OMG are we still on this? Yes we are people, come on, it's a long walk. Try to keep up!
This was billed as an easier day. Let's see if it was. Oh yeah I can see from the photos that it was a sunny day. Honestly, for every day I have to think "what was wrong with me that day?" At the outset, not too much, I don't think, except my feet were kind of sore. We had breakfast in the hotel and made up for lost time. I think I had lots of cake. Apparently there's a special Galician cake that has at least 30% almonds. I assume that was the cake that was out for breakfast amonst the ham and the chorizo and the cheese and the jam.
Double-rope skippin. Do you remember this from school?
Awwww
Lunchtime.
At lunchtime Peter was determined to do a self-timed photo of us from a distance, giving himself a good sprint to cover the ground during the 10s count-down. I was fairly convinced he was going to trip over a root and then nut the granite table at which I was sitting and I'd have to phone the Spanish emergency number and explain it all in Spanish. I didn't even know where I was.
Thankfully he didn't do it.
This was a daunting hill to climb, especially with a Picasso faced house staring us down.
It was just a long hot march on hot feet. Me and Peter fell out with each other at the end of the walk because it said on our guide book (which I'd taken charge of) not to turn up until 4pm. I wanted to stop and loiter but somehow I kept getting frog-marched on, even though I knew we were going to arrive too early. I would have like to have sat with a hanky on my head and my feet in some cool water, but PB just kept on marching, marching, marching, marching. So we arrived at our destination at 3pm. He was all for just going in anyway. It was the first place that had actually set a time limit. It just annoyed me. I went and sat on a wall in the shade for an hour and did my Duolingo lesson and uploaded the day's walk on my phone. Himself found a field and chased butterflies.
At 4pm we went back up to the place we were staying where we were greeted by Maria. Well we were greeted by Maria after she'd got off the phone to someone because we could hear her rapping on from outside. When we got inside she said we shouldn't have worried about the 4pm (I could have kicked her) but she also quickly won us over with her h-u-g-e personality. It might have been a bit much on the day to day but it was very nice for two rather addled walkers who had been marching, marching, marching in the strong sun.
She asked if we wanted meat or fish for our evening meal and I said meat - kind of at random and also because I didn't want any tentacles or sucky things appearing on my plate, if I didn't have to. She then said oh that was a pity because she'd got fish in specially because the On Foot Holidays had said we were vegetarians. Okay let's have fish. So we were going to have Hake and potatoes. Well that's just fine. She said if you need ANYTHING AT ALL you just come down and you shout MARIA MARIA. ha-ha.
It was restorative. She didn't speak English but she was quite happy to keep going with half-arsed Espanish.
At dinner she came and chatted away to us for ages, explaining that the Hake was a flat fish and you could take the spine out in a oner so you didn't get so many bones. The fish was stewed in a pan and the potatoes were cooked in beside it. I think that's whay she said. We also talked about the fires - there had been some bad fires in the heat of the summer and some people had lost their homes. But she didn't want to dwell on that, but bounced off onto another topic.
Then she went and spoke to someone on the phone for a while while we got mildly sozzed on nice wine out of a huge bottle. Pretty sure we had a pudding but I can't remember what. Then we had....a coffee liqueur. Maria said we more or less had to have it. It was muy fuerte and the caffeine doesn't affect you at all - you sleep like a baby afterwards. So we had some crazy strong coffee liqueur which was indeed muy fuerte. I did sleep like a baby but Peter said he wasn't so sure there was no caffeine. He felt kind of wired in the night.
Maria said it wouldn't be her in the morning, but it would be her boss, who had two jobs, he was also a mechanic and fixed things. I think we both spontaneously looked sad - so she said not to worry because her boss was a very gentle kind man and he would take care of us.
Then she went outside to bellow a conversation at a neighbour across the road. We were finished so we left her a little note and 5 Euros and said thanks very much, but she came in and caught us.
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