Downshift Musings

We’re 10km from Santiago

Yesterday our path joined with the French Way. The separate Camino Primitivo way is over. It was a somewhat tedious 20km to Melide where we joined the hordes of other pilgrims. I really disliked the place we stayed the night before- one of the worst hostels, not because the owners didn’t try, but the building just wasn’t designed to be a hostel and the hamlet was in the back of beyond. However, we had a fabulous lunch in Melide – pepperoni pizza (real pepperoni, not chorizo masquerading as pepperoni), beer and pimientos de padron.

We had a several choices of where to stop yesterday, but we were going to need at least one longer day to make Santiago in 13 days. We ended up going an extra 11km to make the fabulous public hostel in Ribadiso de Baixo. The cold river bath for our feet and the amazing facilities were totally worth the foot pain.

Today we immediately hit huge crowds of pilgrims after breakfast. Luckily we were able to pass most of them to get a sense of peace again. We again decided to push hard and we walked an extra 10km to make our day tomorrow nice. We should be hours ahead of the crowds and have a nice amount of time for our only day in Santiago before we leave Spain.