Ruta del Cantábrico, Camino do Mar, Camino Inglés
There is something special about natural arches. The kind of rock that makes up the northern coat in Spain seems to favor them.
Related to this, on the trail Wynette and I got to talking about Edward Abbey and how we didn’t know each other when we were young but we read a lot of the same books. Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” is about his time as a ranger in Arches National Park. We also read, in common but before we met, Hugh Prather and Tom Robbins.
When I took this photo the sea was about 50 feet behind me so these are oceanfront houses. I don’t really understand the long narrow yards.
There is so much oceanfront here that it doesn’t seem like oceanfront property is all that expensive. We see lots of quite modest homes right next to the water.
Mostly it made me think of the thin lots you sometimes see in New Mexico caused by multiple children inheriting the same land without the primogeniture that preserves English estates.
We love the bars in Spain. They are actually social centers and all ages are welcome. There is one on every corner in towns and all along the Caminos. There do not seem to be any chains and every bar is a little different and we are continually surprised and pleased with them. This is one where we had breakfast, our usual coffee, fried eggs and toast.
Did you ever wonder what hotels do with them? When picking up left bags we asked to use the bathroom and they let us use the staff bathroom. Voila!
We’ve written so many Camino blogs that we have to refer to posts from previous blogs. We wrote once about an apparent rule, at one point, maybe not now, that hotel rooms had to have a light over the door, presumably so you can find the door easily at night if there is a fire. The problem is the lights are bright and are hard to cover because they are high and smooth (so putting a towel over it is not an option).
We had one on our second day (in Rinlo) and it was as irritating as ever. We had a coat tree in our room so I moved it by the door and filled it with stuff to block the light.
That’s right, in order to defeat the fire safety device I put a big thing by the door that would impair our ability to exit the room if there actually was a fire.
Actually we do feel welcome and the Spanish people here couldn’t be nicer.
We posted about the chair four years ago. It is still there and still mysterious. It is a Long Beach, several miles long, named “Plaia Longara” which is not Spanish but Galician.
If you read our blog last year you may have read my screed about crosswalks in the US and Spain. It’s still all true, in Spain they stop and in Albuquerque they don’t. Spain is getting colorful with their crosswalks. And did I mention that they actually stop for you?
Correos, the Spanish mail, provides several services to pilgrims. The most useful is pack transfer along the trail. If you don’t want to carry all your stuff you can have them pick it up where you stay and transfer to the next place you are staying. You can carry a small day pack. This service is definitely in our future but for now we are still carrying all our stuff (32 pounds total for both of us).
Another service is to send a bag to the end of your walk, usually Santiago, and they’ll hold it for up to 45 days. We had things we needed only on the plane, like noise-canceling earphones, comfortable clothes, etc. so we put them in a suitcase and sent them on.
It is, for us, always a pleasure dealing with Spanish people. The Correos people we so nice and helpful. And we got a text two days later that the bag was waiting for us in Santiago. Of course, we already knew that because we had slipped an AirTag in the bag.
Our t-mobile phone plans include low-data-rate service in Europe. It is handy to have phone service right away. It is not handy to have a LOW data rate but it works for email and basic stuff. So we always get a Spanish SIM with a high data rate. We have always used Vodafone although it has issues and we think we might switch each year but but we haven’t yet. So that is an errand for the first day. Charlie switched his phone to an eSIM so he has both services. Wynette brings a back-up phone which holds the t-mobile SIM.
For some reason the prepaid plans do not include texting but we can still text on t-mobile. But just about everyone in Spain uses WhatsApp so we normally use that.