Days 25-28 – Camino de Santiago – Triacastella – Sarria – Portomarin – Palas de Rei

Ahhhhh so nice to be back in the mountains again.  The scenery is nicer and the temperatures more tolerable.  Yes its more difficult to walk, but you can hardly complain when you have views such as this.

On this day we made our way to Triacastella, passing farmers with their cows, little churches…

and more beautiful views.

Until we finally arrived to this cute little town.

It has a pretty church and other pretty little architectural details.  Plus we made friends with this puppy.

The next morning was super duper foggy as we set out for Sarria.

In order to receive your certificate of completion for the Camino de Santiago you must at least start 100km out.  That point is Sarria so we expected to pick up a whole bunch more “pilgrims”.  I use the term loosely here because I don’t think someone who only walks an eighth of the trail constitutes as a pilgrim.  And pick up people we did.  The trail became thick with annoying people who tried to complain about their feet hurting or getting ready in the dark.  Boo freaking hoo!

Today was a very short walking day for us, we showed up in Sarria before the albergue was even open, so we sat outside and ate our sandwich.  After we showered and washed our clothes, we took our usual walk around the city.

Here we found a monastery, but of course it was closed for siesta.

The next day we had a very pleasant walk to Portomarin.  For this last stretch of the camino we decided to take it easy and slow, only going 20-24km each day.

We passed through this little town and this kitty started following Martin.  When we stopped to take some pictures, the cat jumped and climbed up his body and perched on his shoulders and started loving on his neck, it was so cute.

Here is the little grain storage building that is so typical of Galicia….and some moo cows!

On the right you see too handsome Danish lads we picked up along the way.  Im so glad we started talking with them because for the last several days of the camino, we walked together, ate together and stayed together in the albergues – they are so nice and funny and Im so glad we got to know them.  By the end I felt like we had a little camino family!

When you get to Portomarin you have ALL these steps to climb to enter the city.  Not really what you want to see after hiking for hours.

Later, we went back to the entrance of the city because there’s 2 bridges.  The tall one is the new one that is in use and the short one is the ancient one – rumor has it it used to be an open air brothel.  Down by the bridges we met this really sweet big doggie!

Some more friends we made: Byul – a VERY sweet South Korean girl – everyone knew her as star because her name was hard to pronounce but we tried!!!! Love you Byul! And Shawn -if you remember I gave him a shout out earlier on the blog for a very sweet email that he sent us.  He was doing the Camino with his 78 year old sweet lady of a mom who absolutely no one on the camino could keep up with.  Seriously I tried once for about 30 minutes and it nearly killed me.  She power walked the whole way every day and then walked all over the towns as her cool down.  What an incredible woman, really.  And her son Shawn is very sweet and was the total social butterfly of the camino.  Too find him, all you had to do was walk down the street with the bars and there he’d be with a new bunch of people and he would know all their names, where they were from, what they did, how long they had been walking, etc.  And he would remember it all too! Very glad we got to know you Shawn! And you better believe we will be coming for a visit!

The next day was another little short day to Palas de Rei.  If you look closely you can see that at this point we only had 78.1 km to Santiago!

I only have ONE more post for you to conclude our walk across the Camino de Santiago! So, what do you think? Would you be interested in doing it too?