12 Oct 2019

It was a clear 54F when I left Portomarin. Albergue/hostel owners save money, I guess, as their season starts to wind down by not firing up the furnace. The radiator in my pension room was cold as stone all night long, so there was no heat when it was needed. I see more and more pilgrims in the morning now, a long snaking line of day-glow colors. Judging from overheard conversations on the trail, since Sarria, there have been many more Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, and Spaniards added to the mix.

After the climb out of town this morning, it was easy walking through small villages all day. And it ended 18 Kms later, around 1:30 in Eirexe, a small bend in the road that features a pension, an albergue, and a cafe. While having a cocktail at the cafe, the owner of this interesting vehicle stopped in:

He said it was entirely human-powered and a real workout on some of the hills. I guess I’ve now seen it all on the Camino now: this, tandem mountain bikes, jogging strollers, rickshaw-style cargo trailers, horses, and of course the regular pilgrim.

I walked today with Susan from Seattle, a tennis enthusiast, whom I met a few days earlier sharing cocktails with Ken, Kerry, and Christie. She was staying where I was in Eirexe, so we had cocktails there too, and she asked if I’d had any epiphanies so far and we discussed the effects of Camino, and how people appear during your walk. Neither of us reported any great insights but we agreed that who you meet along the way means something.

Tomorrow’s weather is rumored to be wet, so it was frustrating to discover that the WiFi signal didn’t extend to my pension room (and barely existed six feet from the router in the common room) and that I had no cell data signal at all. Wow! Modern existential crisis: unable to determine weather on Camino using mobile phone!

I decided to see what tomorrow delivered…