Day: April 17, 2025

Or maybe it really should be “stained milk”. Lately, whenever I order coffee, I’ve been asking for “café con leche” (coffee with milk) and then adding “with extra milk”. This morning, where we stopped for breakfast, I did this as usual, and the woman who served us told me in her quite good English, “we call that manchado“. She said, “think of a white tee-shirt that has a little coffee stain on it.” Milk with just a little bit of coffee. Mancha is the Spanish word for stain. Same word as in “Man of La Mancha.” So, manchado means stained. So, I need to be ordering café manchado. Cool!

• Camino walking: Vigo to Redondela, 8.0 miles in 4:08, moving 3:04
• Elevation: up 70 feet, down 565 feet, we took a taxi from the hotel about 2 miles and up about 500 feet, which we lost going into Redondela
• Total walking per Wynette’s watch: 10.93 miles
• Flight of stairs equivalent (up) per Wynette’s watch: 17. (Many more than that downhill, but her watch doesn’t give you credit for those.)
• Missed turns where we had to backtrack: 2, we were chatting.
• Cute coffee places: 1. A woman who lived along the Camino converted her house into a coffee shop.
• Fabada Asturianas missed: 1, we have been looking for this and we didn’t notice the chalkboard at the little coffee place noted above, until we’d finished eating something else.
• Steep tunnels: 1, right near the end, as we were going down into Redondela, luckily it had a hand rail, it was quite steep in there.
• We walked along a Portuguese Coastal variant that was also one of the Vias Verdes or greenways (https://viasverdes.com/en/). Spain has been converting disused railroad tracks into greenways. They have well over 100 of them. They are marked with wavy lines filled with green (see photos)
• It rained off and on all day but there was no wind and fairly warm.