Camino Day 11: Caldas del Reis to Padron, 22.3 km (26 September)
There is always a day when you question the whole walking business, and we’ve been fortunate enough to leave that until our penultimate pedestrianing. I can go back to times when we have really spat the dummy because the trail was unexpectedly difficult, or the weather crap or things weren’t going our way. We didn’t do that this time, but Paula made the deadly judgement that this was a boring day, and she was correct.
We were out of our hotel before the sun rose, hoping to beat the weather, and so was everyone else. Our hotel was quite pleasant, although we were somewhat amazed at the wait to check in the night before, but we didn’t hang around to enjoy it. We have the packing up thing down to a fine art, with our bags downstairs before 7:30 and lining up for the earliest breakfast, but we are starting to look forward to a more settled existence, as Hotel Via XIX was our thirteenth bed since we left home. The weather was at least consistently Galician… wet.
What really capped off today was Padron, a town that clearly had decided that it was so close to Santiago that it wasn’t worth making the effort. We had late sun in the morning, but as we walked into the town, the rain came down again. We wanted lunch before trekking out to the only hotel in town, and—of course, as this is Spain—nothing was going to open until 1:30 except for the snack bar.
That would have been introduction enough to what could have been a pleasant Galician town, but when we walked the additional two-and-a-half kilometres to Hotel Scala, we found that it wasn’t so much a hotel as a pilgrim hostel with add-ons, and we would have saved a lot of money staying in the better albergues in town, where they did have private rooms. We were staying in a concrete box with a million rooms, thin walls, far too many over-sharing Americans, and busloads of Probus-pilgrims, being carted off to Santiago for an overnight trip. While we had perfectly adequate bar meals for dinner, the place looked over-used and under-maintained. We are hoping for better things in Santiago.
UPDATE: breakfast was a disaster, a completely disorganised fight over inadequate victuals by hundreds of people who don’t know how to queue. We walked out and hoped for a cafe. Anything was better than that. I’ve seen better organised food riots.
