Day 26 – To Porrinõ, in Spain

When I finished catching up with this blog last night in the lounge I returned to the dormitory at about 9pm to find it all in darkness. Of course it was 10pm Spanish time, but still rather early for lights out. Not wanting to disturb those who had already settled in their bunks I decided to get into my bed as quietly and inconspicuously as possible. Unfortunately this meant that I couldn’t root through my rucksack to find the charger for our phones etc. That meant that today my devices had flat batteries. Both my phone and tablet were dead. The same applies to my camera, but that has exchangeable batteries and the spares were fully charged.  I had hoped to awake early and put them on charge this morning, but that didn’t really happen. I managed about half an hour’s charging before we left but that’s all.  So today we travelled without benefit of GPS and mapping. Not a great loss but they have proved to be useful in the past.

We left the albergue at about 7:45 Portuguese or 8:45 Spanish time. We walked through the citadel part of the city, it was a ghost town. We saw nobody as all, it was totally deserted. Yesterday it was thronged with crowds of people, this morning – nothing!

 

We soon found, and crossed the bridge between Valença, Portugal and Tui, Spain, and adjusted to the one hour time difference.

 

We stopped off at the cathedral in Tui to get out credentials stamped, walked a little further to a cafe and had out first breakfasts in Spain on this walk.

The rest of the day was simply a case of walking to Porriño. This route was through totally rural Galician scenery.  Along the way we kept meeting up with Colette and Jan, from France and occasionally other pilgrims. It was a very hot day with long distances between cafés, quite tiring.

 

We were following a “new” route through this part of the country. It avoids, apparently, a very long stretch off dead straight road totally through industrial areas. The photographs shown on the various leaflets, and the little bit we did see and pass through, were a good reason for the change. It would have been extremely tedious to have walked through the bypassed area. The section we did walk through, on the outskirts of Porriño were enough.

There is a lot of stone quarrying activity around here and all the other industry that supports it.

As we entered the town we passed a Camino marker stone showing the distance to Santiago to be less than 100km.

We’re now in the last stages of our trek, we estimate that we’ll reach Santiago by next weekend all going well. As if to confirm that we have now completely filled one credential each. Any more stamps will have to go into the new credentials that we bought in Porto.

We had decided that we would not start in an albergue tonight but somewhere where we had more control of bedtimes and lights. Initially we couldn’t find anywhere in what was a rather dismal area. Eventually, with the help of a local lady, we managed to find a hotel on the centre of what turned out to be quite a pleasant town. We soon settled in, showered changed etc.

Later we went down to the bar for a drink and snacks. There we met yet another solo lady traveller from Canada – Clare. She had travelled the various Caminos previously, all solo as her husband doesn’t like walking, and also worked as a Hospitallero in Ponferradda a year or so ago. We had a very good evening, with good conversations and a few glasses of wine.