After the disturbed night last night we were up at 6:30 and off by the really early time of 7:10 - except for walking the last day into Santiago from Arco do Pino I think that this is the earliest I have ever set off on Camino!
The day started with a steep climb out of the town which the guidebooks promised us would give ius a magnificent view over the town and sea - not really true at the stupid o clock in the morning we had set off at.
It was still quite dark and I think that explains our error - that and our overly trusting nature when it comes to simply following other pilgrims as we managed to lose the path - on the Ingles a lack of an arrow often means carry straight on and thus we assumed that as we had seen no arrow we were to carry straight on. Not so - we had simply missed it in the dark and so walked with a group of other pilgrims for maybe a kilometer along a main road until one of the others had gone into a hotel and asked where the Camino was - back the way we had come was the answer; our mistake had evidently been not only missing the arrow but going for the flat path instead of up another hill. We did though become friends with this group of people who spent the rest of the day teasing us about all of the hills that were still to come and there were quite a lot of them today.
We stopped in Mino at a bar for a drink and Dad was glad to be able to order a 'proper' English cup of tea with hot tea and a small jug of cold milk (his past attempts at this on Camino have yielded him hot milk with a tea bag in, hot tea and hot milk, cold tea with hot milk and once cold tea and cold milk - none of these has impressed him much). Two doors down there was a small bakery selling ice cream so we bought one of these as well to eat as we went - they did not even manage to last half a kilometer!
The albergue in Betanzos was only opened in 2013 and is very nice - we were taken to the bedroom at the top of the albergue and each took a single bed. Rather than the often cramped Xuntas this one had plenty of room between beds and a small light per bed (I did later manage to fuse all of the ones in our room just by switching mine on).
The kitchen though consists of two microwaves and no hob so it was pizza for us that night along with quarter of a watermelon that was on special offer for only 75 cents - it was so big we cut it into slices and put some in one of the small bags I had taken from airport secruity to eat as we walked the next day.
Both of us had been looking forward to seeing the park (O Pasatempo) in Betanzos described in our bnooks as an eccentric Vicotrian gentlemans' park and built by two brothers in the late 19th century who had gone and made their fortune in South America and then returned to Betanzos to build several amenities for their hometown it sounded quite fun but alas it was closed throughout September for renovations.
We did though visit two of the town's Churches and were impressed with the tombs in one of these.
The next etapa suggests walking 29km with a lot of hills so we decided to break it up into a 11km and an 18km days neither of which had anywhere to buy food so we bought enough for both in Bretanzos.
Image from: http://caminodesantiago.consumer.es/llevatela-al-camino/completa/?camino=camino-ingles
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