- Distance Today 2.5 mi
- Distance Camino 2017 449.8 mi
Today’s walk was very pleasant, but brief… almost like a day off, but still moving steadily toward Santiago. It was so short we had barely started when we arrived at our destination of Palas de Rei (pop.3743)
So why such a short walk? When rooms began to get scarce a few weeks ago, we estimated the days to get to Santiago and booked several nights there in a pencion near the Catedral to make it easy to wrap up the Camino and to use as our base to plan our logistics for thereafter. Our return flight to Greenville as it now stands is ticketed for 16 Oct.
Well, as luck would have it, we started gaining on our average daily miles walked a few weeks ago and rather than try to change our dates in Santiago and the nights we had already reserved in good locations on the way to Santiago, we just decided to have a light day today and to slow down a bit on our final week to arrive in Santiago on the day of our booking. If all goes to plan, we will arrive in Santiago on 5 Oct.
It threatened rain from daybreak but all we got was a light drizzle. When the showers finally came, we were checked-in and in our room, having dodged another rain “bullet”.
Our room is in Pencion Curro (45€) and is in a separate building, up the street from the restaurant and bunkbed section. The room is bland and unimpressive, especially compared to yesterday, but it’s clean, has three beds (extra room to organize our stuff) and other accommodations that will meet our needs just fine. The only negative is a strong wifi signal but no internet. Jim found the modem and router but so far hasn’t been able to get the internet signal to connect as in previous locations.
At 12:40 we walked a few blocks from our room looking for pasta and found a place that was open, but pasta wouldn’t be available until 1:00. Our second choice was pizza so we found a restaurant also open which served pizza but not until 1:30! By now it was 1:00 so we returned to the first place and Linda had spaghetti but Jim had changed his mind and had cod instead.
For dessert, the main reason we went back to the pasta restaurant was because on their menu was a Linda favorite, “homemade” rice pudding. Jim ordered ice cream and Linda ordered rice pudding. The waiter brought Linda ice cream too. Linda said “I ordered rice pudding” to which the waiter apologized and returned with a flan, to which Linda repeated calmly , “I ordered rice pudding” to which the waiter said “we don’t have rice pudding”, so Linda ate flan for dessert… we guess rice pudding will come another day. (After 62 days, we are really getting this Camino thing, down pat!)
For dinner we returned to restaurant number 2 for pizza, and hoped they continued serving from 1:30, which thankfully they did. We shared a large margarita pizza and a glass of Rioja wine, returned to our room and called it a day.
Jimandi 