Camino Day 10: Pontevedra to Caldas del Reis, 22 km (25 September)

All sorts of weather warnings had been issued for today, so we joined hundreds of pilgrims in fleeing along the trail in full wet weather trim, hoping to avoid the worst of it. Mind you, the Bureau of Meteorology issued a tsunami warning for Canberra today, so anything was possible. It’s been fire and flood so far this trip, and I’m getting worried about earthquakes in Lisbon on our way to the States.

Paula wants to title today’s video “Dull and Wet”, and she isn’t wrong. I had packed the camera away in its little neoprene case and stowed it in my daypack as the rain tends to get into everything, so the photographs from today are just phone photos. Had the sun been shining, the path might have held greater interest, but all we had to see were lines of pilgrims scuttling hopefully along before the rain set in aat around 11 am.

Like most of them, we had skedaddled out of our hotel before eight. Breakfast looked dull and nowhere else was open. Many pilgrims seemed to buy ponchos over the last few days as the weather broke and, tossed over themselves and their pack, they looked like deformed plastic snails.

The walk wasn’t a bother, as we are pretty hardened to the road after ten days. It was off the main road and along forest trails, whch was fine. We finished relatively dry but sweating under our coats, with not much scenery and only a couple of conversations to enliven the day.

When we reached Caldas just after 1 and realised that the door to our hotel was well and locked until 3 pm, we had a hankering for pizza. We found some that were hot and good but bore no resemblance to anything that might have reflected Italian cuisine. The pizza place had no seats, but the bar next door did. We bought drinks at the bar, tentatively began to eat our pizza, and then realised that the pizza place and the bar were owned by the same family, or had at the least some form of economic incest.

Caldas is wet, we don’t want to go out, and the only interesting thing abou the place that St Brierley mentions is that the parish church iglesia paroquiale is dedicated to St Thomas á Becket, who came on pligimage to Santiago three years befoe he was mudered in his own Cathedral.

Tomorrow promises more of the same…