Subject: santiago- hooray!!!
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 17:05:38 +0000
hola,
well they say that a girl´s best friend are cosmetics and clothes, but i´ve revised this idea and now i´m aiming to head a movement championing tar mark as a girl´s best friend. I love tar mark!! whenever i see a nice flat tar marked surface i rejoice and think hallelujah (very god-like i know), no more pushing of the bikes. We´ve been going on the actual camino track more lately, which incidentally has signs for bikes on it, which may i add is a joke. I´m sure that whoever put those signs up has never ridden a bike, and definitely not a bike loaded up with panniers and loads of stuff, anywhere near those tracks. And why is it that they ( whoever makes the paths) feels the need to put all of the most slippery gravel, or the biggest stones - no rocks, boulders even - on the most vertical of up hill slopes, i think they are trying to bleep the cyclist off.
Well today i was in no mood to be grappling with such stupid hills, as now i have deri´s cold and he is all better, my mind over matter thing was working but i got really drunk and forgot to do it, ...... anyway for some unknown reason deri likes these bleep ridiculous paths, so he went one way and i went on the road - i like going fast and i like the satisfaction of seeing the kilometres wizzing by. Anyway i´m ill, and today i didn´t want to mess about, i got into santiago at 11.45 am which was good, had a really nice pizza and a cup of tea and waited for deri & hans. Came across deri at the side of the road when coming back from town, his bike rack has come off so he can´t ride coz it keeps falling in the wheel and the cogs, see that´s what you get for taking stupid-bleep dirt tracks, and not sensible lovely flat tar mark. Again i do love tar mark!
It´s been so hot here the last few days, up to 25 celsius between 1 and 4, and still these spanish people wrap up in shawls, an winter coats, weird weird people, we saw this tramp today with a wolly hat and gloves on, personally i think she was milking it a bit.
I don´t feel too bad in the day time but really rough in the mornings and at night, tomorrow deri is walking on to finisterre with hans and i´m taking a day off to recover, then depending how i feel the next day or day after i´m gonna ride on and catch them up, i don´t think i could manage a whole 8 days on my own (4 days there and back), hope the weather holds up though because they say you´ve gotta go swimming in the sea in finisterre, people used to think it was the end of the world and that you had to go in the sea to wash away you´re sins.
Sarria was good, the night before last and yes the pancakes were great, the albergue was really small and was more like a guest house, me and deri got really drunk ...they put out complementary liquors and shot glasses and light a fire in an out building, it was really pleasant, and the people were really friendly, also they didn´t have a kicking out time or a going to bed time, which was novel.
We don´t really know what we´re going to do afetr finister, the main objective at the moment is to head south to the sun, although i don´t think i could cope with more heat in the day times at the moment, trying to cycle in it is really hard work, but it´s freezing cold in the mornings, i mean like -1, well actually 2 celsius, but that´s pretty cold especially when your going down a big hill or something, i have my hood cagoule that makes me look like a member of alcaeda, but it does the job, until about 11 when we start stripping off into shorts, by the way i have the most laughable tan lines, my hands are now stark white and arms relatively brown - for me anyway - and half way up my legs behind my knees i have horizontal lines from my cycling leggings, down my face i have strap marks from my helmet, thankfully these aren´t that obvious, but how attractive am i looking! and i´m far more tanned on my left side coz we´re always cycling west, i can´t wait to turn around (east) to even things out a bit.
We are a bit concerned about how expensive it´s gonna be when we leave the camino, and one topic of conversation has been the setting up of a camino in britain, we thought to start with we could get it to go to glastonbury torre, via stonehenge, and if we could arrange it so the end point would coincide with glastonbury festival this would be a good incentive, we thought that maybe we could contact the owner and see if he would give a discount on tickets to anyone producing a fully stamped camino credential ( we now have a fully or nearly fully stamped book, which we had to show to get our certificates, and to stay in the albergues) anyway we reckon that we need to get the hippies walking and in 20 years it´ll be accepted in the middle classes, could get lottery funding, and funding off the culture and tourism sectors of the government, get prince charles on board as a green initiative, and he could get the princes trust to build the paths. Local businesses would all benefit, and they could do special pilgrims menus like they do here at cheaper rates, and once one is started, loads of them could be set up - wales camino to st davids, scotland to somewhere or other etc.. As you can see we really have given this a lot of thought, even thought of logistics and stuff, but how could we get people walking in the first place, it´s not as if we have the weather like spain has, maybe an anti-obesity ploy?????? well not a lot else to talk about, adios
beth
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