Day 18: Gijón, We've Got a Problem

 Let's just say that walking 30 kilometers on a bad ankle wasn't one of our best ideas, even after a day of rest.  We're sitting in a hotel room in the industrial port city of Gijón, bummed out.  We have two tickets on the first train to Madrid tomorrow.  This Camino's over--for now.

Our day started with the usual 5:30 wake up and 6 AM out the door.  In the case of yesterday's hotel, that meant locking the door behind us and then leaving the room keys in their mail slot.  Villaviciosa may not be San Sebastian or Bilbao, but there were still some young people on the street at 6 AM.  I guess all over Spain, Saturday night means all night.

So we're walking out of the center of the city, following the Camino, and following these two young women finishing up their long night out.  We're just some weird pilgrims with lights on their foreheads... until we stopped at the bumper of what must have been one of their cars.  (Tina needed to adjust her shoelaces on her bad foot.)  "Wait a second!  Hold on!", they blurted out in Spanish.  They thought we were about to relieve ourselves on the back bumper...  They were pretty embarrassed when they figured it out.

Heading out of Town

How many morning church shots does this make?

We're not moving at our old pace, but we're much doing much better than we were before the day off.  Tina's ankle is stiff and painful, but she has all kinds of wraps plus analgesic creams...

So we get to the first little town in the outlying area, trying not to make any noise because it's way too early.  Well I don't think it mattered.  (Turn on the volume for this video clip.)

How many roosters can one small town have?

We weren't making bad time it seemed.  When you start at six, nobody passes you because nobody starts that early.  We were making progress,  The plan for today was to climb a 500 meter mountain and descend to a town where we'd hopefully get coffee.  After that, another hill half as tall, and then a long descent into Gijon.

The first mountain took forever, but at least most of the roads were paved.  

Again, tiny, sleeping towns.  This one though, had an hermita (hermitage) named the Casquita de San Blas with a sign on the door telling pilgrims to come on in and stamp their pilgrim credentials.  I turned the door knob, and sure enough, it was open.

 

Tina stamped both of our credentials.

Beautiful countryside.  The overcast skies meant that the temperature hovered in the 60's all morning.  It was really comfortable walking weather.

The tall mountain covered a lot of ground.  By that I mean that not only did we have to climb, but it was something like 16 kilometers to the town where we hoped to have refreshments, a place named Peon.  (I'm not making this up.  The other day we walked through a town named Poo and it took everything I had not to put it in the blog...until now.)

So we get to Peon, and Tina's ankle is killing her. It's 10:30 AM. She says that she needs to sit, and I tell her that there's a restaurant named Pepito's just past the church.   Sure enough, we spot Pepito's, and it's huge.  And it's closed.  We sat there anyway, and fortunately they had a vending machine so we had some sodas.

Two more pilgrims caught up to us and sat there disappointed at the lack of services.  Romina is a Ukrainian lady who's lived in Italy for 24 years and who's on her fifth Camino.  Mark is a British man who lives in Malaga, in Southern Spain.  You meet really nice people doing this.

The Road to Peon

I earned major brownie points with everyone when I went exploring and discovered that the restaurant's bathrooms were indeed unlocked and usable.  There was much rejoicing.

Tina and I left first since we'd been there the longest.  Every time we stop, that ankle stiffens up and it takes us a while to gain momentum.  Sure enough, not long after, Mark came roaring by.  Did we ever walk that fast?  Maybe forty minutes later, Romina passed us.  By this point, we were tackling the second smaller mountain.

Asturias is beautiful.

 

 

As you've read in previous posts, rocky paths don't agree with Tina's ankle, and we had plenty of those.  She was a trooper, though.

 

 

Remember that awful cider Tina wrote about.  They make it in ginormous barrels.

 

Finally, after at least seven hours of walking, we could see Gijon in the distance, but how long would it take to get there?  Tina's ankle was complaining more and more.  We'd adjust the bandages and retie the shoes, but the fixes were making less and less of a difference.

We were about six kilometers--not from Gijón, which is a very large city, but from the hotel that I booked, when we decided to call a cab.  That ankle had had enough.  The cab picked us up outside a restaurant that we'd just passed, and it whisked us through the downtown, past the beaches, and to our hotel.

We knew, when we got to the room, that we were done.  Tina offered to let me finish alone, and tempting as that was, it wouldn't have been the same.  I walked to the train station and bought two tickets on the first train tomorrow morning.  We'll be in Madrid by noon.

So what's next?  Well, after Tina heals, and when we can work it into our calendars, we're going to hop on a train back to Gijon and pick up where we left off.

Total distance covered to date: 494 km.  Santiago de Compostela is only 341 km away.

Some day.

POST SCRIPT:  There's been a change in plans. Tina's on that train to Madrid, and I'm continuing the Camino.  We promised that we're returning to Gijón, staying in the same hotel, and finishing this together.   In the meantime,  don't stop reading the blog!