Wynchar Camino 2025

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.

You may have heard on the news that there was a big power outage here yesterday. Spain and Portugal and even parts of France. The area where Charlie and I are was without power for almost 24 hours. That included virtually no cell phone service (no cell data) or wifi. So, we didn’t do any blogging last night. I wrote up some notes on my phone so will copy them here.

NOTES FROM YESTERDAY, APRIL 28:

Charlie and I both agreed that today was the most boring walking day on the trip so far. 90% of it was along a small paved road with no shoulder. Very little traffic but enough that we couldn’t let down our guard. We did walk through a couple of tiny sweet villages and lots of farm country (wheat?). A few cows. A couple of horses. A cat. No places to stop for food or coffee or bathroom. It could have been worse. E.g., urban industrial. We’ve been lucky to be able to avoid that on this Camino, so we are spoiled.

The boredom turned to intrigue and disruption of our firmly established routine when we arrived at our place for tonight, a really nice tourist apartment (Apartamentos de San Roman), and our proprietor, Alberto, told us immediately “the electricity is out all over Spain”. I thought “surely he is exaggerating.”

We are lucky in that Alberto has a generator and turns it on and off so we have electricity on and off. But internet isn’t working. Luckily we can get some in and out phone service when we walk down the road to the local tavern. Their business is hopping. Lots of pilgrims.

Later Alberto told us he heard that electricity is also out in Portugal and parts of France. As I write this we still don’t know what is causing the outage. You may know before us via the international news. I’m writing this just on my phone, no internet right now. Will transfer it to the blog when we get service back.

We hear banks, airports, other transportation are in disarray. Alberto said his credit card machine isn’t working and asked if we could pay cash. We did have enough cash but that would have left us nearly cashless for the next few days. (We are in a very rural area with no banks.) He understood and graciously took our credit card number and will charge it when he’s able to.

He told us that tomorrow is very up and down walking but the prettiest day of walking on this part of the Primitivo. So, we are hopeful for a nice walking day tomorrow.

The power wasn’t back on when we got up this morning. We had planned to get off an hour earlier than usual because a warm sunny day was predicted. But, the sun comes up late here in Spain. So, since we didn’t have lights, we got up at our usual 7:00 and it was still pretty dark outside. We packed with very little light and got off around 7:45 hoping we hadn’t left anything behind in the dark apartment.

We walked an hour or so and found an open bar for breakfast. They didn’t have electricity but their gas stove was working. We ordered eggs and bacon on toast from their menu and it turned out to be our usual fried eggs.

We walked another hour or so and found another open bar for coffee and …. they had electricity! The power was back. Yay!

Each of these bars were in tiny rural villages. It’s so great to come across them.

It was a nice walking day on the Camino. Pretty views, lots of small villages and dairy farms. At one point we got to walk through a small herd of cattle on the path. We had to walk right in the middle of them. My heart was racing but it’s always a fun thing to do. The herder at the end was laughing and joking with us.

We are staying in a private room in an albergue tonight (Albergue A Toqueira in As Seixas). We were relieved they had electricity. The owner told us they had to close yesterday. No lights, no running water, all the food going bad. They have a little bar/cafe and are the only place in town for food open today. We will have her menu del día for dinner tonight. She’s been working hard all day. We are sitting blogging just outside the kitchen. It sure smells good.

• A rest day in Lugo. Charlie walked the Roman wall again. Wynette walked around the old town. We walked to lunch. I ended up walking 4.2 miles. Per Wynette’s watch we walked 5.4 miles today.
• 21 flights of stairs. Lugo is a little hilly. Most of that was coming back from the laundry.
• I like walking on top of the wall. I would walk it 3-4 times around every day if I were staying here instead of Vigo where we will stay a week soon.
• If you use swipe keyboard typing, as I do, and you try to type “wall walk” you get “walk walk”. Not a problem for Wynette who uses speech input all the time. I really should change to that. But then we’ll both be talking to our phones. Also it seems funny in a crowded bar, where we are now, but W has her Bluetooth keyboard.
• There is a mother and two kids next to us. They are a bit loud but we like to hear children. In the square just outside there is a large playground with dozens of kids running around and yelling. Last night, after blogging in the same bar, we watched them for 45 minutes. We’ll probably do the same tonight.
• We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant in the cheaper part of town with the menu del dia for the amazing price of 10.80€, $12.32, each. It was pretty good but we’ve had better. We’ll be having Spanish food for the next three days, our last three days on the Camino Primitivo.

Kids at the bar from a few days ago. They were running around also and we enjoyed their energy. The older boy at the table, maybe 12, is spending his energy on his phone. You can see we were using the old trick of pretending to take a photo of Wynette while really taking a photo of the family with the kids, something we would not do directly.

Today was laundry day. They had five washers and four dryers for people clothes and a washer and a dryer for dog clothes. We have seen this a few times before, with signs saying not to wash pet things in the people clothes machines. There was a strongly worded sign:

I assume that the horse prohibition was a slight possibility and the other three are humorous.

This is a photo of an old church from a few days ago. We have not encountered the cross with a little circular window before. This is, no doubt, because of our lack of experience with churches. Maybe some helpful reader can enlighten us about this architectural feature in Christian churches? It was repeated along the side of the church. This photo is of the back.

I ran out of time and energy last night to post photos from yesterday but did have a few I’d like to share so will do so now.

We had a rest day in Lugo today. So great to have time and energy tonight! Now, if only the internet will cooperate. It’s slow right now.