Another long day, and another curve ball to make it longer. The guidebook we're using is quite good overall, but any printed guide will be out of date almost immediately because of changes due to road construction and the like. Such was the case today, and it ended up costing us about an hour. We weren't the only ones to get lost. There's a delegation of the Friends of the Camino from Sevilla, which has published a guide in Spanish that we see around a lot. Even they got lost following their own directions.
We left this morning without a really proper breakfast. In particular, I missed my orange. We'd arrived too late the previous night to make a grocery run. As we left town this morning, we took a slight detour to an 11th century church with a figure of Santiago as Peregrino carved into the portal. It is one of the earliest depictions of St. James as a Pilgrim, and the most recognizeable icon on the route. When we picked up the trail again a few minutes later, a young woman opened her door, stepped out and offered us a bag of oranges. There were too many to carry, so we took four and thanked her repeatedly. A superstitious person might be tempted to read something more into that. We were just grateful to be in the way of a random act of kindness.
The camino took a turn to the west a few days ago. Instead of walking north along the eastern border of Portugal, we are now walking west along Portugal's northern border. We crossed the 700-kilometer mark when we entered Rionegro today.
No comments:
Post a Comment