May 12, 2013

Another cold and grey start to the day, but the weather forecast was for a sunny day so I’m hopeful that the sun will soon appear.  As we find the road out of Xinzo we pass a pharmacy with a thermometre showing 6 degrees (not sure why pharmacies in Spain have these but most do) so I’m glad we didn’t camp again last night.  We are wearing two tops under our jackets and we need our fleecy gloves inside our cycling gloves, but we are still cold going downhill.

We have a road that is like an action replay of yesterday – fairly flat to start with and then the road climbs, only today we don’t have the wind in our faces and what a difference it makes.  We just seem to sail along, even uphill.  We’re following one of the historic paths of the Camino de Santiago now and there are signs showing the route with its symbol of a shell at the side of the road every so often, so we know we are nearing our goal.  If all goes well today we should be able to reach Santiago tomorrow.  It will depend on how many hills there are.

We stop for our second breakfast of the day at a small bakery and the sun comes out quickly banishing the clouds.  The road turns into a steady routine of climbing for about 5 or 6 kilometres and running downhill again for about the same amount, so it makes for a day of steady work.  Our biggest challenge of the day is to navigate our way around Ourense which is a sizeable city; we arrive there at lunch time, grab a sandwich and then make our way through the city across the river and climb up and out into the open countryside again.  For once the sign-posting is good and direct, not sending us around in circles like many cities.  We are aware that many pilgrims travel the historic route to Santiago, both on foot and on bikes, and so maybe that is why the route is well-marked.

Once beyond the city we pass through many small villages with plenty of cafés and bakeries to keep us fully fuelled. The countryside is very like north Wales, green with lots of streams and woods and very hilly.  The architecture, however, is unmistakably Galician ,with granite stone houses having wooden balconies along the front of the upper floor.  Another specific feature of the area are strange stone grain stores.  We haven’t stopped to take any photos of them today (we’ll take some tomorrow) as we are concentrating on covering sufficient kilometres to leave ourselves a reasonable run tomorrow. 

We cover over 70 kilometres, leaving us about the same distance to do tomorrow, and start to look for accommodation for the night. Luckily, we come across somewhere almost immediately and Ken is particularly happy as the Seat 600 classic car club are having a rally there so he gets to look round their cars.  We’re looking forward to reaching Santiago tomorrow, when we’ll take an extra day to look around as it is a city we have not visited before.