Saturday May 18, 2019

Rates to Barcelos, Portugal; 32,320 steps

Proverbs 3 

v. 24  When you lie down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet.  You never know who you’re going to lie down next to in an albergue.  Friday night it was the brokenhearted but talkative Slovenian.  Tonight my top bunk was pushed snuggly against the one next to me, mattresses separated only by a metal rail.  The other bunk’s occupant was a handsome blond-haired blue-eyed Nordic-speaking lad with a friend the next bunk over.  I called them the Norwegians, and they were sleeping peacefully when we came back from dinner.  On the other side of me, though a little apart because of the narrow aisle, was a young German who climbed down the ladder bottom out, clad only in his underwear.  I decided to sleep facing the opposite way of the young gentlemen.  But it’s all good.  Everyone in the albergues has been polite, and three young men in the corner of the room who had claimed lower bunks willingly moved up top to give their space to people who apparently looked even older than us.  The albergues are very interesting, and I am not afraid.  I kiss Maurice good night, climb up to my bunk, stretch out on my thin flowered cotton sheet whose edges I saturated before we left home with cinnamon oil, a purported natural bedbug repellent (just in case), snuggle into my new chartreuse Aegismax sleeping bag, and my sleep is sweet with the Lord.

*************

Actually Friday night I couldn’t fall asleep.  I lay there in the dark and heard everyone else come in, including the tall silent German and the German girls who seemed to break into giggles at every one of Maurice’s gentle snores, and the arrogant brokenhearted Slovenian who is walking 70 kilometers a day, and I heard them fall asleep.  I didn’t want to put my shorts on and try to climb down the ladder without falling and rummage through my pack in the dark for my magic sleep aid…but I must have slept because at 6:40 Maurice was telling me to get up.

We were the last ones out.  We met Davide and Monica waiting patiently for us at the bar across the street for breakfast such as it was.  We brushed our teeth in the bar bathroom then, putting on our packs, decided to take some painkillers.  The plastic bag was not zipped shut and a pill assortment tumbled into my backpack and onto the floor.  “Quick, grab them!” I told Maurice; I was already buckled in and couldn’t easily bend and fetch.  When someone wandered by we just stood and smiled and glanced at the floor to see if a wayward pill was about to roll under a foot.  The pills seemed to keep rolling out of nowhere and we didn’t have so many that we could abandon them.

We stopped in a nearby bakery for a couple pastries and were soon on a path through field and forest.  A cuckoo called, or maybe a hoopoe (I can’t tell the difference).  The ocean views of our first day and a half were OK but this is what we think of as the real Camino—farms, fields, forests and little villages.  Pristine calla lilies grew by walls, in drainage ditches and even edged a yard where strutted a fat Thanksgiving-ready turkey.  Lemon and orange trees burst with fruit and bright clumps of bird of paradise blooomed in front of houses and shops.

We veered off the main route to take a scenic detour to a chapel, a miradouro and some sort of ancient castelo.  Maurice agreed even though he knew the road headed UP (all true Camino roads go up).  This one took us off the busily trafficked streets onto a cool and quiet forest road through ferns, eucalyptus trees with dangling strips of bark, sturdy stalks of magenta foxglove, one thin stand of ginestra (whose aroma is surely the scent of heaven), scattered calla lilies and a couple cork trees.  Up and up we trudged through the pleasant air until at last we spotted crooked stone picnic tables on shaded grassy terraces leading up to a lovely 16th-century capela.  The road circled past the terraces to miradours all around and views to the ocean in the west.  Steps led up to the broad central platform where pansies, roses and shade trees softened the picture of the capela under threatening skies. 

A stone bench was the perfect spot for our lunch, and what a feast we had been carrying:  whole-grain rolls topped with crunchy seeds, queijo, fiambre, strawberries, apricots, peach nectar and chocolate.  Maurice hurried us as the wind picked up and the air cooled (and the WC was locked) so we moved on, except that on our descent down the other side we missed the castelo ruins and eventually lost the whole Camino waymarked route, though we ended in the right town.

More walking, a final bar stop, and we had a nice view over the little bridge into tiny castle-crowned Barcelos.  Our albergue Cidade de Barcelos was a municipal donativo with a suggested price of only five euros apiece.  The key was next door at the bar and you had to ask to be buzzed in every time.  Fifteen beds fit into an oddly shaped dorm room, a few overflow mattresses lay in two converted storage areas with three-foot-high entrances and latecomers could sleep on the lobby floor downstairs.  Maurice sat on his low single bed and fell right through; he repaired the supporting slats as best as possible and lowered himself carefully thereafter.  The women’s showers were in a small room with two nozzles behind one curtain—not a set-up that pleases the ladies.

We showered and arranged our things on beds and floor.  As Maurice and I were bandaging each other’s feet, a late-arriving pilgrim came in and was shown to the one bed left, the lower bunk under mine.  She seemd upset, and it turned out she had a blister on the back of her left heel, just where mine was on our previous Camino.  I know how much that hurt.  We gave her a few supplies and I helped her fix up her blister.  She was Brazilian.  Maurice pointed out that when my blister had developed last time, the first person who helped me with it was a young Brazliian woman.

We walked around town to see the church and castle ruin and find an ATM and “supermarket” and ended up back at the bar next door to the albergue for the six-euro pilgrim meal.  We sat in back at tables pushed together into a row for pilgrims.  The woman who seemed to run the one-man show of operating both albergue and bar served our dinner—when she was not standing with the huddle of men, young and old, glued to the soccer game on the front wall TV.  “Ooooohh!” they would yell as one, in delight or dismay; another pilgrim told us later it was a championship game, and Lisbon won.  Dinner was wonderful:  the same cabbagey soup we’ve had every night, steak for Maurice and salmon for me, a lettuce and tomato salad with fruity olive oil (how can such a simple thing be so good?) and enough homemade French fries to feed a family of four.  I ate every single one of mine.  Happy pilgrims!