I received some really crushing news today.

A dear family friend, someone who has been there for me since my father passed away, crossed over to the other side. He lived hardships that no one should have to go through and yet found a way to have a great life. He was a teacher, a mentor, a friend, a colleague and a lover of the arts. He always greeted everyone with a smile and took advantage of every moment. He will forever be in my heart and I am thankful to have had the privilege of knowing him. Happy hours just won’t be the same.

…

Our dear friend H, who’s lived on the Camino for 15 years, told us not to stay in Porrino, the next stop after leaving Tui. Instead, he recommended we walk on into Mos. He claimed it would make our walk the following day more bearable. I’m thankful we listened to him. Porrino itself, didn’t have much to offer. Despite the long walk into the city, the rest of the way from Tui was quite lovely. The walk out of Porrino, on the other hand, was as dreadful as the walk in.

I believe I might have mentioned we are following John Brierley’s book. Well, we have some notes for Mr. Brierley:

Your little orange dots leaving the city added a kilometre to our walk. Up the highway, around and down. I was so afraid the ascent and decent was going to give the gentleman walking behind us a heart attack I offered him a bottle of water and we walked with him for nearly 2 kms.

When we reached Mos we saw people setting up for the Fiesta right outside our apartment. Aware of the party, we thought, no big deal. Then, after seeing the size of the party and speaking with a local we realized this wasn’t a fiesta, it was the Fiesta.

The party was literally 10 meters from our door. It started at 10 pm. It finished at 4 am. Thankfully I sleep with earplugs jammed in my ears, otherwise, I may have looked like the other pilgrims this morning with puffy, dark circles under their eyes.

We had a short walk out of Mos. Getting the hang of things, we left at 7:30 and beat the heat. We arrived at our next destination, Redondela, where we had a room booked, at 10:15 am. I’ve been trying to teach Leslie to go with the Camino flow and let the path guide you. Unfortunately the path doesn’t always guide you and we walked straight past our hotel. Sometimes it does pay to take out google maps.

Seeing as it was early and it is wise to never go back, we opted to cancel that reservation. I hate to do that last minute but there’s so many pilgrims on the path, they took our cancelling with no problems. Which gave us the chance to keep walking.

We even decided to take a +1.5 km detour through Cesante, a gorgeous seaside resort town. Well worth it. The locals were friendly. The food was delicious and best of all, we weren’t surrounded by a mass of pilgrims. We didn’t even see one. It was perfect.

When we finally hit the town of Arcade we decided we should stop. The sun had shown its face for the last couple of hours and we were both fading. After being told everything was booked in this moderately sized town we found an apartment. The owner met us at a local restaurant, walked us up to the apartment, showed us around, even bringing us croissants for the morning. I love this country. Best of all, I have my own bed for the night. Currently, the birds are chirping outside my window, I’m curled up in bed, resting my feet and I get the impression sleep is coming soon.

Buenas Noches