July 17, 2008

Day 81: 3 July- Melide to Brea

It was an exceptionally early wake-up call. One old man was up at 4.50am, making lots of noise. He was still there making noise when we left at 6.30am: ahhh the joys of crowded albergues!!! But really, nothing could upset us at this stage, as we knew we were almost there!
A lot of today's walk was in quiet forests, including eucalypts. They planted eucalypts from Oz here, but are finding they need too much water, so are not really suitable for Spain and they are removing them apparently.
It was supposed to do a Galician rain thing today, but it stayed dry and reached low 20s or so in temperature, so it was all very pleasant.
We intended to only walk 14km today and stop in Arzua, since the alternative was a 29km walk. But when we reached Arzua it was only 10.30am, and there was a succession of bland modern albergues all on the busy main street. We decided to bypass them all and carry on.
We made really good progress
though we did have to wait for some cows to pass at one point.
We had lunch at A Calle after 1pm, with 7-8 km still to walk. A lettuce salad seemed to give us the energy required, and we zoomed along! The km marker signs showed how quickly the distance was reducing, and I did a 'happy dance' at the 25km mark!

We decided to stop at a pension at A Brea. (Just as well- we heard the next day that all the succeeding municipal albergues were full by 2pm or so, and we would have had quite a long trek to find a bed otherwise!) At 12 Euro, this was definitely more expensive than our usual accommodation. But we had real sheets, and they served a wonderful menu. Shame about Snorer From Hell #2 that we met here. Next day we discovered that others along the trail knew exactly who we meant!!! Even with my earplugs I couldn't quite block out her sound!! The 'odd' thing at this albergue was that most of the walkers had walked quite short total distances, and were bus/taxi assisted. So they went into raptures that we were not accustomed to... about the length of our walk......so I guess we learned to keep it quiet for the next couple of days....

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