It is said that in London one is never more than 20 feet from a rat. It might be 50 feet or 5 feet I guess depending on whether one is a member of the Guild of Rat Terminators and pleading on the Today programme for more government “investment” in rat killing. Anyway, this has zero relevance to this post apart from the fact that on the Camino Frances one was generally never more than about 60 minutes from a bar. Sure there were some exceptions to that rule but the way was pretty well supplied.
Not so the Camino Ingles. In fact I have been guilty of decrying the Camino Ingles. Whilst the French crossed two mountain ranges and walked a minimum of 500 miles, I used to say, the English and Irish caught a booze cruise to a port near Santiago and had a five day saunter to the cathedral, bought their remission from hell, and then swanned off back to dear old Blighty. However this route has its challenges. It’s not really the terrain (although today’s climb certainly made me work) but rather the lack of places to sit down and drink coffee or beer. I was 18km out of Betanzos, today’s starting point, before I came across Casa Julia. Now it is probably a good pub. Indeed a few miles before I got there, a random chap stopped his car, beeped at me, reversed up to me and told me that it was not far to Casa Julia where I could get something to eat. This was delivered in Spanish but with plenty of hand gestures to indicate that the food was good. So, if random strangers are out marketing your pub, that’s probably indicative that you are doing something right. So I stopped, had a couple of pints and a large cheese and ham sandwich and went on my way up the steepest part of the route. But that was it. Nothing else until I got to my hotel. So I now reckon the English and Irish were a bit tougher than the shortness of the route would imply.
Casa Julia
Today was a dog day. Not slow, just that I got stalked by a couple of dogs. The one in the second photo was clearly prone to wandering since it had a radio transmitter attached to its collar. It followed me up the steep slope so I did a lot of stick waving and barking to try and get it to turn round. It just lay down and presented its tummy to be rubbed. Eventually I got to a flat bit around a corner and ran and managed to lose it. The second dog, a bitch, clearly thought I was incompetent and needed a bit of shepherding, which she did for a few hundred yards.
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