Author: Charlie

• Camino walking: O Cádavo to Lugo, 6.4 miles in 3:35 hours, moving 2:32
• Elevation: up 607 feet, down 807 feet, from 1463 to 1942 feet
• A fairly short day. We walked six miles and then called a taxi to get us into Lugo, avoiding some major up and down into the city. The walk was again very nice, through farmland and past many streams. They sure have a lot of water in Galicia!
• We passed an albergue that we had had a reservation in but canceled when we changed our plans. When we got to the place we checked if it was open and took a photo of it because it had a nice logo. Apparently the owner noticed this and came out and ask us what we wanted. Wynette said a coffee and he said come on in. So we had another place that opened up early just for us.
• We saw quite a number of pilgrims today.
• We’re back in Lugo for two days. It has an ancient Roman wall that you can walk on all the way around, 1.4 miles. Apparently it is the only completely intact Roman city wall and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was great fun walking all around it.
• Total miles walked today (Camino plus wall plus around town) per Wynette’s watch: 11.45. Equivalent flights of stairs climbed: 64. That includes 3 to get up onto the top of the wall.
• We’re in Spain so we had another Indian food lunch. It was a set menu and was so massive we are skipping dinner.

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.

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.

• 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.

• Camino walking: A Fonsagrada to O Cádavo, 8.5 miles, 5:42 hours, moving 3:15
• Elevation: up 1480, down 1371, between 2175 and 3068 feet
• Flights of stairs climbed: 133
• Miles walked total per Wynette’s watch: 11.99. This includes walk to restaurant and grocery, etc. But we think it is a little too high.
• This was another great day on the Primitivo. We started with a taxi to reduce the day to 8.5 miles. The views on the ride were amazing. We started at 3000 feet and you could see a think layer of clouds spread out in the valleys below, quite a sight. For the last mile we were in the clouds, that is, a fog.
• The bars in Fonsagrada were not open when we left at 8:30 and per Google we thought there was a bar in A Lastra, the town where he dropped us off and we asked the taxi driver about it. He said he thought it was open and said he’d take us there. He had pulled off on the side of the road and proceeded to back up 150 yards on this narrow dirt road to the bar. We pulled up and the door was closed. A woman came out and he asked if they were open and she said “I guess so”, but with a smile. Clearly they weren’t open, but they let us in and made us coffee and we had a slice of homemade walnut cake. They were in the kitchen preparing things while we were there. The place was very charming. It was right on the Camino path and so they probably got a lot of pilgrim business. My guess is that they really opened at 9:30.
• So we set out on the path, in the fog. The fog burned off over the first hour and we were treated with more spectacular views. This mountain country is so different from the coastal Portuguese Camino. There was a lot of up and down, as you can see from the elevation stats. The day got warmer as we walked and we started getting full sun. Mostly we were walking on mountain paths. We ran into some mud but it wasn’t too bad. We felt sorry for the pilgrims walking here last week when it was so rainy. We would not have been able to walk it in the rain, it would have been too risky. And we were especially thankful we switched to backpack transfer, me walking down the rocky paths with a full pack would have been dangerous.
• After three miles we were ready for a break, it was already sunny and hot. We stopped at another old-fashioned bar. We asked about a tortilla (Spanish omelette type pie) and she didn’t have one but offered a ham and egg sandwich on their great bread. We shared one and it was excellent.
• We got through the next 5 miles without much trouble. It was hot and there was a lot of up and down but we were well-fed and not tired. The nice thing about our short 7-8 mile days is that, even if it is hard, it is not that far and we have fun walking it.
• We got into this little town and checked into our pension. We rested and then went down the road to a restaurant for a nice meal around 5 pm and we are still here doing this blogging and savoring our postres.