6/14/17 – 18.6km/11.6mi from Baamonde to A Lagoa.
After a night of merrymaking in Baamonde, some of the crew woke up not feeling so good. Solution? Open up one of our bottles of wine left over from yesterday, and have a morning roadie. I tried to resist temptation, but in the end I had a lil’ sip too. Today’s paths were beautiful and green, and the walk was fairly short – mostly because of the limited sleep possibilities. We stopped for lunch at a beautiful place called Witericus – it was about 100 yards off the path, and some of us were ahead of the others. So we used some eucalyptus tree bark to create an arrow, and left a cryptic clue to let our friends know that “Ben Camino” was headed in that direction. It worked! It was a beautiful little rustic hostel also, and we thought about staying there for the night. But, we felt we had to move a little bit forward so that tomorrow won’t be superlong.
Ultimately, we got to stay at the absolutely delightful Albergue A Lagoa. The place was just a few years old, and had everything – including queen sized dorm beds! I’ve never slept more comfortably on any night of any Camino! It also had a huge yard for some of our group to set up their tents, and for me to do some yoga. And for dinner, all of us signed up for the “pilgrim meal,” which here was a magnificent and massive barbecue. We’re going to have the meat sweats for a few days.
Another highlight of the day was an unexpected stop on the way. David and I walked around the wall of a house playing loud Spanish music, and we wondered jokingly if it was an afternoon dance party. I hesitated for just a minute at the gate, where a sign said that they stamp pilgrim passports, but in the end we went in. And what a surprise! We met “Chacon” (Javier Lopez), a local stone sculptor at work in his workshop. He has designed quite a lot of works of art in his day. He gave everybody the coolest stamp in our passports so far, a sealing wax stamp of the Templar cross.
We marveled at the stuff he made – including a massive Mayan calendar made out of smooth black stone, over a meter high! And inside his house we saw a veritable museum of handcrafted and brilliant pieces of stone work. I liked one so much, I bought it and I’m taking it home. I liked the message on it, it says “Los Caminos no tienen final, nuestros pasos si.” You can translate that in a few different ways. What I took from it was “Just because we stop walking, doesn’t mean our Camino has ended.” An additional bonus to this, is when somebody picks up my heavy backpack and asks “what do ya got in here, rocks?” I can say yes!
