villafranca de bierzo to vega and vega to o cebreiro to tricastela and tricastela to sarria.

original post is older, but edited April 17th to add pics and comments at bottom


wow, i am SO tired. almost too tired to blog this. but i have to stay up till 11 pm anyway cuz gro has to sleep in the entryway of this albergue so i need to make sure shes settled after they shut the door.

a few random comments. we did almost 35 k yesterday. we had to hitchhike the last 5 k or so into tricastela becasue it was getting dark. we were lucky to finally get a lift. the bigger problem was that yesterday was saturday, there had been no shops all day, except in the village friday night, and i was NOT lugging 2 days food up o cebreiro, so i was trying to get into tricastela to get us food before the shops closed cuz we had little stored food for dinner and nothing for today sunday when alllllllll shops are closed.... we got there and the shop was already closed anyway;thankfully it was open today unlike most shops so we sat outside it for an hour till it was open with gro in my lap, on one of those silver blankets, and a sleeping bag over both of us until the shop opened. it actually worked out better that we left later because it was so foggy this morning we couldnt have seen ANYTHING on the tricastela-sarria path. and the views turned out beautiful. it was foggy in the beginning but it was still beautiful.

the galicia region is BEAUTIFUL. its what ireland would look like if ireland had more trees, more mountains, and less rocks and sheep. but it is the same green, wet, foggy, fairy-tale-ish kind of place, or at least it was walking through the woods this morning. the woods were deserted enough that i felt safe enough to let gro off-leash for a few minutes to play fetch. she was delighted. she hasnt had a chance to be off-leash outside in over a month. so wrong, but so necessary given her propensity for trying to eat any dog that she can sense within a mile....

this post is discombobulated...seems like blog is getting less and less organized as i go, but seems like internet time is so sparse unless i have a rest day somewhere.

a few more (positive) comments i must make about Ave Fenix, the albergue i raved about in the last post: some albergues are in a rush to get you out the door and make u leave by 8am, even though its barely light. here, they encouraged me to relax, take my time, and one of the hospitaleras visiting from another place told me the best time to go was around 11 at this time of year because it wasnt so cold :) before i left we TRIED to paint a yellow arrow on grainnes grey raincoat cuz i thought that would be cool...but the yellow spraypaint didnt work and he only had orange besides that so her raincoat now looks like that of a construction man or something...lol.. i still want to get some yellow spraypaint or even better yellow ductape...anyway Jesus (HAY-SUS, not jesus), the man who runs the hostel, was delighted to search for paint and put the arrow on for me, and i also got a shell to put on my bag, so i started feeling more like i was part of the camino "in-crowd". lol. while i was waiting for the paint to dry, jesus and a bunch of the other hospitaleros had to leave. he came up and gave me this big hug, like a grandpa or something. i really liked that place. also, they have a community meal every evening, and that was really nice to eat with all the other people there. the others there were all hospitaleros and they were working on the place, renovating. we had a good laugh earlier in the day when they were painting the bedframes blue and one of the guys had totally blue hands and i tried to tell him he looked like a smurf...but he didnt speak english and me no spanish and it just didnt translate. he thought i was telling him he looked like a desert nomad with blue skin. then one of the women there suddenly realized what i was talking about and said whatever the name for the smurfs is in spanish, and they all busted out laughing cuz they DID in fact know who the smurfs were.

the day i left villafranca bierzo we took it easy and i was still feeling kind of tired. it took us the whole day to go 17 k or something.... that night i stayed at the albergue with a cool german guy who spoke english, which was cool, and also a swedish man who was just starting, and a spanish guy who insists on leaving the albergues before 8am... he goes out with his headlamp...apparently he likes to start early. the next day which was yesterday, we had to get up o cebreiro. i had been concerned about this climb cuz my book made it look impossible, and i had been worried about the weather getting up it, but the climb was BEAUTIFUL, and the weather too. weather was so warm you could go without a jacket and gro and i stopped partway up and took a nap. it was that warm. if a tshirt had made it into my bag i probly would have had it on but one didnt. so weird to be HOT IN THE SNOW!! i mean there was snow on the ground, and 2 feet on the edges of the road in some places, but we were very warm. it was very warm beautiful. the climb up wasnt like a climb up a mountainside cliff face either, it was first a steep climb through beaufiful old forest, then tracks through fields and stuff. at the top there was loads of snow in the village but it was warm. this guy started snapping pics of me as we emerged from teh path. also there was all sorts of irish music stuff going on and stuff up top. we had entered galicia and i guess galicia has alot of irish influence. plus it was saturday. it was busy up there. tourbuses and stuff. i stopped at the albergue to ask what other hostels were open past there, filled my waterbottle and set off. it was only 230, too early to stop for the day, beautiful weather, and plus we needed to get down to lower warmer altitude in case we had to sleep in my tent. PLUS i THOUGHT it was all downhill from there...it wasnt. we spent the next few hours trekking MORE UPWARDS along the road, and the worst part being that because we were in the shadow of the north side of the mountain, it was freezing and no sun reaching us cuz we were in the shadow of the mountain. we needed to rest as we hadnt really rested since our nappie nap part way up cebreiro, but everywhere was freezing. i kept thinking that around the next bend we would finally get out of the shadow, but it took AGES and i didnt want us to stop in the shade. when we finally got to sun, near paio de alto, we just sat down on the side of the road. gro was out cold for about 15 minutes then i had to start us busting @** again to try to hoof it to tricastela before dark. we had really taken our time and enjoyed the morning, but our enjoyable day turned into a long haul of just trying to get there in the evening. the views were gorgeous, but all i really cared about was getting the heck to tricastela, which took FOREVER. i had expected that the downhill was going to be really downhill down down steep, like coming down to ponferrada a few days earlier, where i was literally running down the path and we were covering tons of distance and getting lower altitude fast. here, the descent was SO gradual it felt like we were getting nowhere. so glad to finally get to tricastela, and so thankful that someone finally picked us up and that it was someone "ok." (A young couple). i have quite a bit of experience hitchhiking in ireland, but hitchhiking in a country where you dont speak the language feels quite a bit riskier. i was hoping that someone would finally pick us up because it was getting dark, there were so so few cars though, but finally someone did.

the changed weather has made ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD. seriously, i dont see how we could still be doing this if we were struggling through cold, rain and snow every day. that climb to cebreiro was beautiful in the nice weather but seeing the 2 ft of snow on the roadsides really made me think about how impossible it would have been 2 weeks ago when that snow was falling. the timing for us to go up it, which was in part determined by all the rest days we took, etc etc etc, in the end made it possible for us to get up and down it, which is really cool. but seriously, the weather makes SO much difference;it means we can sort of stroll and meander, rather than feeling under pressure to just get through it. it doesnt make everything perfect as i still feel quite wrecked and with hurting feet alot of the time, but the fact that you can stop for a rest or a nap and the sun is warm etc really does make all the difference. yes i still have hurting feet. i mailed more stuff to myself, bringing the total of stuff mailed to self to about 10 pounds out of my pack, but when im carrying food, the bag is still heavy, but manageable now to me. my feet keep hurting, but in different places each day so im not so worried about them. if it was the same spot all the time then i would be more worried. different spots i can handle. the awful trying day after sleeping outside ponferrada shelter, i bought some silicone insoles for my boots, as my boots dont seem to have as good shock absorption as desired...but unfortunately the insoles seem to be disintegrating from my wet boots....

hmmm. i feel like i am just talking stream of consiousness here but i feel like i should take advantage of internet time on the scattered occasions that i get it. my thoughts are so organized during the day about what i would write about if i was writing at those moments...but then when it gets to this time of night... scattered. going to try to upload some pics.

EDIT: ADDED LATER: the following pics and comments :)

Ok, these are my fav pics from this sections, so even though it puts them out of order in this post, as they shoudl be at the BOTTOM after arriving cebreiro, they are at the top :) these were at the top of cebreiro. sun was warm but still snow on the ground. some guy was taking photos with a big camera, "asked" (in another language, if i remember correctly) if he could take ours, then took some of us with mine. cebreiro was hopping like an irish pub up there on a saturday, but we didnt stick around for long. there were too many dogs around, and also we needed to get going. good thing we did because the rest of the day was tough, not interesting, cold, along the road, some of it not very scenic, and in the shade of the mountain where the snow never melted, and we still ended up having to hitch into tricastela because it was getting dark.













Luisa, one of the visiting hospitaleras at Ave Fenix. we expected to run into her later in our travels, and when i had realized i lost grainnes muzzle off my bag somewhere between Villafranca de Bierzo and Vega, I called her to see if she could keep an eye out for it as she was walking starting the next day... i dont know if she ever found it, but we never ran into her again,and had no way to get in touch with one another, though we ran into other people who had been walking with her. anyway, i guess she got stuck with a useless (and pricey...oops.) dog muzzle if she did find it... below is grainne with her flashy new "yellow" arrow on her jacket. hahaha. she remeinds me of a construction worker with the bright orange that was supposed to be yelllow... and my bag with the shell on it. I definitely felt more like i was part of the camino after I got myself a shell for my bag.





There were vegetable gardens on the edge of the river all on the edges of Villafranca. huge gardens (below)









We stopped for lunch under these big beautiful ?chestnut? trees only a few km outside of villafranca. it seemed like we had been walking FOREVER but we had only gone a few k. anyway the leaves were soft and the sun was warm. good nap. we took a LONG lunch. i didnt want to leave. was really tired and just wanted to keep eating and sleeping ;) i remember thinking how we still had AGES to go... anyway, the village we stopped at these trees for lunch near was the next village from villafranca, where we could have hiked to instead of stopping in villafranca. im so glad we stayed in villafranca, as the albergue was awesome and in this village there was no shop, no nothing. .anyway, at these trees i think this is where we left behind grainnes muzzle though, and it would have come in handy later, especially in santiago. by the time i realized it was missing though, i was NOT going back the 4 k or so to these trees to check... I think the path was fairly flat this day and alot of it was along the roadways. I didnt know if there would be a shop in the village where we were staying and i was afraid of getting stuck again without food, so i went hunting for a shop in one of the previous villages. took a detour to the gas station but they hadnt fruit, finally found a tiny shop where we paid four billion dollars for some oranges..but at least i felt better that i had some more food in case there was no shop.

















kwwalking from villafranca, we then spent the night in vega. these pics above and below are of the moon, when we were leaving vega the next morning to go up o cebreiro. The night in vega was OK, i didnt sleep well though, like most places. at least i had a bed, but it was chilly. showers were a bit on the chilly side :( --the kind where its "borderline"...ie. you keep staying in, HOPING its gonna get just that little bit warmer, but it doesnt, so it leaves you borderline shivering the whole time. hate those. the company was good though, especially after many nights as the only pilgrim in an albergue. because there was a shop in that village after all i ended up making way more food than me and grainne could eat, and so shared with a german guy who was just arriving in very late. he offered some of his wine that he had gotten in cacabellos (sp?). cacabellos is well known for its wine, and apparently if pilgrims go to a certain place, they give you a free small bottle, but you have to know where to go. apparently he had known where to go :) . Also, at least the albergue was open in vega...when we first arrived, everything was locked up except the bathrooms. i could see the dorm rooms but not get to them, and i think i tried the phone number and it didnt work. so i was just about to set off to try to ask at the bars where to get a key, when it occurred to me to go upstairs. sure enough the upstairs dorms were fortunately open.
Anyway, back to the pics. it was lovely seeing the moon as we were headed out in the morning.

below is the path near la faba. i feel like i posted alot of these pics in another post already, and that someone even commented on one of them (the dog shadow one..)..but they are nowhere to be found anymroe so i dont know what happened to that blog posts. .... anyway, the hike from vega all the way up was AMAZINg. alot of it was through woods, and i really appreciated being on our own and having it to ourselves. nice weather too, and paths overlaid by leaves crunching under your feet. further along, after passing through almost all the other villages, i could look back and see the view, which is like the picture below right. we stopped to nap again somewhere along that path. LOTS OF NAPS FOR ME ON THIS CAMINO!! ;P i think i first took a nap the day i left leon. it was a long, straight, 12k with nothing out there, and i was so tired and bored and the sun was out a bit so it wasnt totally freezingt--though you had to watch out for wet ground, uch. anyway, i just lay down on the side of the path. that was the beginning of my "chronic napping on the camino", lol. later on i found myself napping frequently because i was wrecked and tired and the sun looked so nice to sleep in... but then we would end up getting places so late because i had stopped to nap, but i just wasnt sleeping well in ANY of the albergues basically, so i would wake up tired every morning and sometimes feel like i got more rest during a nap than i had all night long at the albergues!!


These two pics here I think were from the top of cebreiro, looking out over the valley/path we had just come from.


oops here it is i found it elsewhere :)