Camino Primitivo - Etapa 6, Grandas de Salime to Padrón

18.4.2013

26.5km

From the balcony of my room at Hotel la Barra (22€, including pastries and cafe con leche for breakfast). I had spent a very enjoyable late afternoon and evening - including a pilgrim menu dinnner in a little restaurant near the church - with Lars, the Swede, who also had taken a room in the hotel - rather than a bed at the albergue - to get a decent shower and a night's sleep away from the prodigious snoring of the dear old Spanish men (who readily admitted that they made an astounding cacophany). 

Before leaving, and after coffee with Lars (who was jumping ahead a stage by bus to make it to Santiago within his time window), a last sit on a stone ledge under the medieval pilgrim porch at the entrance to the church.

Not long after leaving Grandas, a light drizzle began, which would last the day. After five days of strong sun, it was a welcome change. On went the raincape, and off I went in the light rain, whistling the Colonel Bogey March. 

Capilla de la Esperanza de Malinera, where I took a break from the rain.

 

Thorn bushes. I did not know how pretty they are (nor how big those thorns are). I thought these first bushes I saw were huge and that there was a lot of them - until I got into Galicia, where there are entire mountainsides of them. 

Another break from the rain under the pilgrim porch at the capilla in Peñafuente. 

After the capilla break, I stopped to pet a horse, and then missed the marker for the Camino and ended up in a briery pasture. From the map, I guessed that the trail - a gravel quarry road - was somewhere on the hill above me, so I hiked up my raincape and hiked up the hill. And there was the way. 

A windmill in the thick fog. I heard it before I saw it. 

Crossing into Galicia from Asturias. I was not prepared for the wave of emotion that accompanied first setting foot into the homeland of Antonio Ribas (my great-grandfather). For about two minutes I just stood there, sobbing. I had brought some red wine in one of my plastic water bottles, and I drank a toast to Antonio. Then I found a piece of white quartz on the trail for him and added it to the stones piled at the base of the border marker. 

The first Galician way marker. Everywhere else, the direction is marked by the way the bottom of the shell is pointing (all ways lead to Santiago); but in Galicia - in which Santiago is located - it is the opposite, as if the shell is a rounded arrowhead. 

The church in A Fonsagrada. 

After a stop in the church, a visit to a little grocery for some provisions. Then 1.6km to the albergue - in a great rambling old farmhouse - in Padrón. Hot food - courtesy of the Spanish men - and dry socks.