Month: April 2025

• Camino walking: As Seixas to Melide, 9.3 miles in 5:41 hours, moving 3:37
• Elevation: up 761 feet and down 1243, between 2290 and 1368 feet.
• 63 flights of stairs up.
• Last day of April and our last day on the Camino Primitivo. A fairly long day.
• Melide is where the Primitivo merges with the Frances, which is the main one and is, in some sense, THE Camino, that is, the one everyone knows and the most popular one. Most pilgrims merge into the Frances and walk the last 50-odd km to Santiago. We have been to Santiago several times and so tomorrow we take the bus to Vigo to stay for a week.
• Frances Freakout: At a bar stop today we talked with a pilgrim who said the Frances is full. He tried to get a reservation for the night every place between Melide and Santiago and everything was full. He said hundreds of pilgrims were lining up at albergues trying to get a bed for the night. We have been reading on the Camino Forum about the crowds and the “bed race” where people get up at 3-4 in the morning in order to get a bed at the end of their days walk. People walking talk of being in long lines of pilgrims.
• On the other hand we just finished the Primitivo and there were a fair number of pilgrims but not crowds in any sense and we were usually alone on the trail. Many people don’t know how many different Caminos there are.
• Last night we stayed at an albergue in As Seixas, in a small but very nice private room with private bath. There were only two other pilgrims staying there. The woman who runs the place made us a wonderful dinner with the best Gallego soup we have ever had. We ate and chatted with a man from Australia and one from Germany.
• We had another cattle incident today, our third, very low key with cattle who mainly wanted to get out to the field and start munching grass.
• Today was another very pleasant day with a lot of variety. It was kind of sad to know it was our last day but we are ready to move to our stay in Vigo.
• We finally saw some stork nests and storks, three nests at the top of the Melide Cathedral. Storks really like to next in church towers. We had been wondering where they all were.
• We see horreos, that is, corn drying structures, all over now we are in the heart of Galicia. I have dozens of pictures of them but I have talked a lot about them in previous blogs so I will refrain.

Our neighbor Brian said he was looking forward to seeing stork photos. We’ve had some great stork sightings on previous Caminos so I was pretty sure this one would be the same. I checked out every church steeple for nests, that’s the place you tend to see them, but didn’t see a single one until today, at the very end of the last day of our Camino, walking into Melide, on the church steeple here. We spotted the nests and then got out our cameras and did a zoom to enlarge and, yes!, there were storks at the nests.

So, Brian, here are the best stork photos we could come up with.

PS. We did hear some cuckoos, about 6 times. Amazing how they sound just like the clocks.

PS. I think we might be on the very edge of stork territory. There are many many storks to be seen on the Camino Frances east of here.

You may have heard on the news that there was a big power outage here yesterday. Spain and Portugal and even parts of France. The area where Charlie and I are was without power for almost 24 hours. That included virtually no cell phone service (no cell data) or wifi. So, we didn’t do any blogging last night. I wrote up some notes on my phone so will copy them here.

NOTES FROM YESTERDAY, APRIL 28:

Charlie and I both agreed that today was the most boring walking day on the trip so far. 90% of it was along a small paved road with no shoulder. Very little traffic but enough that we couldn’t let down our guard. We did walk through a couple of tiny sweet villages and lots of farm country (wheat?). A few cows. A couple of horses. A cat. No places to stop for food or coffee or bathroom. It could have been worse. E.g., urban industrial. We’ve been lucky to be able to avoid that on this Camino, so we are spoiled.

The boredom turned to intrigue and disruption of our firmly established routine when we arrived at our place for tonight, a really nice tourist apartment (Apartamentos de San Roman), and our proprietor, Alberto, told us immediately “the electricity is out all over Spain”. I thought “surely he is exaggerating.”

We are lucky in that Alberto has a generator and turns it on and off so we have electricity on and off. But internet isn’t working. Luckily we can get some in and out phone service when we walk down the road to the local tavern. Their business is hopping. Lots of pilgrims.

Later Alberto told us he heard that electricity is also out in Portugal and parts of France. As I write this we still don’t know what is causing the outage. You may know before us via the international news. I’m writing this just on my phone, no internet right now. Will transfer it to the blog when we get service back.

We hear banks, airports, other transportation are in disarray. Alberto said his credit card machine isn’t working and asked if we could pay cash. We did have enough cash but that would have left us nearly cashless for the next few days. (We are in a very rural area with no banks.) He understood and graciously took our credit card number and will charge it when he’s able to.

He told us that tomorrow is very up and down walking but the prettiest day of walking on this part of the Primitivo. So, we are hopeful for a nice walking day tomorrow.

The power wasn’t back on when we got up this morning. We had planned to get off an hour earlier than usual because a warm sunny day was predicted. But, the sun comes up late here in Spain. So, since we didn’t have lights, we got up at our usual 7:00 and it was still pretty dark outside. We packed with very little light and got off around 7:45 hoping we hadn’t left anything behind in the dark apartment.

We walked an hour or so and found an open bar for breakfast. They didn’t have electricity but their gas stove was working. We ordered eggs and bacon on toast from their menu and it turned out to be our usual fried eggs.

We walked another hour or so and found another open bar for coffee and …. they had electricity! The power was back. Yay!

Each of these bars were in tiny rural villages. It’s so great to come across them.

It was a nice walking day on the Camino. Pretty views, lots of small villages and dairy farms. At one point we got to walk through a small herd of cattle on the path. We had to walk right in the middle of them. My heart was racing but it’s always a fun thing to do. The herder at the end was laughing and joking with us.

We are staying in a private room in an albergue tonight (Albergue A Toqueira in As Seixas). We were relieved they had electricity. The owner told us they had to close yesterday. No lights, no running water, all the food going bad. They have a little bar/cafe and are the only place in town for food open today. We will have her menu del día for dinner tonight. She’s been working hard all day. We are sitting blogging just outside the kitchen. It sure smells good.

• A rest day in Lugo. Charlie walked the Roman wall again. Wynette walked around the old town. We walked to lunch. I ended up walking 4.2 miles. Per Wynette’s watch we walked 5.4 miles today.
• 21 flights of stairs. Lugo is a little hilly. Most of that was coming back from the laundry.
• I like walking on top of the wall. I would walk it 3-4 times around every day if I were staying here instead of Vigo where we will stay a week soon.
• If you use swipe keyboard typing, as I do, and you try to type “wall walk” you get “walk walk”. Not a problem for Wynette who uses speech input all the time. I really should change to that. But then we’ll both be talking to our phones. Also it seems funny in a crowded bar, where we are now, but W has her Bluetooth keyboard.
• There is a mother and two kids next to us. They are a bit loud but we like to hear children. In the square just outside there is a large playground with dozens of kids running around and yelling. Last night, after blogging in the same bar, we watched them for 45 minutes. We’ll probably do the same tonight.
• We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant in the cheaper part of town with the menu del dia for the amazing price of 10.80€, $12.32, each. It was pretty good but we’ve had better. We’ll be having Spanish food for the next three days, our last three days on the Camino Primitivo.