For reasons best known to himself, J got up at the crack of dawn today, so we walked to the station and caught an early train to La Coruna. They have the strangest system of buying tickets here in Spain – you seem to have to specify both the outgoing and returning train. I don’t […]

Today we were both exhausted after all our exertions so we decided just to do a little exploring of Santiago and leave La Corunna for our last day tomorrow. We went on a ride on a little tourist train to explore the city – sadly it does strike me that outside the old town they […]

Santiago de Compostela is absolutely humming today. What a beautiful city. I got up at 6:30am and went over to the Pilgrim’s office to get my Compostela. I was a bit concerned that they might raise issues about the fact that we had a big gap between Leon and Sarria, but in fact the very […]

Today we set off for (unfortunately) a bus tour to Finisterra. Not having a car there is literally not other way to visit this area. The big legend around this is that it was what the Romans regarded as the end of the world but this can not conceivably be true as the the ancient […]

Well we made it. In the case of J he just made it and no more as I have rarely seen anyone more exhausted than he was today. The Camino was very busy but there was a lovely atmosphere and lots of “Buen Caminos”. We passed a few lovely churches and dropped in to get […]

Another uneventful day’s walk through beautiful countryside. Starting to get extremely busy now as the Camino del Norte and the Camino Primitivo have now joined the route to Santiago. We stopped at lunchtime and had some lovely food in an auberge. I had never had a “Galacian Sandwich” before, but it was sardines, ewe’s cheese […]

20190417_111005000_iOSA very pleasant but long (18 miles) stage today. The scenery, which on Monday seemed to be rather unremarkable farmland had cheered up and we went through some spectacular little villages. One bonus of this stage seems to be that the churches are all open and it is possible to have a look round inside […]

After finally managing to kick J into action this morning we set off amongst a huge crowd of pilgrims. I’ve noticed that the demographic seems definitely to have shifted to young Spanish people away from the very international and distinctly middle aged people we met early on. Presumably this is because the final stage is […]

I was dead right in saying that it was going to be noisy overnight. The pilgrim party stopped about 1am and then trucks started honking about 5am. About 6am the pilgrims started to get up and that was the end to sleep. We had a smashing breakfast. For some reason it was scotch pancakes (drop […]

This morning I went to early mass in the Cathedral of Leon. I don’t think I would actually have found it without the help of a young Mexican pilgrim I met in the square outside as it was in a (spectacular) side chapel. He was getting a bus to Sarria today, so perhaps we will […]