And the bottle tops are mounting up on Alan & Peter’s table… As Chivas regal and we’re drinking in the Camino.
As Chivas being our rural idyll billet for the night, just up the hill and off the Way.
And the Spanish name for the farmhouse’s permanent residents, the guests.
That Alan and Peter are Australian is unsurprising.
And takes me back to Top Deck days on a repurposed double decker bus to the Oktoberfest in Munich.
When Rambo would bite the tops off the bottles when we lost the bottle opener.
We pass the late afternoon in the sun sharing war stories of this trek and others.
Hakes and hikes
Julio and Davide run an easy, informal tab, where you mount up bottle caps into a mountain and pay on departure.
I feast in the evening on two hakes, patates (chips) and green veg with Brusssel sprouts.
And the next day roll back down the hill to rejoin the Camino Portugues.
A couple of kilometres down into the village of Arcade and then back into the woods en route to Pontevedra.
Big Brother is watching
There will be more Aussies, Americans, South Americans and ten likely lassies from my hometown of Glasgow.
With whom I spend far too much time for Big Brother’s liking and he marches ahead.
Each time their own and every Camino is your own.
I form more attachments along the Way including a lucky black cat.
And fill a second page on my Camino passport and splash on the holy water in a Wayside chapel dating back to the 1690s.
We will meet up again at the Galicia Palace in Pontevedra at the end of our 16kms stretch.
Only 70kms to go to Santiago de Compostella and, yes, we’ll…
MEET YOU ON THE ROAD