Portomarín to Ligonde to Mélide

Well, if it looks like we haven´t covered much ground in the past two days, it´s because we haven´t. But it´s a decent story why.

I posted two days ago from Portomarín, before we went to dinner. If you´re on the Camino, a good rule of thumb is to eat dinner or have drinks in a sidewalk cafe on the town square, or the closest thing the town has to a square. There´s almost always a big open space in front of the biggest church in town, and generally, that´s where most pilgrims run into each other in the evening hours. Christa and I make a practice of it, just because we know the habits of the people we´ve travelled with and we´re always hoping to see familiar faces now that they are fewer and farther between. I mean, we have NEW familiar faces, but the ones from the beginning of the trip are the ones we hope most to see, and so we go to the plazas.

That night in Portomarín we sat and had dinner and a few drinks and watched people do the ¨pilgrim walk.¨ Christa gets a real kick out of this. That night we decided to rate them on a scale of one to ten, and it cracks us up. (We feel we´re entitled to laugh because we´ve been there and we do the walk too.) We saw this one guy in a red shirt, hobbling across the plaza to the church doors. He was leaning heavily on a tall wooden stick and one leg was wrapped in gauze, and he was walking so badly that we decided he was going to the church in the hopes that, once he got inside, he would simply die. We called him Stickman. Christa took pictures of him. He was so pathetic looking...poor guy. We didn´t see him come out, but we saw him cross the plaza back and forth to and from the church a few times, so we decided the people inside must have told him he had to go die somewhere else, but his heart was set on the church.... OH the pilgrim walk....

The Hungarians have resurfaced...the pirate and his entourage. They´ve walked the whole way, which sucks for my ego, but oh well. They waited around at our albergue till 6pm and were able to nab three beds on a reservation that hadn´t shown up. Grrr. He asked about Bradley James. I hope Skip reads this, because if he hears that the Hungarian pirate called him Bradley James, he´ll pull a Chuck Norris on Hungary and roundhouse the whole country. =)

We couldn´t figure out all the people in our albergue. For one thing, there were 160 beds...a huge warehouse room with about 40 bunked beds in a partitioned area, then a curtain, and then 40 more, and again, and AGAIN. And some people HAD SUITCASES. HUGE, SAMSONITE, HARD-SHELLED SUITCASES. WHAT are they doing??? We later surmised that they must be sending them ahead every day. But it´s ridiculous. Pilgrims with LUGGAGE. Christ on a crutch. More Spaniards now, and teenagers, and children. Christa is disgusted with the newbies who collapse, mid-afternoon, on their beds and lie there ¨like dead flies,¨ she says. We´re such snobs....

The snoring that night was INTENSE. Particularly from the bunk next to ours. I remember vaguely that at one point in the night I woke up and he sounded like a freight train, and I couldn´t help myself, I snapped, ¨ROLL OVER!!¨ to the guy, even though I doubt he spoke English and wasn´t awake to hear me anyway, even if he did. But surprisingly, it kinda worked...at least till I went back to sleep.

Yesterday, I decided I must have blown a fuse on the mad dash to Portomarín, because I was DEAD. NO energy. Christa and I were both snails. Furthermore, we decided not to play Galician Gallop in any way, shape, or form. We just decided to walk and enjoy ourselves (sluggish though we were) and see what the Camino had to offer. We decided to shoot for about 24km and figure something out when we got there. The thing is...it´s not a competition for beds. Competition implies that we can bring something to the fight. And we can´t. We´re not fast enough, we don´t leave early enough, and even if we tried, we can´t cover the kind of mileage we need by 10am, when places are filling up. So what´s the point?? Our elevation is dropping, we´re nearing the coast, and we decided that a field would be fine for the night. Get our night under the stars. I have a sleeping bag now, so I´m no longer worried...so we decided just to focus on the walk and what we came here to do.

Rain on and off. Galicia. Very much like the Pac Northwest, I think. Very cloudy all the time, sometimes the sun breaks through, and the rain is never that hard, just misty-sprinkly. Dad´s Gore-tex raincoat he gave me before I left is magic. I put it on, and the rain stops. Never fails. As soon as my rain gear is on, the rain is over. Magic.

Speaking of magic...since there´s not much else to say about the walk yesterday; it was pretty and green and misty and that´s about it...we came upon a table with some people behind it, and they were offering free coffee, tea, and magic tricks! It was a tiny little albergue in a tiny little cow town called Ligonde, run by folks from the Agape Fellowship. There were a few Americans working there...mostly expats in Spain and France who were part of this group, and they were there for a couple weeks working in the albergue. We´d gone about 17km at this point. We stopped for coffee, and a woman named Lisa offered us beds...there were a few still free. It was about 2pm.

I said thank you, but no, I hate to turn down a bed since I doubt I´ll have one tonight, but we have to walk farther for the day. She said all right, and said her sons did card tricks and we were welcome to have a break and sit for a while before we carried on.

I turned to Christa and we talked about how much we liked the place, and I said, ¨Gee, I´d really love to stay here...it´s so peaceful, but we have to walk farther.¨

And she said, ¨Why?¨

Why?

Why, indeed. It was a beautiful spot. There were tents set up in a small field across the street. The people were nice, and though I wanted nothing to do with Americans earlier in my trip, it was nice now to have effortless conversation without feeling like I was putting upon someone to speak a different language than their own. They had a large pavilion style tent in which they had all just had lunch. There was a dog in the street with an old man who said she had just had TEN puppies. Lisa´s kids were incredibly charming. It was the first breath of true Esprit du Chemin that we´d had for several DAYS. Why did we have to walk further? Because we´d said some arbitrary number earlier in the day? We had no guarantee for a bed later down the road, and stopping now or in another 7km would have no bearing on reaching Santiago on Saturday.

And the Camino is about more than just walking, and more than just Santiago. It´s about the experiences we have along the way, and the best ones happen in places like this with people like this.

Why not?

So we let go of our ¨plan¨ for the day and decided to see what the Camino had to offer us in this place. We said we´d stay. Well...we´d taken too long to decide. Only one bed available now; some people had come while we were sitting there dithering. I asked what other option there was for me. They told me there was a cot in the garage-type area. I said okay. I asked how much. FREE. Donation, of course, but free.

So we stopped.

It was lovely. We saw Malek not too long after; he´d stopped because his foot hurt again and was in another albergue around the corner. (He said the boys didn´t walk yesterday...he thought they were taking the bus, despite the compostela, which says you HAVE to walk the last 100km.) We got a text from Brad, from someone´s phone, that said he was going to Arzúa (FAR ahead) and was hoping for Santiago the next day.

While we sat, some guy showed up on a UNICYCLE. He had a long red hat, like a jester´s hat with one prong, and multicolored striped cotton overalls like a circus bodysuit type thing, and he had a stick with a jester´s head on it and a horn like a clown´s car. He´s friggin´ crazy but he´s hysterical to see. He´s doing the whole Camino (SOMEHOW) on a unicycle. Malek said he escaped from the circus. I said the circus is probably chasing him down to get him back. I got a picture or two.

Not too long after, I got MY reason why we decided to stay. A wonderful girl from Missouri named Dawn lives in Madrid and will be back there on Monday. I got her phone number and email address and she has offered to let me stay with her Wednesday night...the night before my plane leaves. YAY!! Madrid no longer up in the air...just how to get there!!

The people were wonderful at the Fuente del Peregrino albergue and we had a wonderful time. They made us a huge pasta dinner and held a lovely prayer service in the pavilion tent, where they read Paslm 23 in four different languages and offered up a few prayers for pilgrims we´d all met along the way who have specific challenges they´re facing (or just all the pilgrims in general). It was beautiful. Neat to hear such a well-known psalm in Spanish, French, and German as well as English. No chance of internet in a place that small, so that´s why I´m just catching up now.

Anyway...my cot...SIGH. There were six or seven of us in cots in the garage area, and outside, there were dogs barking ALL NIGHT LONG. And the cot was a bit less than comfortable. Not flat like a military cot...curved so you had to lay on your back, which is hard on your knees and on tender heels covered with callouses. I eventually did get to sleep. Christa said her bed was wonderful...grr. We´d flipped for it that afternoon, and I won, but I said she could have it anyway.

So this morning, up and outta there. Breakfast, goodbyes, thank yous...such a lovely place. Glad we stayed there. And we both had our strength back, so today was a good power day.

It´s been uneventful today. Saw the unicycle guy again, ha ha. Lots more clouds and rain off and on. We managed to miss the rain in the morning because we left around 9am again. Then we stopped for breakfast around 11am and it started again. Got our raingear on. It worked again...the rain stopped as soon as we left the bar. We walked through a farmer´s market in Palas de Rei and some old woman tried to sell me a wheel of cheese that I swear weighed a pound. More beautiful countryside, more cows, more stone fences, more corridor-like paths, beautiful forests, eucalyptus now (bet Skip´s loving that), and quaint little towns. Stopped at half-past-Magnum in a little town called O Coto and the man practically demanded I come sit down and rest when he saw me standing by the road with my ice cream. I told him I was waiting for my friend to catch up with me, and he was very pleased when we both came in and sat down. Once Christa arrived, an ice cream became an ice cream, patatas fritas, and a beer or two. (Hey, my pants are getting too big.) It was beautiful. We got ready to leave, and the rain started again. Stayed a bit longer. It stopped.

When we finally got to Mélide, we had to make a decision. Stay and try the nationally-famous pulpo (octopus), or go another 12km to the next town that had an albergue. At this point it was 4pm. We wanted to push on and have a big day to make up for yesterday, but we just couldn´t do it. So we went to the albergue. The woman sitting behind the desk, despite our most positive smiles, kept her ¨completo¨ look on and referred us to a nearby school.

Off we went. The school was empty...no one apparently in charge...but there was a sign-up sheet and one rucksack in the corner of the gym and the shower was going. So we put our stuff down. A few more people arrived. We got a shower before anyone else got there...it was ARCTIC. And it´s not too warm outside here either. Galicia is COLD!!! But basically, we´re fine and I will FINALLY use my mat and my sleeping bag tonight, I suppose. I´m not happy about a gym floor, but the only double room we found is €50 and the gym is free, and so we´re gonna get some Camino experience. I actually miss the garage in Triacastela!!!

News from the boys...the people from whose phone Skip texted us yesterday have told us that he was hoping to get as close as possible to Santiago today but his foot is really bad. We don´t know how it´s bad...but we´re worried. Today was his goal and we hope he made it. Felix JUST wrote me from Santiago and said they did 117km in 30 hours in a madcap stretch that I can hardly believe, given how sick Kasey was the other day. They got there YESTERDAY. How, I have no idea. But they´re there and we hope we´ll see them Saturday afternoon...which is the DAY AFTER TOMORROW.

We´re set up for 33.5 tomorrow and might send the packs ahead one last time. After that, 24km on Saturday and Santiago that afternoon...I was hoping for the morning, but it is not to be. The hard part has been a couple of long stretches with no albergues. Like today...either stay where we were or push out another 12 at 4pm. Which would´ve had us getting there at 7pm. No go, not with intermittent rain. Tomorrow, we´ll get to Santa Irene, I think, and that´s at the end of another long stretch with nowhere to stay...like 18km. Tough to plan with stretches like that.

But we´ll make it there. We can´t believe it´s almost over. There´s been so much to think about...so many life experiences are now in a new light. The hardship has been good for us, and even the gym floor experience tonight will be a good thing, I think.

Many people have written and said they don´t know what they´ll read with their coffee each morning once I´m off the Camino. I have a feeling I´ll keep writing things the Camino reveals to me even after I come home. I think that´s when the real lessons will start to become clear. So stay tuned.

Tomorrow, Santa Irene. Wish us luck.