Saturday, September 12th
Before we leave Portomarin for a report on the mileage we walked on the Camino today, I want to share a few last photos of this wonderful town.
This was typical of the sidewalks we saw:
And I loved this mural of a pilgrim. He looks like an old-fashioned fellow, but the imagery of the clamshell is relatively new.
Every day we walk, Brenda posts a map on our Whatsapp thread showing our route. You read the map from left to right. The black magic marker 2nd stands for the place we’ll meet for second breakfast. The star at Castromaior was the archaeological site we’d be visiting. And L is for our lunch spot. Each walking day, she also sends us a custom map she created for us, from hotel to hotel, on AllTrails, a hiking app I use at home all the time.
To walk our route, you can also just follow the yellow arrows and jot down our meeting spots. Or people can stick close to Brenda or Andre, but for those who want to walk more independently, these tools keep us on track.
Here we are just before we set out this morning:
This was the path out of town.
I think we walked 14 or 15 miles today. My phone says I walked 30,785 steps and my feet and calf muscles feel it! We started at 8:00 in the morning and I reached our hotel around 5:30 pm. The way we walk the Camino, we take lots of long stops along the way. We stopped for food and bathrooms twice. We explored an archeological site. And we had a final stop where people painted and I took a power nap on a stone wall. The last few miles were a slog, at least for me—the day had gone from cool and foggy all morning to hot in the afternoon. The bulk of today’s mileage was on pavement and hard surfaces. My feet took a real beating.
As I write this post, I have my feet wrapped in a pair of hydrating socks I brought with me: a thin plastic baggie type thing filled with shea butter, jojoba oil and vitamin E. You keep them on for 20 minutes and then massage the remaining soothing cream into your tired feet. They feel luscious.
This morning when we first left Portomarin, a busload of pilgrims emptied out and for the first hour of our walk we were immersed in a crowded sea of people, a loud river of humanity. I was shocked at how crowded the Camino was. I’d never seen it like that before, except right at the end, when all the different Caminos converge to enter Santiago de Compostela.
I was walking with Hannah from our cohort. Around us, people were talking in multiple languages. Two men right behind us started a conversation. First they tested French, then German, then Italian, then some Scandinavian language that we couldn’t identify, in an effort to find a common language. Finally they settled on speaking English—a language they shared, and began talking about their home countries and their families. We could hear the whole conversation.
For a long time, it was a steady walk uphill. All morning we walked in a cool comfortable fog.
Slowly the crowd began to thin. And later in the day, I had many moments walking alone or walking in silence with just one other person, through villages and farmland, along highways and on forest trails.
At one point, walking with Hannah and Jo, they started discussing how they might paint the field of grass covered by a fog bank to our left. Brenda’s lessons were definitely taking hold!
I couldn’t resist stopping to take a picture of this:
And here’s Elayna’s photo of me taking that picture:
We walked alongside a lot of highways today.
For a long time, the air remained cool and deliciously comfortable. Here’s a bunch of pilgrims clumped up to get a special wax seal stamp in their pilgrim passport.
For those of you who have asked, this next shot is typical of the restaurants and cafes by the side of the road here in this busier part of the Camino. More people walk the last 100 kilometers of the French Camino headed into Santiago than all the other parts of the Camino.
Here in this wooded area, you can see the crowds have thinned out.
Today we got to go to one of my very favorite places on the Camino. The Castro de Castromaior, an archeological site dating back to the Iron Age, is just a few meters off the Camino, though many pilgrims walk right on by it, not knowing it exists. The site was inhabited between the 4th century BC and the 1st century AD, until its abandonment during the first Roman incursions. The site is only partly excavated and is believed to be far vaster than what we could see.
This is the entryway.
We came in and set our backpacks around and then started to look around.
Here’s what it looks like:
Here I am walking on top of the site:
Here’s Elayna and Hannah in the fog.
Down this hill was the way back to the Camino.
Shortly after we left Castro de Castromaior, the day really started heating up. It got hot.
For long stretches of the afternoon, I walked alone on wide tree-lined streets, hearing only a rare car, half a dozen electric bikes (yes, bikes ride the Camino, too, though the bike route doesn’t always coincide with the walking route), and a lot of mooing from cows.
Cows were a big part of our day. Big, healthy grass eating cows and bulls.
I watched this cow walk down the street and around the corner to her barn.
After all of that, there was this:
I didn’t think I’d be ordering a hamburger anytime soon.
Here are few last images from our day. It’s amazing how much more you notice when you’re walking.
Brenda is an all-powerful Amazon. Here she is carrying two backpacks: her own and one that was accidentally taken off the bus this morning.
This memorial for a dog caught my eye because Karyn and I have a yellow lab, Luna.
I loved these flowers in the window.
Our long day of walking was a feast for the senses. But there was also something else special woven throughout our day.
Elayna and Kerry gave everyone in our traveling company trail names. Getting a special name while hiking the Camino is a tradition they’d heard about and a couple of days ago they started suggesting special trail names for each of us. The thing about a trail name is that you can reject a name that’s been suggested for you, until you’re offered one that resonates, lights you up, and makes you smile. Trail names reflect an essential quality inherent in each person being named. Today, Kerry and Elayna gave out the final trail names for our group. Now we have all been christened.
Our group’s trail names include: Owl, Brave Heart, Butter, Boss Fairy, Quinn Copernicus Rose, Blaze, Spark, Treasure, Maverick, Pearlescent, and Venus.
I loved watching this naming process evolve and take root. As a trip leader, it’s always rewarding when bonding in a group grows through their own initiative, and the introduction of trail names came entirely from them. What a sweet way to bind us together!
My only problem is it had taken me days to finally learn the names everyone arrived with. I had just mastered that. Now I have a new set of names to remember!
