Post by Wynette: We are on the Camino! We finished the Ruta Cantabrica about five days ago and had planned to walk beyond the Ruta, heading west, staying along the Atlantic Ocean. Lots of charming towns and beautiful coastline to explore. However, we discovered that there are not good trails for walking that part of Spain — unless you want to do some very rugged hiking. So, we were finding ourselves walking on highways. Not huge highways. Highways where a car would pass every minute or two. When there isn’t a good shoulder, that kind of walking can be tiring. You have to be on the alert all the time and also the sound of the cars gets to you. We quickly realized we didn’t want to continue doing that. So, we took a taxi to our destinations for the last two nights. (Our first taxi driver told us that it would be dangerous to walk the road he was taking us on, and the road we had earlier planned to walk.) We stayed in two lovely places and will in future posts talk about one of them in depth.
We thought we would try to do some more walking in that area but then decided “heck, let’s just start the Camino Ingles”. So this morning, we took a taxi and a bus to Ferrol where the Camino Ingles (aka “the English Camino”) begins. The bus let us off very close to the beginning of this Camino. It is the Camino the English people took historically to get to Santiago after taking an easy(?) boat ride over from England. It’s only about 110 km long (68 miles). We plan to go slow and do from 6 to 10 miles a day. We started with a bang and did 9.4 miles today. We started walking when the bus driver left us off about noon and didn’t stop once (except to run into the LIDL store for walnuts and muesli and fruit) until we got to a restaurant near our hotel for tonight.
We are very excited to be pilgrims again. To be on a walking path again. A path for walking!! A path with good markers, the lovely yellow arrows. A path that leads to Santiago.
And we are hoping we’ll have time for more blogging in the evenings now that we’ve figured out all these logistics!