Due to the extreme shakeyness of the beds that made me feel like I was on a small boat out on the ocean, and the super bright streetlights outside exactly on the hight of our beds, the night was not really as restoring as it should have been.
We left at 7 anyway and it was already hot outside. Today we took a D-tour back towards the Camino del Norte to avoid a few more nights on the Camino francés which is terribly crowded so close to Santiago and summer. Walking on the Frances right now means having to reserve all your albergues or get there before 12 and stand in the queue until the albergue opens, and maybe not getting a bed or having to sleep somewhere outside. In other words: it’s not really desirable.
Therefore, we walked towards the little village of Friol in the middle of nowhere. Unexpectedly, after only 10 minutes after leaving Lugo, an absolutely stunningly beautiful path through a forest along a river began and we followed it for almost 2 hours, admiring it’s fairy-tale like beauty.
The only problems in the forest were the spiderwebs that were everywhere and that obligated us to walk swinging our sticks in front of us in order not to be covered in them. Also, we had to stop ever once in a while to check for ticks and remove the ones crawling on our legs.
We finally arrived on the road and were somehow glad about it for the first time in history. We walked until we couldn’t go on any further without new fuel and sat down in the grass in the shade. The others joined us little by little in the next 45 minutes and began pulling all kinds of eatables out of their backpacks. Probably the most exotic one was a 1.7 km pinapple, Mitch had been carrying, but we also had yogurt, cornflakes, ginger chocolate and normal chocolate and all sorts of other stuff.
After this double breakfast of about 1,5 hours we went on together again and walked through increasing heat on roads and paths and dirt roads through different very small villages. Ben and I fell back and split up from the group for a while and got lost a bit but finally rejoined the group one hour later when they were all sitting under some trees in the forest.
It was there that someone decided to take a shortcut straight through the forest and we all followed him. Unfortunately, this “shortcut” went right through a bunch of bee-boxes and Johanna got stung in her ear, which must have been pretty painful.
It got hotter and hotter while we went on after that and it was very hard again, even though the path was very flat with little hills.
We arrived at Friol around 3:30 and sat down on the terrasse of a very first thing to rehydrate and relax in the shade.
Our pension was right next to it and we checked into our 5-person-apartment and 3-bed-room. Afterwards, we decided to go to the swimmingpool of the village about 1 km further but when we got there, it was closed. There was a pretty dirty river right next to it though and a few of us decided to jump in. Ben was the first one to do so and epicly walked in with all his clothes, shoes (and headphones), followed by Johanna, Andres and Mitch.
Along the riverside we found some picnic tables and barbecue places and decided to have a barbecue for dinner. There were no metal frills there it someone found a schistose stone to improvise a hot plate. We went to have showers at home and do the shopping in the supermarket and got lots of awesome food.
However, by some kind of misunderstanding, we all thought there was no charcoal and the grill would work and cooked our stuff in the microwave instead before going to the park. The microwave was inside a bedroom that wasn’t ours on a little table at the end of a weird hallway that was labelled “private” but we were allowed to use it. The whole building was actually very strange and weird but okay.
When we finally got to the park with all our food, the grill was working and we shared all the rest of the food we had bought and had an amazing dinner and amazing time together.
As we didn’t have a curfew today, we didn’t go home at 10 but went to the next bar to get two more bottles of wine after having finished all the beer and the first two bottles of wine. Trying to finish all the food, it got later and later and we did some riddles and very nice performances (poems, singing, percussion, harmonica, etc….). Another bottle of wine was bought and started to get a little chilly. When the stars were shining bright on the sky and we were all very happy and content, at around 12, we decided to go home and not start at 7 tomorrow.
P.S: I am aware that my writing style is getting worse every day and that there are probably many mistakes in my texts, but it is incredibly exhausting to do this very night with bad Internet and tired as hell on my small phone keyboard. So I don’t even bother to proof-read anymore.
