Day 4: Camiño Ingles (Betanzos-Presedo)

Day 4, Camino Ingles (Betanzos-Presedo)

Please listen to recorded version first, here (i am singing to you amd you alone :), thinking of it as a sort of podcast!

Good morning, good morning. It's nice to see you here. Good morning. Good morning to you. 

All right, let me paint the scene I am on the top of yet another mountain, having just left the town of betthos, having summited another mountain, and today it is raining like the dickens, and it's forecasted to rain the entire day. So I was kind of pinching myself because the first three days had basically no rain and actually quite a lot of sun. And now the rain has arrived, and it is supposed to stay with us until the end of the week. So I've summited this mountain, and I am leaving this message under my umbrella. I have a bright yellow umbrella that I bought from the Correos (the public post office), and their colors are yellow and blue. And so my umbrella is bright yellow, like fluorescent yellow, and it's a teeny little retractable umbrella, like those portable ones. So it's not huge, but it's just big enough to cover my phone and my head and part of my bag while I walk. And I'm sort of decked out this year. I have an umbrella; I have a raincoat given to me by my beautiful niece Sokaris; And I have all of my essential items in a dry bag inside my backpack, because although the backpack is covered in basically what looks like a plastic hair net, things will inevitably get wet, because, of course, the straps are getting wet, even if the rest is covered, and then the water from the straps travels to the main part of the bag. But I would say by the time I arrive, I will be about 50% dry, which is doing pretty darn stinking good. (Step aside to let this car go by). 

Something I've learned about cars in Galicia this morning is they do not play and they do not slow down when the rain is out, because I'm guessing it's pretty standard fare here. So people are cruising, and to give you a sense, dear listener, dear reader, it is still not light out, and it's after nine o'clock. It's dark and cloudy. It was pitch black when I left, and so I couldn't bring myself to leave in the rain quite yet, at 730. And so instead, I went to a little bar off the main plaza, and the sweetest woman, she had just made fresh tortilla. I took a photo of it. And when a tortilla Española is still fresh, it's essentially scalloped skinned potatoes in egg yolk. But my understanding is the potatoes are hot and the egg is not and so basically, once the egg mixture is poured on the potatoes, it slowly cooks, but not right away. And my other understanding from some of my Spanish friends is that the most prized part and time to eat the tortilla is while the egg is still raining, while it's still cooking. And so that's one of the pieces I got this morning, and I will say it's a very different texture, right? It's much creamier, and it was really good. So I had that with a little cafecito. I found lactose free milk here, which I love, and every bar has it. It's like a standardized thing across Spain, now also across Italy. So that's lovely. So just got a little mini coffee and some tortilla and put all my things in a dry bag and sort of re geared up for the rain. I find that this has to happen in stages. And then marched out. I ran into some folks that I walked with yesterday. They were also busy pulling out rain ponchos and basically any of the rain gear that they own. This is the day, right? And I learned you know about walking in rain. I'll just reflect on this for a moment. 

In June, I had a day where it was forecasted to really, really rain, and I opted to not walk. I can't remember all of the reasons, but I think I wasn't feeling well, and I didn't have good rain gear with me at the time. So I didn't walk, and ended up taking a bus to the next destination. And let me tell you, I was sooo out of sorts. I think it was from having lost the rhythm, being sad that I hadn't walked in the rain, being sad that I hadn't had that experience. It was also the day on the Camino Frances when you pass this sort of epic beloved wine fountain, and so I missed that as well. But the bigger thing, and this is actually something I had learned from one of my participants in songs of Santiago, the year before, was just to embrace the rain. Just embrace it. It's okay to get wet, especially if you're moving, because right now, as I'm leaving you this message, there is steam coming out of my mouth every time I exhale and I have a lot of heat buildup, and as long as you keep on moving, the heat keeps coming, as long as you have a certain baseline number of calories coming into your body, you'll be Okay. So that is my philosophy for today and probably the next three days, it's gonna be embrace the rain and then, okay, so specifics. 

What do you do about a really wet pair of hiking shoes when they're the only pair you have? Well, newspaper works wonders. Taking your insoles out works wonders to the bare, bare bones of the shoe, and then drying each piece separately on whatever you have at your disposal. A wood fireplace is the best. But really anything will do a couple weeks ago, when we were in El Ganso, the host there brought all of our shoes overnight into a furnace room, or like a wood pellet stove room that was basically the furnace for the whole house. And it was like being inside a cave. And I mean, there were literally 30 or 40 pairs of shoes in that room. They were all sleeping in there, side by side. And I mean, they had to be in there for about, geez, 14 hours or so to dry out. But they did, and by the next day, we were all walking again. 

There were also many jokes, because the furnace in the house where the shoes were drying was a couple houses down, and so no one, because no one of the shoes. No one had the ability to go and fetch their own shoes. So we had to send commissions, delegations of shoe retrievers. And then one morning, I got the wrong shoes for someone. I was so proud of myself. I thought it was being such a good retreat leader. And he held them. He totally played along. He held them, picked them up and like, well, these are really nice shoes. He's like, but they're not mine, and you're running back. And then I started having this incredible amount of like anxiety that maybe his shoes have been lost. And I, you know, of course, I started like playing out the repercussions of that, and then we found them, and it was fine. I Okay, so I'm about to go over a busy freeway, as you might be able to tell from the sound the rain has picked up, and apparently this morning, I am cracking myself up. So this morning, this morning, ramble, this morning, meander through the rain as much as I am, let's see what else yesterday. I think I mentioned in my post and recording from yesterday that I walked with a family from Toledo, and then yesterday was really sparse on the food options, as is today, but today I'm better prepared. And so we went off course. We used good old Google Maps when the Camino isn't forthcoming. Pull out Google Maps, and found a little cafeteria about a kilometer off course, and went over there, and I had my first churros in a long time, not by choice, but because there was absolutely nothing else to eat. It was the only thing, and the kitchen wasn't open, and they sure as heck weren't gonna make a tostada or any kind of toasted bread or something warm. So they brought each of us some churros. And typically, most typically, one would have churros with chocolate, which in Spain is that really thick, delicious chocolate, what in Italy they call chocolate, Espace, thick chocolate. And I think it's actually thickened with potato flour, but always some sort of thick art. But in this case, I just dipped the churros in my coffee, my cafe con leche. And I have to tell you these churros, which are super fatty and which, at the time, we were all really low in calories from having we'd already been walking about three hours, and it had been uphill the entire morning. The two of those were incredible. They were, I don't know. I'm guessing they're fried with lard, although it could be olive oil, maybe like a less flavorful olive oil. And there's fat ones and thin ones. These were the thin ones. And I have to say, they really, really hit the spot. And they kept us going for another almost two hours till we got to the next town, and I was able to get a meal. Anyway, dear listener, I will leave you with the senses and the smell and the imagination of churros being dipped in cafe con leche after a long hike up a steep mountain and putting our feet up. for about 20 minutes and just basking in a job well done. Before we continued onward. Abrazos y hasta luego.

entering Betanzos in the rain