Camino de Santiago #5

We started the day with a nice breakfast in the historical center of Pontevedra. I wanted to try churros for quite some time and finally got the chance to do so.  Hm, what can I say about them? They were very good, as all fatty and sweet food is :). I was wondering what it was, but after trying it, I’m sure it’s something my grandma calls “štraube”, and usually makes them around Mardi Gras (pustni torek), although to be fair, they do look a bit better than my grandma’s but in the end it’s just fried dough. So while we were sitting in the coffee place and dunking churros into the hot chocolate it started to rain, again, so another day of walking in the rain ahead of us. The path on this stage was nice, it was mostly out of the urban area.

Around noon, we walked through some small village, and like in a cartoon,  amazing smell of roasted pork, flew around the corner. It was like in cartoons, when smell actually calls people inside, haha. Aljoša is still joking about it today (October). After smelling it, we couldn’t help but follow the smell back 100 m and enter the restaurant, that looked like the likeliest candidate of being the source of the smell. I’m mentioning this, because this was probably the best price/performance of any restaurant that I have been in past 10 years if no more. For merely 10 € you got the following:

• Hot soup with vegetables
• Roasted pork ribs with baked potatoes
• Dessert
• 1l of wine (yes, each one got a bottle of whine, haha)

The restaurant is called As Eiras, if you are in the vicinity, by all means go try it out.

You know, how they say the world looks better with a full belly? In our case it actually was true, the weather cleared, and we reached our next destination in Caldas de Reis early afternoon. There is no official albuerge there, but a private one, for the same price (8€ in Spain) was waiting for us. The town is known for its hot springs, but I think everything was closed at that time of the year.

The town had several stores, so we were able to raid the necessary supplies, including some super cheap, but good (ish) wine.  Before we started preparing dinner Jakob tried his best to persuade anyone, who would listen to him to go swim with him to the hots pings – basically it looked like random fountain outside, in the end surprisingly he didn’t persuade anyone but managed to annoy everyone, so he actually went alone. While Jakob was swimming in the rain I did other stupid extreme and went for a run, well at least I didn’t try to persuade anyone to follow me.

After good lunch it’s only natural that even better dinner follows. Well, I can’t say about the quality, but  I can definitely testify about the quantity. This became the day, know as the day, the three of us,  ate 1kg of pasta in one sitting. I’m not sure, if we should be proud of this or not, but damn haha, it really gives you energy.

Next morning we were flying toward Padron, the last stop before Santiago. We barely made one short stop in the middle, to eat a snack on this 19 km stage. This leg of the journey was one of the best, most of the path was going through the forest and fields, if it wasn’t raining again, it would have been perfect. The albergue in the town was in an old monastery beside the church and it was again really nicely maintained. It must have been renovated not so long ago, the interior was mostly  wooden and there were plenty of heaters provided so it was nice and warm.

All in all I have to say that albergues in Spain are really superb. Especially if you account that they only cost 8 € a night, but more on this later.