Sun rose at 6:30 and it stayed on the sky surrounded by blue sky all day. We had early-rising roommates, extremely shaky beds and completely insane cows in front of our window today, so we left early at 10 past 7.
Apart from the perfect blue sky, the day welcomed us with a huge mountain. It hadn’t looked that hard on the altitude profile, but it was. Complaining started earlier than ever before as we went up and up towards the highest peak visible in the surrounding landscape. We didn’t like it. However, the view on the surrounding mountains and the clouds hanging in the valleys were very nice.
On the top of the mountain, surrounded by wind mills, we crossed the border between Asturias and Galicia, the last region we are walking through.
We sat down on a spot of grass right after that and had breakfast, not willing to walk any further.
After a while -like always- the rest of the gang started to appear. We kept on walking with Mitch and Ben and Andre from Chech Republik joined us after a while. We walked down the other side of the mountain and reached the first “village” in Galicia, consisting of one single building. Even though we had refilled our energy tanks with breakfast, we burnt almost all of it in a giant attack of laughter and were pretty exhausted afterwards.
After this, it started to get really hot and the path took us up and down on dirt roads and forest paths and along the national roads under the burning sun. We reached a bar at one point and sat down in the grass for a while.
We still had 4 km to go to the only real town we were passing by today: Fonsagrada.Fonsagrada is built on a huge mountain which we had to climb and which was one of the worst climbs yet and super hot. However, Fonsagrada had a small supermarket and we bought some lunch and ate on a little square next to the church. Lukas and Tom arrived and we decided to cook dinner together later this evening. Fonsagrada was the last chance to get some groceries and we bought some rice and vegetables together and splitted up the weight.
We had to carry them the last 3 or 4 km to O Piñeral, which we almost missed and just walked by if someone hadn’t looked on the GPS at some point.
O Piñeral, as the word sais, was just one building in the middle of a pine forest and we checked in together as a group of 7. The showers were quite nice although there was not even one single hanger anywhere in the bathroom and the light switched off every 9 seconds (we counted when we were in the shower).We all gathered in the bar after showering and washing and had some beer and wine and celebrated our first 500 km.
Inspired by the first glasses of beer and wine, we all got rum Coke afterwards and proceeded to cooking dinner around 8. There were two kilos of rice that almost didn’t fit into the two largest pots, and all the vegetables we had been able to carry from the last supermarket. Mixed up with some curry and pepper and pineapple and canned tuna for the non-vegetarians, we had a great dinner all together on the terrasse of the restaurant and lots of fun.
The evening was good enough to make Johanna forget she wanted to cool her ankle, which she half-sprained yesterday, but in the end we got some “help” from the bar-tender.
When we finally went to bed it was far too late and, tired and exhausted as I was, uploading this blog with the extremely bad internet drove me completely nuts.
