After a pretty good night in a pretty shitty albergue, we started the Camino Primitivo today. As I already mentioned, this Camino is commonly described as “Challenging but worth it” and has been highly recommended to us. It is supposed to have more mountains and less road wich is why we decided to switch from the Camino del Norte to the Primitivo.
With its official starting point in front of the Cathedral of Oviedo, the path took us out of the city and through foggy villages that looked basically exactly like Ottweiler or Schiffweiler. We were supposed to see the famous Holy Mountain on the other side of the valley but we only saw a thick white layer of fog.
On our way out of the city we met Christopher, a German man who walked with us until breakfast break after the first 7 km. We stopped in front of a little chapel and enjoyed food and views for a while before going on. Mitch caught up with us (Ben was taking the bus again due to his bad ankle) and we kept on walking through villages, through very beautiful forests with broad rivers and on some ugly and dangerous roads.
The clouds and fog vanished soon and a burning sun and heat took their place. We walked up our first elevation and down again until Christopher reached his albergue and we decided to stop there for lunch next to a water fountain in the shadows.
In the end, Christopher invited us to a cold drink in the bar and we stayed there a little longer than expected, not very motivated to go on.
We overcame the strong desire to just stay at the nice albergue with the big garden and the cold beer and went on for another 7 km to Grado, our stage’s destination. The official albergue still had beds for us and Ben was already waiting there. Tiredness and weird complaining mood kicked in after showering and washing and we almost didn’t make it to the supermarket.
We survived the shopping and even the way back up to the albergue, cooked dinner and ate about 2 kg of rice with chicken and veggies.
Even though we were pretty destroyed, we stayed up way too long playing cards afterwards until the hospitalero kindly asked us to go to sleep.
