Portuguese Coastal, Part of the Primitivo, Week in Vigo
Our hotel tonight has several interesting aspects. Here is the view from our window, looking west. That’s the ocean way in the distance.
Ahh, to be in the country. The view out the front window in the hallway outside our room, looking east:
If you look closely you will notice a competing gas station across the road. Ours is, of course, better.
Seems like a lot of options. Here is one of the pumps.
Only four nozzles. Not sure how you get the other three options.
Walking today we ran across some street maintenance.
I got to thinking about how low-tech cobblestones are. The stones look easy enough to make. We saw some being installed: they just grab one, place it in the sand, and tap it with a hammer to position it. No hot tar. No big cement truck. No waiting for it to dry. It is a cheap and easy way to maintain streets and sidewalks. And small repairs are easy. And, they last a long long time.
On the downside they are not as nice to walk on as asphalt or cement in terms of tripping.
According to ChatGPT true cobblestones are not cut or shaped but collected. What I have been talking about are setts or Belgian stones.
The pilgrim ahead of Charlie in the above photo was a very nice young woman from Slovakia. She was friendly when she was walking beside us and we struck up a conversation. When we exchanged details about where we were from I said “New Mexico” and she misunderstood and thought I said “Mexico” and assumed I spoke Spanish. She was excited because she wanted to practice her Spanish. She said she hadn’t been able to use it much in Portugal. We chatted a bit in Spanish and somehow she finally figured out that we were from the US, not Mexico. At one point she said “I really admire you walking the Camino at your age.” (We hadn’t talked about how old we were.) Not long after that, she said her goodbyes and sped ahead. I guess this old woman was a little too slow for her. I got a grin out of that exchange.
On caminos in Spain, they have concrete kilometer posts and people often leave stones on them. Sometimes people bring stones from home or pick them up along the trail. Each stone has a meaning to the person leaving it. Often they write something on the stone. This seems to be a Camino Portuguese variant of this. This is the only one we’ve seen so far.
The boardwalk passed the Estela Golf Club today. We were watching some players and the woman shouted a “bom Caminho” at us. We got about a dozen of those today.
In my youth I wasted a lot of my precious time on Earth watching golf on TV. Youthful indiscretion. But I did learn that on seaside golf courses, like Pebble Beach, putts break towards the ocean, or maybe it was away from the ocean. That made me think of the old joke about heaven and hell not being that different. In heaven you get to play golf all day and in hell you have to watch golf all day.
I think this is a ping pong table. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be this way or it warped. In any case it might be interesting to play. Then I thought that you could have a table that was constantly changing curvature in random ways. Would that favor the offense or the defense?
That’s me and Wynette in the corner but we’re not losing our religion.
We’re having a lot of fun. Finally remembered to take a selfie.
We stopped at a bar and I wanted something cold to drink. Found this in the cold case. A new one for me! It wasn’t bad. I wished it had more milk in it because it was a bit too sweet. Charlie said I should have asked the person tending the bar for some milk to add to it. I often ask for more milk in my coffee. But I felt rather shy about asking for more milk in my apple juice.
Most of the places we’ve stopped at have been clearly beach restaurants. But this one was a funky old-fashioned bar, my favorite kind, a block or two off the boardwalk. There weren’t as many places to stop today so we were glad we found this one.
