It’s been a bit of a strange day with me having such a wide variety of emotions, happy one minute and sad the next. We’re one day’s walk from Santiago and I want to just experience whatever comes my way without trying to influence it. I’ve been particularly sensitive today – to the smells of the forest, the joy of companionship, the tastes and textures of coffee and chocolate, the feel of the hiking poles in my hands, the colours of the landscape.
Today, we passed through the city of Arzua, where the Caminos Frances, Norte, and Primitivo meet. There were a lot of pilgrims wandering around town, but they thinned out considerably after we left town and started walking through the fields and forests.
We went into a tourist shop in Arzua so that Birte could replace her broken flip flops. My goodness, the kitsch for the Camino has started. It’s amazing how creative people can be to produce such a vast array of products with the Camino flèche or shell – Camino sandals, patches, glasses, spoons, tea cups, key rings, socks, stickers, pins, ornaments, gourds, figurines, and, well, you name it and it’s been produced with the Camino symbols. It was shocking, especially so because we haven’t really seen much Camino kitsch at all on the Camino del Norte.
We’re sitting with a German woman in the kitchen of our albergue in Salceda. It’s 5:00 pm and she’s trying to book a bed at an albergue five kilometers outside Santiago. The albergue is fully booked, that is to say, all 370 beds have already been reserved for tomorrow night. Unbelievable. For our little band of four, we managed to reserve some beds at a private albergue about 500 meters from the cathedral in Santiago. We were lucky.
Tonight, we will go eat at a restaurant and enjoy our final communal meal before we reach Santiago. The wine is likely to flow.
The highlight of the day is that I had churros for the first time, and dipped in chocolate to boot. Churros are deep-fried pieces of dough, covered in sugar. So bad….and yet sooooo good.
