October 6, 2014 – The Way-Slow Way

Wifi Sometimes Won’t

Charlie. There seems to be more wifi access on the Camino this year than in 2013. Just about every bar, hotel and albergue has it. Since I am taking photos of markers I have a lot of photos to upload, far too much for the 1.6 GB of phone data we have. It takes an hour or two to upload the photos each day.

All this wifi creates a naming problem. Sometimes it is the name of the bar or hotel. Sometimes it is something like ORANGE_74AF presumably the factory set name.

The password is given to anyone who comes in and is often posted on the wall. I have seen: 1234567890123, 0123456789, 123456 and others like that. Here at the Albergue El Puntido it is “elpuntido” the most common convention.

In the last place we had the slowest I have ever seen. A photo that normally downloads in a minute took over an hour. Tonight we have the fastest one we’ve seen.

Mostly the wifi is slow and the signal weak. Often it is not usable in the room only in the common areas.

Mobile data is okay in most places, sometimes 4G, usually 2G, sometimes worse or nonexistent.

The Meseta has been bad for data and even phone service. We had to use a landline pay phone here in Hontanas to make a reservation for tomorrow.

Dueling Albergues

Charlie. Wynette read in an albergue review about a woman yelling at a pilgrim because they stayed at a private albergue in Rabé instead of the municipal one and that they weren’t a real pilgrim and that her albergue was open to everyone.

We got to Rabé and had a reservation at the private albergue. Walking back to the bar we passed the municipal albergue shown above and asked the woman sitting there where the bar was. She started talking about how her albergue was open to everyone and essentially she said her pilgrims were truer. She mentioned how the bar was owned by the brother of the woman who owned the private albergue. She wasn’t yelling but we think it might be the same woman.

Later we were talking to a Swedish woman we had met before (shown below)

and she said someone in our albergue, the private one, had told her that they had first gone to the municipal albergue and the woman had questioned her for half an hour before letting her into the albergue and she had fled to the private one. So the Albergue manager seems to be a strange one.

The day before we met our “angel” of the Camino (previous post) she had also warned us about the private albergue in Rabé and how true pilgrims didn’t stay there and the municipal was open to everyone.

So something is going on here. Some kind of feud between albergues in Rabé.

As we were walking into Rabé we asked a guy how to get to our albergue and he said his sister Tina ran it and took us there. He looked like a guy who ran the bar in Rabé that we had seen on our previous trip. We asked Tina if her brother owned the bar and she said yes. On going to the bar we found and see the guy who was the one we remembered but not the one who directed us. So Tina has two brothers and they own the Albergue and the bar and maybe are some kind of local mafia and that is part of the feud.

Anyway lots going on in Rabé.

Dinner at 8?

Charlie. Okay this is really breakfast the next morning in the Rabé albergue. And the pilgrim in the center has a WTF attitude about being photographed. But let me get to the point.

We have noted before that the Spanish eat really, really late. Along the Camino they cater to the pilgrims who get up early and pilgrim’s menus are usually at 7pm, sometimes 7:30. But Tina gave us the option to eat at 6 and we grabbed it. Only four of us ate at 6, the other dozen pilgrims ate at 7.

Then last night in Hornillos the bar started dinner at 6 too. We were the only ones there until 6:20.

Albergue in Rabé

Charlie and Wynette. In Rabé de las Calzadas we stayed in Albergue Liberanos Domine. (Front of albergue shown previous post.) Our room above. Here is the room from the other direction.

It was a room for four that she let us have to ourselves. An albergue so no top sheets or towels and bathroom down the hall but it was nice. Who is “she”? That would be Tina or Tinín.