Friday, September 25, 2015.  Larry is leaving Ribadeo, and I think Ria will arrive tomorrow afternoon.  I am staying two more nights at the Hotel Linares, writing, walking a bit, sleeping late, giving my feet and ankles a break, rubbing Arnica cream into them at regular intervals.

I look for pastry shops, especially hoping for one of those swirly pastries with raisins in it. I go to the grocery store, knowing that when I leave for the next part of the Camino, there will be few or no places to get food on the way or even at some of the albergues, stuck out in the middle of nowhere.  Slices of ham, slices of cheese, croissants, tomatoes, dried cranberries, are things I can carry, and I also begin to make my own little sandwiches in my sweet room.

On one of my wanderings, I stop at a pharmacia and weigh myself.  For 50 Euro cents, you can stand on a big scale in the middle of the pharmacy, and I’m ecstatic to discover that I have lost TEN pounds, despite the bus rides.  Clearly I have been sweating my buns off!

I hope there will be more good news when I arrive in Santiago.  Today is spent in a very low-key fashion, and I think I have written three segments for this website.  I try my hand at scheduling the publication at intervals, so readers aren’t innundated with huge amounts of travelogue at once.  Seems to work, and usually I don’t have that luxury because I have several days of walking before I can actually work on this little MacAire uninterrupted.

But recounting the days is soothing when I have the time and I have chosen to take that time in Ribadeo,  Ribadeo is on the border, Asturias and Galicia.  An interesting thing happens on the Camino when you pass from Asturias to Galicia.  The shell symbol’s significance is reversed in direction, so you have to pay attention. I know I mentioned this in a previous post, but I will show it again here, if only to anchor my own understanding of what I will be looking for in Galicia.

In Asturias, the small end of the shell points the direction, but in Galicia, the open end of the shell is the way you must follow.  So if you are in Asturias, you turn left at this spot.  In Galicia you will be turning right

Actually in my feeble memory, I think on my last Camino, the direction was always in the open position, not the closed end, but I’ll have to check my old photos.

This day is happily uneventful . . . but for the great news about those ten pounds I somehow lost along the way.  Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll start looking for signs of Ria.

Saturday, September 26, 2015. Today is still cloudy, and I’ve wanted to take some photos of the water’s edge, the boats in this harbor, etc.  An Ascensor is housed in a stone enclosure, with its walls mostly glass.  If this elevator is open, you can walk to the water, get into the ascensor and as it goes up, it lets you see the coastline from a higher and higher perspective.  I hope it will be at least partly sunny before I leave this place

Midday I get a text from Ria.  She has just walked into Ribadeo, heading toward the center, and I tell her to come toward the Plaza de España where it meets the playground.  My hotel is full, but I’ve checked with the one next door and it is available and affordable.  So when she strolls into the Plaza, I am the one who calls her name this time rather than the other way around.

She gets checked into her hotel and we agree to meet in two hours.  The weather is fairly okay to walk to the water, so we do, and then take the ascensor to the top of the town.  The trick will be trying to find our hotels in the layers so typical in these old European towns.

The harbor in Ribadeo, our last seacoast

And on the way back to our hotel, I see this lovely structure . . .

We have dinner at Ria’s hotel restaurant, right next to mine.  I have sea bass again and it is still delicious.  Packing up tonight so we can get a good start.

We will have breakfast at 8:00 tomorrow morning:  cafe con leche, croissant, orange juice  What else? I have done a trial run, tracking the way out of town, since the signs are non-existent until we are nearly past the Ribadeo limits.  Here is our first flipped-direction shell:

Here’s our first Galician direction . . . go straight ahead (not back where you came from!) . . .

My lazy, recuperating days are over, I fear.  Hope my foot and ankle enjoyed the rest and will behave as we go forward.  Tomorrow is supposed to include a very hard climb, and we’ll end up at an albergue in the middle of nowhere.  Wonderful.