Day: April 30, 2025

WynChar Diary, April 30

  • 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.
A typical horreo
The cows mostly stayed to the right.
Walking into Melide. We finally spotted stork nests on the church tower. If you look closely you can see a stork in the next on the lower right.

Storks at last

If you look hard you might be able to see the stork.

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.

Zoom lenses are great.