Stage Thirty – Tricastela to Sarria

21 km

November 7

Its a Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood!

Today was a beautiful day and a beautiful walk. Galicia is a lot like Ireland, and some of its origins are Celtic in nature. I was treated to wonderful views, green hills and fields, rock fences and lots of farm animals. I had to dodge lots of animal dung along The Way today and the smells are a resemblance of life on the farm. It was tough now to tell the dung from the mud. It was all the same colour!

After our nice night in the hotel, Pam and I were in much better spirits and the warm, dry weather made all the difference. I took lots of pictures as we went up and down today and walked past and right through many farms. I wondered how they liked it in the summer with so many people walking through, but they must be used to it. I also wondered what the statistics were on the number of pilgrims who get hit by vehicles, especially in the cities.

I kept singing Mr. Rogers song " Its a beautiful day in the neighbourhood" . It would go through my head as we entered every village. Strange...Pam had Arlo Guthries' "Coming into Los Angeles" in her head. Different head spaces!!

After some looking in Sarria, we found a nice private albergue that was open. Because it was now into November, many private albergues were closed for the season. We did not even consider the municipal hostel here and didn't want to walk on to the next town.  We were done, done, done, with them!! Sarria is the last major place that is just over 100km from Santiago and a starting point for many pilgrims. You can get your  "compostela" if you walk from here.

The owner of the place was also the chef and he cooked us a great pollo (chicken), with a fresh mushroom sauce. It was really good. There were a number of pilgrims seated around the large table. Linda, an Aussie, had just discovered the Camino by chance, walked a bit of it, but didn’t have time to get to Santiago. She was a very talkative interesting woman who seemed excited about everything. There was also a Swiss man in his 70’s, who was sharing our room and recovering from a hospital stay. He had been walking for a long time and got sick. His wife wanted him to keep going once he got well but he had to get back to her because her health was failing. We were also joined by an Italian man, a Danish couple, and two guys from Belgium. The conversation was in varying forms of English and there was lots of wine to drink!
I didn't know at the time but  I would be seeing some of them a lot in the coming days.

There was an American couple in our room too but they did not join the dinner. I think they had washed everything they owned and then hung it all over the room. The room was damp and cool because of it. They were not particularly friendly, especially the woman. We saw this couple every day after this day, and they never warmed up at all. Oh well.

I paid the people to get my laundry done. It was always nice to get all your walking clothes clean and dried in a dryer. Upon reflection, I spent quite a bit of money on getting my clothes washed and dried. That would be a good business to be in. Most places wouldn’t let you just use the dryers. You had to wash first in the washer, no hand washing.  If the weather was warmer and dryer, a pilgrim would not have a problem getting your clothes dry at night but in Oct/Nov this is hard to do.

 Had a pretty decent sleep here but the old fellow did snore pretty loud and the church bells were close so I could hear the ringing every fifteen minutes. I think it stopped at midnight but starts again at 6 or 7 am.  The earplugs can’t keep it all out.