Camino bore, day 28. Includes horses.

Thursday 27th May, day 28. Palas de Rei to Arzua.
Oh no, not another day when I read in the Caminalla 'Slept rotten last night'. Why???* Was it the excitement of not knowing our destination? Wondering if we'd get there? Because I have a fond hope of doing the camino again and sleeping very soundly. Perhaps I will next time, as I'll feel very at home and I expect to get a 'tucked-in' safe feeling. But just now I'm so excited at the thought of 'getting to Santiago in 2 days' time', and this is reliving the event in 2011! You can really understand how the exodus idea could take root. Or the eucharist. Re-living something really IS about living it again, and I'm having sleepless nights. Perhaps I ought to experiment on the grandchildren and see if I can make THEM feel as though THEY did the camino just by being descended from us.

*Actually, there were real reasons: sweaty blue mattresses, very bright 'EXIT' sign over door, a lot of noise and door-opening and door-banging well into the night. What HAS got into the pilgrims?

Now you know why the lanes are green!

Galician green lanes lovely, but today I fell over a tree root and took a tumble, rolling over to land in a stream. Knee bashed and blue. To think! I could have walked 700 km and fail somewhere in the last 90 and not be eligible for the Compostela! Life isn't fair, but we knew that already, and if the camino can sometimes seem like an over-cosy a metaphor for life, it can at least be a true one as well. But always a pilgrim willl rush up with some first aid to share. It seems that most first aid stuff is used on the pilgrim in front, as they get it out faster than the injured one gets to their own stuff.

A highlight was stopping off to eat picnic by the side of a big trough of water. A woman arrived with a bucket, and I wondered whether she had brought pet octopusses for a swim; but no, it was her washing which she rubbed and rubbed on the sloping sides of the trough. And while she did that, a bunch of pilgrims on horseback came through; breathtaking!

It was 29 km to Arzua, which we did in about 7 hours. A long day, but we felt revived when we got there as we went straight out to investigate the local creamy cheese, which gets a good write-up. Mmmmm, ooooooh, aaaahhhh - we found a bar that did us a big HEAP of the stuff with lovely bread, and glasses of ice cold Galician cider. But when we say 'bar', we don't just mean 'bar'; this place had hams and suasages and cheeses on sale.

I bought a pair of lovely dangly earrings, which I like to think are much like the Maragatos ('the mountain people west of Astorga') people would have worn, described in the camino 'Pevsner' as 'intricate filigree earrings .... were noted by Arnold von Harff in the late 15th C'. Mysteriously, one disappeared on the eve of St. James's day in the holy year of 2010. Oh all right then, I went on a bouncy castle at a party and it fell off and I never found it.

And back at the albergue, not only were the sheets REAL smooth cotton sheets and not the disposable nappy-liner kind; but there were TWO sheets on each bed. Another 'absolute luxury' experience.

But I end today as does the Caminella by going back to a moment at the beginning of the day that I shall always remember: 'GALICIAN LANES - in the early morning rain, a line of caped pilgrims silently processed, no sound except the cuckoo'.