29 September - Palas de Rei to Melide

Eric: Only 14km's to walk today which will get us to Melide. The streets were wet with overnight rain but John didn't say anything today to jinx the weather so we enjoyed cool overcast conditions for most of the walk.

Peter and John powering ahead

 

Other than the occasional 'ola' or 'buen camino' to fellow walkers there was little human interaction. It's interesting how the mind wanders when you're just walking for hours on end. Ideas and thoughts play through the mind while wandering past the old villages, creeks, steak factories, smurfs and marshmallow fields. No epiphanies yet.
 

milk bar / steak factory

marshmallow field 

wild caterpie

Bridge into Melide

Melide was pretty busy when we got there, presumably the post church lunch crowd in their sunday best. Checked in, left Collie to nap and we went searching for lunch. There were a few pulperias along the main road and we headed for the one recommended by the lady at reception.

View from the bridge

And wouldn't you know it, the place was full and there was a line outside! Despite the promise of good pulpo (judging from the guy at the shop window chopping up tentacles) we were too hungry to wait and ended up in a quieter place where we partook in stuffed peppers, garlic prawns and albariño wine.

Stuffed Peppers with Potatoes

 Garlic Prawns
 

 Grilled peppers

 

John: Well the skies were clearer and it only rained a bit … mostly as we came into Melide … and we only had 15kms to do. We passed through several small woods which would have been very romantic in warmer weather but seemed fairly dank and dismal because of the rain. Mostly flatter country, still seems to be a fair bit of dairying, but we spent most of the day away from the farm yard rather than in it as we had been doing earlier. Hotel is interesting, seems to be an old warehouse of some kind judging from its location in an alley and the roller door at the front, and obviously they’ve put in three floors where there may have been two because the windows in our rooms are at floor level. Col and Pete have a view of somebody’s back yard, complete with chickens, but it is very comfortable. Our first encounter with hotel staff unable to speak English … we were trying to ascertain if they were going to be able to offer us dinner and it wasn’t going well until Pete uttered the magic words “Tee Travel” that they understood whereupon we were escorted back to the Pulporium we’d tried to go to earlier and fed. A bit of boning up on the old phrase book and we were ready to ask when and where breakfast was and when the bags would be collected … all went well but the locals had worked out that we “no entiendo espanol” and had resorted to writing down 9 for “las neuve” or nine o’clock … etc ... we just won’t tell the Spanish teacher.