Day: April 25, 2025

There is an old joke that people who speak three languages are called trilingual, people who speak two languages are called bilingual, and people who speak one language are called Americans. I am in that category. I have studied French, Spanish, and Italian a little but never got any good. I just don’t enjoy learning languages.

But I do enjoy watching Wynette speak Spanish with the people here. A lot of language understanding is based on context. When she talks with, say, a taxi driver I get some things just because I know what they are probably talking about and hearing words I do know and cognates.

Once in a while I get what they are saying when she doesn’t because she is trying hard to understand their words and I just hear a few words I know and think about the context and what they are probably saying. Kind of a forest and trees situation. This happens less and less as she gets better at Spanish.

Yesterday, we were walking from our pension to a restaurant. We approached the woman shown above. She seemed to be in her 90s or so. She stopped and smiled at us and it seemed wanted to talk. Sometimes the older Galicians do like to chat. She looked us up and down and then said (in Spanish) “you must be peregrinos!”. Then she pointed to our shoes. We didn’t have packs or poles but we were wearing walking shoes and sandals respectively. Part of the Camino uniform. (Many pilgrims, like me, change to sandals at night to rest our feet.)

I may have misinterpreted her but what I got out of that is that she was surprised to see such old peregrinos. We have noticed that we are quite a bit older than just about anyone we have seen on this Camino (Primitivo). The vast majority of walkers we see are probably 50 or younger and most of those are probably 30 or younger. Although today, where we had lunch, we met a couple from Ireland who were probably in their 60s. They mentioned that they were newly retired.

We passed this in a little town today and I was thinking it was some new kind of satellite antenna. We we tried the new feature where you have Gemini (the AI) look through your camera and you can ask questions about it. It said it was an old-style TV antenna that people used to use before cable and satellite TV. Oh yeah, I do vaguely remember that.

In my defense, this was a pretty small town in the mountains and I didn’t think they would be close enough to a broadcast antenna for a regular antenna to be useful.

This was in a small grocery store. To me it represented the old-time style that we love about Spain. Note the slate roof. We are in slate country again.

This is a closer view of the old picnic tables beside the chapel. We saw several more along the trail, all in bad shape, some better than these. They look pretty bad but I got to thinking about it and I decided they were actually high quality constructions. They were maybe 50-60 or more years old and still there. The wood planks were thick and sturdy.

Yes, we are in slate county, even the sidewalks. We see slate stacked up everywhere.

We’ve seen some beautiful, very even slate roofs and many like this, a bit worse for wear.

The coffee machine at the little bar that opened especially for us. It has a Camino shell. They are all pretty similar but I did see a modern one where you had buttons for the various coffee styles.

A pay scale in a bus station. Get your weight for 20 euro cents. I remember these machines but they were old-fashioned even when I was young. That’s my pack.

Spain has a lot less crime than most parts of the world. Definitely less than the US. We’ve talked about this in blogs of previous trips, but we are always amazed at how trusting people are here. For example, it’s extremely rare to pay for coffee when you order it, even if the bar is full and busy. They never bring you a bill. When you are done, you walk up to the counter to pay. They, somehow, always seem to remember what you ordered. One time, last year, we forgot to pay for our coffee and a sandwich in a bus station. We remembered it after we were on the bus and many miles away. Oops.

With the pack transfer we are doing, there is a high amount of trust involved:

You pack up our bag and leave it in the hotel lobby in the morning before you set out for the day. (Have to get it there before 8:00, no sleeping in.) Often (usually!) there is no one in the lobby minding the desk. The door to the lobby might be open and certainly not locked. There may or may not be other bags along with yours.

You say a little prayer and head out. You get to your place for the night and the bag is sitting in the lobby of the place where you are staying. Again, unattended.

Obviously, this works because there is very little theft going on in these towns.

If we lost the bag, it would be a huge inconvenience. Possibly enough of a problem to halt a Camino since you need just about every item in that bag or you wouldn’t have brought it on the Camino. Of course, we don’t transfer things that would be a major problem to lose: e.g., medication, passports, phones, etc.

But lots and lots of people do pack transfer and so far, I haven’t heard of anyone not getting their bag eventually. If the bag wasn’t there when they arrived at their place for the night it wasn’t because of theft, it was a screw up of the transfer company or some screw up in communication.

• Camino walking: O Cádavo to Castroverde, 5.1 miles in 2:49 hours, moving 2:07
• 7.16 total miles for the day per Wynette’s (probably-not-accurate) watch.
• 48 flights of stairs.
• Elevation: up 525 feet, down 1027 feet, between 1864 and 2779 feet
• We are slowly moving down in altitude
• We like to walk 7-10 miles a day but often that is hard to do because places to stay are often not in the right places. We avoid the communal rooms of the albergues so that reduces the places we might stay. Another solution is to use taxis: walk as far as you want, get a taxi to the nearest place to stay, and take a taxi back to the same spot the next day. You walk every step, a good thing for purists but we have already established that we are not purists. This has its own problems: once you stop you have a call a taxi and wait for it to get to you. Also the taxi fares can add up.
• Another solution is to just have some short days and that is what happened today. We had a taxi solution planned but decided to go with a short days, nice to have a little extra time to catch up. There were a few hills but that doesn’t bother if you are only walking five miles.
• It was another beautiful day on the Primitivo, albeit short. The views are not as amazing as the ones higher but still very nice, more rolling hills than mountains, more farms. We walked through some little villages which we love to do. We walked past a few streams and enjoyed the sounds of running water, which we also love to do.
• We did have a “cow incident”. We were walking along a trail, maybe 10 feet wide, with walls on both sides and we saw a line of cows ahead lumbering towards us. This is common enough on the Camino. But they were big, as cows tend to be, and there was no herder or herding dogs in sight. The cows were mostly on their right of the path (Do they walk on the left in England?) but some moved over at times. We moved past them carefully. After a few cows we saw the herder and dogs up ahead at the rear of the line. There were a few calves at the end also. The herder gave us a big smile and a “que tal?”. One of the dogs started tagging along with us and had to be called back to his duty.
• Of course, cows are by and large gentle and harmless but in the Guardian I occasionally read of some poor English person seriously injured by cows. This is always in some unusual situation but it stays in your mind, especially if you are a city boy like me.
• About Camino purists, or completists, we are not, but we don’t want to put that down in any way. If we had started younger I would definitely have wanted to do a Camino and walk every step. There is a satisfaction in that completion. A sense that you have accomplished something hard to do. We love to walk and we make some compromises so we can do it and still have fun. Up those steep hills today I was glad to be carrying 10 pounds instead of 25.
• Another interesting thing we encountered today. The Camino turned left along a stream with a narrow path on one side between a high wall and the stream, another place I was glad I was not too heavy. The stream had a line of rocks in the middle. We were wondering what they were there for. My guess is that someone did it just for fun.