14:00 Mon.

26 Oct, 2020

Camino de Santiago #5

The last stage

Tags: caldas de reis, camino de santiago, last stage, padron, pontevedra

°C

12:00 am

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.

Churros and hot chocolate. Really go well in the morning, although not something I would recommend doing every morning.

Supper good, warms you up in the cool morning.

Interesting fountain with drinking water.

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.

Time to dry the shoes. Next time I need to remember, not to do it inside a room.

A frountain with spring water in front of the albergue

Despite being private, it only costs 8 € per nigth, as with the official ones. Although it was not as nice as the official ones in Spain.

Thermal water (it was actually warm) from hotsprings.

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.

Wine less than 1 € in glass bottle. I don’t understand how this is possible, probably the flask is more expensive than tha.

couldn’t eat so much plain pasta, had to put some tomato sauce onto it

… we actually did it! 1 kg of pasta between the three of us. Although to be honest, I think Jakob did 0.5kg and me and Aljoša the rest.

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.

We started the day with the girls, but soon split and went our own tempo.

Red shrubs, not sure what plant they were. It looked quite cool in the winter.

Not sure what surprised me so much in this photo, just find it funny.

So, how does one spend whole day of walking?

You talk a lot, but once every so often a bit of change is necessary.

I managed to read (actually read) the last two Witcher books on my kindle and listened to first book of Stormlight Archives. Especially audiobooks make it much easier to read, and I liked the story a lot.

Walking way in front. I find it great that there were 3 of us. We could take turns in talking to each other in pairs or all together. If we were just two, it might have gotten boring soon, but as it was we always find interesting topics to talk about.

Taking a snack break in the middle of a bridge.

Albergue, from the outside it looks horrible, but on the inside it was really great and new.

As usually it was mostly empty, so we had our pick of beds, where we wanted to sleep.

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.