We continued our morning of slothfulness after packing up too. We went to a bar and had coffee and hot chocolate BEFORE we had even started walking. It all felt very civilized. The blue skies and sunshine meant that we got to enjoy all of the beautiful views that we had missed on the previous day. It was amazing. We had really climbed quite high, and we found ourselves looking down over rolling hills of emerald green pastures. We paused for a few photos before getting on with our walk.
Starting two hours behind most everyone else made things feel like a bit of a race for the entire day. I'm not sure if it was the sunshine, the late start, or the coffee, but we all practically ran for the first two hours (mostly down, but with some occasional unanticipated steep climbs). Each little village that we passed through was more like one gigantic farm set right on the track with animals and all of their accompanying flies and smells competing with us for space. When we finished one particularly steep slog to a point called Alto de Poio, we were ready for our first stop. We were greeted at the top of the hill by a huge group (hundreds) of teenagers and a bunch of vans that were shuttling them along. We immediately ran for a quieter spot and began plotting our strategy to stay away from them all day.
We have been adequately forewarned that the pilgrimage takes on a sort of over-populated madness in this final week. Many people walk the final 100 km to earn their "compostella" at the end of the trek, so they join in for the final few days. Others are bussed in to walk just the final day of the Way into Santiago. It has been a difficult transition. We've been used to going hours without seeing people and then welcoming reunions from time to time with familiar faces. Now we find that we are shunning the crowds and trying to regain a little bit of that peace. It's easy to take on a very unenlightened superior-pilgrim attitude, and the kids and I are spending a lot of time talking about it. As I hear myself remind them that this trail is for everyone and that it's great that everyone is out here walking some part of it, I find that I have to listen very carefully to my own words. I have to bite my tongue and model patience. It's not easy.
After a lunch stop on a great patio in the sunshine halfway through our day and our descent, we walked our final hour into the village of Triacastela where we checked into a hostel at the record early time of 2:00 p.m. That's when the real fun began. It was time for a bedbug eradication fiesta. Brianna's arms looked like a topographical map of the Pyrenees, and she was scratching like a monkey with fleas. Naturally, it was siesta time in Spain right at the time we were prepared for our fiesta, which meant not a single store was open for us to purchase laundry detergent. So, we set about boiling every last bug to death in the hostel's washing machine. Brianna, clad in her bikini, dumped every possible bedbug harboring material from her backpack into the washer. With a sunny afternoon ahead with nothing better to do than switch loads of laundry, it all worked out perfectly, and by the time the sun was setting on another day, Brianna was crawling into her sterilized sleeping bag and praying that this night's mattress would be free of the varmints. The rest of us crossed our fingers that we would not be the next victims as we dozed off to sleep. Just another day on the Camino.
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