. The experience keeps changing. The last couple days I´ve been with the same people, not only at night but during the day, walking. This took a little getting used to, and I even contemplated surging foward on my own. But really I wanted to stay, and so I have.