Lourenzá is a tired small town, but we made the best of it. As Tina wrote, we had a really nice, ample lunch with a great bottle of wine for not a lot of money. After that, laundry, a siesta and a walk around town before the albergue's ten PM lights out.
GF beer and cheese balls before bed... what's not to love?
Our albergue was very nice. When we told the proprietor that we'd be leaving early, he showed me where to find the espresso pot and milk so we could have coffee before leaving.
This morning, we were out the door by 6:30 and immediately found ourselves using headlamps to navigate dark forest paths that started really close to the albergue. This was not a big town.
The plan was to walk nine kilometers to the larger town of Mondoñedo, then to walk eleven kilometers to Abadín, and finally six kilometers to tonight's albergue in As Paredes. That was the plan, anyway.
The first part was perfect. About nine kilometers through beautiful countryside as the world slowly came to life. We saw cows and horses lying down in the fields. It was bucolic. And very special.
We were mostly alone, making a good pace. After a while, a young couple passed us, and we could always see them ahead of us. This led to Tina's best line of the day. "We're no Speedy Gonzales, but we are the speedy Rodriguez's". Before 8 AM, that there's funny.
Mondoñedo was a welcome sight at 8:30 in the morning. The approach to town is long, and much of it's on the side of a highway with, get this, sidewalks. Up ahead, we saw the young couple make a right turn into a neighborhood.
I checked the Buen Camino app on my phone, and sure enough, they were on the correct path, but it was making a useless detour, adding unnecessary distance, before rejoining the very road we were on. Maybe that made sense before the sidewalks. The Camino seems to take a lot of questionable detours...
We stayed on the sidewalk, and sure enough, the speedy Rodriguez's beat the young couple into town!
Sitting outside a bakery across from the cathedral, we had some incredible cups of café con leche while we deliberated the route to Abadín. I'll cut to the chase: there are two routes, and one is five unnecessary kilometers longer. We ended up on that one. (I took that one last year too and whined about it in this very blog.) How do you make the same mistake two years in a row?
Don't ask.
The first twelve kilometers were pretty awesome. The views are striking.
Kale is a staple of Galician cuisine. They harvest the leaves from the bottom,
and new ones sprout at the top. The plants get pretty tall.
As in Asturias, retired bath tubs in Galicia have second lives as water troughs
for horses and cows. You see them everywhere.
About twelve kilometers into phase two, we stopped in a shady patch to snack. It was about 11:30, two and a half hours out of Mondoñedo. Chorizo (carried from Madrid), gluten free bread (ditto), picos, a popular form of breadstick (Avilés), plums (Ribadeo), and cheese (Lourenzá). It was good to eat--and to lighten our loads!
The snack was great until we did the math on where we were and how long it would take to reach our destination.
A funny thing happened next. Three of the six Spanish girls from Gijón passed us on the road, and then we passed them when they stopped for a break.
At about 1:30 PM, we stopped in Abadín for sodas. That helped the general mood a bit. To tell the truth, despite the sun, it was pretty cool and breezy. The next six kilometers were almost picture perfect, but I wasn't in the mood to take pictures until this:
You had to smile.
After nine hours, we arrived at our albergue. To say that it's in As Paredes really overstates As Paredes. There's nothing here but this albergue and a few farms... and the A8 superhighway.
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| The view from my lawn chair... |
But, the albergue is beautiful. It even has a pool, which Tina used. We'll have dinner here tonight with the other travelers.... that's to say with the two American girls from yesterday, the four Italians also from yesterday, plus lots of new faces.
The middle of nowhere really draws a crowd! Tina will fill you in on how it turns out.
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