Day 7 - Monday 28th March

Officially the books say that we walked 20km today but the route was so wet and soggy from all of the heavy rain overnight with wide areas of mud and places where the path was just wide running streams so that we had to detour several times into the fields around the path so we probably walked over the 20km. Added to this it rained for most of the day and some of the puddles were so big that the inside of our shoes were wet as well.

The day did start off well though as we went back to the bar we had eaten at last night – the owner had been so nice that we all decided to return for breakfast. We all had a drink and then toast (the Cee bread again) with honey, cheese and tomato (we ordered one of these each and she brought enough over for us all to have each and then kept asking if we wanted more toast). Before we left she insisted that we take the number of a taxi and her number as well in case we ran into any problems – she told us that the way would definitely be wet but it was quite beautiful.

There was a shorter route that we could have taken today which was only 15km but that way was almost completely on the road and taking the longer path meant that we could visit the monastery in Oseira which is a Trappist monastery originally built in 1137, abandoned in 1835 and then rebuilt in 1929, it looked to be at least as big as the monastery at Samos but contains only 13 monks. There is an albergue here but the description of it as ‘cavernous’ and the fact that it is not heated meant that we had decided not to stay here.

We approached the Monastery from the road and it seemed to suddenly appear between the trees (and through the rain). We knew there was a bar in the village as well and briefly discussed which to go to first but decided on the Monastery first.

There was a tour just leaving (for 3 euros) but it would be only in Spanish and last an hour so we decided not to go on the tour. We did look around the shop, got our sellos and some postcards and two small soaps made by the monks for our Mum and one of our aunts (nice and light plus they made our bags smell very nice!).

Then we headed to the bar just as a tour group was coming off their coach and heading into the monastery, several of them wished us a ‘good journey’ as we went past.

The bar was not the nicest we had been in but the drinks were warm. We did leave quite a puddle as we left and went back into the rain to immediately start climbing up again over rocks between which ran the water. We got very wet and muddy.

The albergue was right at the other end of town and when we arrived it was freezing so we put the two heaters on in the bedroom and washed our already damp clothes and then tried to dry those, and our shoes, out.

The albergue had an outdoor swimming pool attached which is opened in the summer and the place gave the impression that it was all built for the swimming pool with large communal showers and a large industrial-looking kitchen.

We found a small supermarket behind one of the bars and bought pasta and stuff for the three of us

Two other people were in the albergue that night – they had walked the shorter route and were as wet as we had been.

We settled in for another cold night.