Day 7: A Day Off in Ribadeo

 I found this photo from yesterday on my hard drive.

It's the Camino Equivalent of a Lemonade Stand, but with jewelry and background music.

 

Today, was a day off in the town of Ribadeo, population 10,000.  That sounds small, but this is really a substantial, small city on the border with Asturias.  The body of water separating the two is the Ribadeo estuary.  We crossed it yesterday, by walking across the Puente de los Santos, the Bridge of the Saints.

I didn't say it was a small bridge. It takes the A8 into Galicia and has two pedestrian walkways.

 

We started our day, as always, in search of coffee.  Coffee, early in the morning, on a Sunday, can be a problem in Spain.  This was after 8 AM, mind you--but this is Spain on a Sunday.  It's all relative. The first open cafe we found was crowded, so we kept walking.  We stepped into a nice bakery and had two cafes con leche and found ourselves sitting next to the two American girls from Tapia de Casariego yesterday with the REI backpack.  They're from Northern Virginia and Washington, DC, so we're all practically neighbors.  Small world...

They've been on the Camino since mid-June, taking their time.  They were fully packed and ready to resume walking after breakfast.  Maybe we'll catch up to them in the week to come, and maybe not. 

From coffee, we walked straight to the Convento de Santa Clara,  a Franciscan convent off the Plaza de España, the central square in town.

 

We caught Mass there in their small chapel.  It was well attended (I snapped this photo after mass ended.)  One of the most fascinating parts was the nuns.  They're a cloistered community, so they were sitting behind us in a section behind a wooden screen.  Their habits were really old fashioned--straight out of the Sound of Music.

The routes of the various Caminos to Santiago have existed since the middle ages and basically traced a path from parish church to parish church across Europe.  With things as they are these days, dwindling attendance and very few priests, this was one of the first churches that we were able to go inside.  But, hey, I went to Mass!

Afterwards, we walked back to a farmer's market that we'd seen getting set up outside the central market, the Praza de Abastos.  We bought some nice looking plums for the walk.  You can never have too much fruit...

Does your farmers market have a chorizo vendor?  It should.

 

After dropping our plums off at the hotel, we took a walk to see the sights.  (It's a day off and I've done almost 14,000 steps...)  We retraced our steps  back towards yesterday's bridge and up the coast.  We made a point to walk slowly--remember, nobody's getting hurt on this trip.

This looks like a bridge to nowhere, but it's actually a nineteenth century loading dock called the Cargadoiro, where iron ore was loaded onto ships... until 1964!  (That's the Bridge of the Saints in the background.)  Next up, was an old fort protecting the harbor.  It was closed, so no photos.  We kept walking another mile through a beautiful waterfront park to get to this:

The Faro de Ribadeo on the Illa Pancha

It's the lighthouse, or Faro, on a rocky island, outside the harbor.  It's connected by a short bridge, so we walked out to the island.  What you see is the new light.  The old lighthouse, built in the 1850's, is a vacation rental!  Next time!!!

The view from the light house.

The vacation rental.  There's a cafe downstairs with the best outdoor seating anywhere.

From the lighthouse, we walked back to town and got dressed up for a nice lunch out.  Like grown ups.  I made a reservation at a nice place yesterday, and we had a very nice, very long lunch as walk-ins were getting turned away.  To be honest, the tables weren't all full.  The problem was that they (like restaurants everywhere) were understaffed.  Lunch took three and a half hours.

Ox tails. Mmmmm.

The consensus here is that taking this time off is a superb idea, not just to explore a cool town, but to allow our bodies to recuperate.  The week coming up is going to have some long hikes with lots of elevation.  There's even one that might approach 40 kilometers.  The length of each day is driven largely by the amenities--or lack thereof--in the destination towns.

We're using this blog from last summer as a guide.  Maybe we're overthinking this...  Probably.

In any case, tomorrow morning, we're going to start early and head to a town named Laurenza, that's 29 kilometers away.  We'll deal with over 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) in elevation.  Tina will recap the hike for you.

The adventure continues...