Month: April 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.
  

• No Camino walking today. It was cold, rainy, and windy this morning by the ocean. We had already decided we needed an organization day in Vigo so we took a taxi from A Bousa Vella into Vigo. What a treat to zip through the driving rain in comfort and speed. No wonder we ruined the climate with automobiles.
• Taxi video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/RNhvVJ4ELWTa5ypn6
• This weather is a disappointment for the holiday-oriented businesses along the coast. This is Samana Santa (week before Easter) and usually everything on the coast is fully booked.
• We got our saved bag at the hotel and repacked for the next phase of the trip. We did the laundry and picked up some things we needed.
• Lunch at a working man’s restaurant with very good food. There will be a post on it.
• A friendly hotel clerk gave us some good advice on getting out of Vigo (300,000 people) without the hassle, that is, he told us where to take a taxi to the edge of town. If, he said, we were not purists who had to walk every step. Believe me, we are not.
• We still ended up walking a fair distance and going up and down, Vigo is quite hilly. Full disclosure: we did take one outdoor escalator and some inclined moving ramps in the mall we went to.
• Total miles walked today per Wynette’s watch: 6.08
• Flights of stairs climbed today per Wynette’s watch: 31

In case you had any questions. And another cute graphic.

• Camino walking Baiona to Nigrán: 8.1 miles in 4:36 hours, moving 2:46
• Elevation: up 100 feet, down 265 feet, not much up and down. 17 flights of stairs.
• Total walking: 8.99 miles
• Rain: off and on all day. Last night it poured most of the night. We were on the top floor of our pension and every time I woke up I heard it on the roof. It did rain a lot of the day but not as hard as it did last night.
• Boardwalks: maybe a mile
• Coffee stops: 2; grocery store stops: 2; restaurants: 1. We like to get fried eggs and toast but lots of bars don’t offer that. We ended up in a gastrobar and had a fancy bagel with scrambled eggs and hollandaise sauce and avocado toast with a poached egg and hollandaise sauce — both very good. And the coffee was good too.

Last night, in our pension, our room was on the top floor. During the night we heard the rain pounding hard on the roof. Much harder than anything we’ve had to walk through. It came off and on. I was trying to imagine how our raincoats would hold up to such an intense downpour.

But, so far, the rain, in Spain, … falls a lot harder at night. (Couldn’t think of a way to make that rhyme.) We did walk in quite a bit of rain today but it wasn’t nearly as heavy as it had been during the night. It was very off and on. When it would stop raining the sun would come out and we were sure it had cleared for the day and then, sometimes minutes later, it would get very dark and more rain would fall.

We were so lucky, though: it wasn’t windy like yesterday. We were able to layer enough to stay warm enough.

Our walk was a little shorter than usual and was a pretty walk mostly along water: first the Atlantic, then a ria, and then the ocean again. Our hotel for tonight is on the water. Hostal Montevideo Beachfront. It’s a humble little place but has ocean views. And Maria who checked us in was a hoot. I’ve been using the name “Dorothy” for reservations on this trip since it’s a lot easier for the Spanish to understand than “Wynette”. Maria told us that her mother’s name was Dorothy. (I’m guessing probably Dorothea.) I told her that Charlie’s and my mom both were named Dorothy. Maria exclaimed “Que casualidad!” which thrilled me to understand her and to remember that “casualidad” is a false cognate in Spanish that means “coincidence”.

After we got to our room, we rested a bit and then walked to a nearby restaurant (tapas bar). We filled up on two huge salads and a large empanada filled with greens and chorizo.

The restaurant was pretty full when we got here but it has mostly cleared out so we stayed to do our daily email catch-up and blogging.