Month: April 2023

Post by Wynette:

Before we left for this trip Charlie and I speculated whether we’d see lots of spring flowers. We did expect to and we have not been disappointed. I talked about the ice plant and gorse early on our trip. And we’ve seen countless azaleas and wisterias and rhododendrons in full bloom. April is a great time to be here for the flowers.

We’ve seen several domesticated plants that have escaped into the wild such as Easter lilies and nasturtiums.

We’ve posted in this blog about some beautiful home gardens we have seen. We enjoy looking into people’s yards at the flowers they are growing.

Post by Wynette:

We are enjoying being pilgrims again. Being on the Camino. Albeit a less well-known Camino. Charlie and I were talking today about how this Camino Ingles is different than we had imagined. I can’t quite describe how I imagined it but I kind of imagined it to be boring (hate to say that). But it hasn’t been. The Spanish people here, as always, are delightful. There are fascinating old houses, beautiful flowers and trees, wonderful bars and restaurants, rias to walk alongside, great hotels, charming towns. And pilgrims!

Today we counted about 30 who passed us. This was the first day we left at a popular stage beginning (Pontedeume) and a common time to leave (8:30). So, we saw more pilgrims.

So far, we’ve chatted with people from Canada (BC), Sweden, Australia, Portugal, Madrid, and Malaga (Spain).

AND, we have started to re-meet pilgrims which is always fun. We met ___ (dang, I forgot her name) yesterday at lunch time in a restaurant in Pontedeume. She is from Australia and speaks with a great accent. Then, as we were walking out of Pontedeume this morning (up a veeeeery steep hill) we heard someone say “I thought I recognized your voices.” She was standing in her hotel room, looking out the window. (Very unusual to have a room on the ground floor!). So, we chatted, of course.

Then, a few hours later, she passed us on the trail. Of course, we talked about how damn steep the trail was and how much we dreaded the sharp downhill at the end.

We are staying in Miño tonight. After we had lunch, we went to a grocery store to buy milk for tomorrow’s breakfast cereal, and, of course, there she was. She’s staying in Miño tonight, too, and in the same hotel. No doubt, we will see her again tomorrow.

And, at lunch today, we ran into the Swedish couple we had met on our first day on this Camino. We chatted with them quite a while. (Hint: they said the Swedish Krona is way down compared to the Euro and dollar and it’s a great time to travel in Sweden.) (Good timing, Ella and Grubb!) They decided to stay two nights in Miño for foot-recovery.

We were nearly finished eating when they came into the restaurant. They asked what we would recommend from the menu del dia and we recommended the green salad with fresh tomatoes, cheese, and walnuts. And the albondigas (meatballs). They were both excellent.

While we were eating, three children came in (at different times). Maybe between ages 10 and 3. Our very efficient server tended to the middle child who was fussy about something. Then the bartender picked up the 3 year old who was also fussy. Then, not long after that, the 3 children were sitting at one of the restaurant tables, with the bartender, having lunch. Meanwhile, the grandmother kept the restaurant and bar service going.

Post by Wynette:

Our favorite thing is to walk a while and then have coffee and breakfast. That worked out for us today. We had a bag of muesli and boxed milk and fruit and walnuts and bowls and spoons. All we needed was a place to eat it. (We didn’t want to eat in our hotel room before we left, as we had done the day before.) So, we packed it all up (heavy!) and planned to stop at a bar somewhere and ask if we could have our breakfast at one of their tables.

We didn’t find a bar till around 10:00. Google maps said this (photo below) would be an open bar. But, as we walked up, it didn’t look like a bar and it didn’t look open:

We ordered two cafes con leche and then asked if we could eat our picnic breakfast at the table. She said “Claro que si.” We had permission!

We drank her delicious coffee and had our delicious breakfast as we watched people come in. It was also a little tienda selling a few groceries. Quite a number of people came and went, with lots of visiting going on. The woman who served us the coffee, etc., no doubt the owner, stayed busy. I’m sure the people who lived in the neighborhood appreciated having a bar and tienda close by.

The owner was not a smiley person and I wasn’t sure she was all that happy with us being there, although she hadn’t hesitated in giving us permission to eat our own food there. (Note: there wasn’t any breakfast food on offer there as far as we could see. And there were still some other empty tables.)

But … as we were finishing up eating and starting to clean up, she came to our table and asked, with a smile, if she could wash our dishes for us. I had planned to wipe the bowls out with a napkin and wash them at our hotel later. But we accepted her offer and handed her our plastic bowls and spoons and knife and cutting board.

It was a small act of kindness that made our day.

This is the first group of pilgrims we saw on the Camino this morning. When we see people we often make up elaborate and completely fictional, stories about them. All couples do that, right? Here goes.

This photo shows less than half of the group. They were all women.

Some things to notice: the are all walking together, they all seem similar in age and general look, they all have poles in their packs, most of them have rolled up mats in their packs, their packs were small. They had pilgrim shells on their packs. Clearly this is a guided pilgrim group where you sign up for a Camino tour. They are having their luggage transferred for them. Their common bond is yoga.

We went on speculating and Wynette said if we catch up to them and they are in tree pose we could be sure we nailed it. A little while later we were looking for a bar and I speculated that we might find it full of yoga pilgrims who all wanted special herbal teas and we would not get our cafe con leche. It seems we dodged the bullet though because we went a little off the Camino and found this bar, completely free of tea-drinking yoga pilgrims on a packaged tour.

Post by Wynette:

I wrote a while back about how eucalyptus trees were introduced in Galicia in the late 1800s and they have somewhat taken over. 10% of the trees in Spain and 30% of the trees in Galicia are now eucalyptus. They out-compete the native trees and about the only plants you see growing under them is a very common fern.

Now, when I see a different kind of tree, I think “this is what the eucalyptus is replacing.” Here are some beautiful trees we have seen lately:

In our posts from O Barqueiro we had some photos of little boats that were parked in people’s yards. Most of them seemed pretty trashed and it was hard to imagine them going to sea again. Solution: saw the top off and use it to hold planters as you see here. Problem solved!

There is a system of “grand routes” in Europe with names like GR55, GR 34, etc More info here. They all have route markers that are two horizontal bars. In the photo you see blue over white. The GRs overlap with Caminos in many places, as you see here this part of the Camino Ingles is also part of the blue over white GR (I’m too lazy to look up the number) the thing that is interesting is the blue and white arrows on the sidewalk just past the sign. This is, I assume, based on the famous yellow arrows of the Camino. I have seen a lot of GR signs and this is the first one I have seen that uses this arrows thing.

Now that we’re on a regular Camino we are starting to see pilgrims, and, of course, they are passing us. We chatted with a woman from British Columbia, a couple from Sweden, and a man from Madrid.