via de la Plata - Monday 21st March

We had planned to get up at 8:30 this morning but there is a distinct possibility that we didn’t get up until 8:50 after the delay yesterday but the train that we planned to catch wasn’t until 12:10 so that still gave us plenty of time to get ready.

We headed to the bus stop as last year the bus that we caught to the airport had stopped at the train station but this time we couldn’t find any bus that went to the station so caught a taxi for 6.50 euros (a single on the bus to the airport is 3 euros so the taxi was only slightly more expensive).

I had screen shots of the train that we wanted to catch to show the person at the ticket office but the man knew English so I didn’t get to try my limited Spanish.

We had about an hour to spare and so headed to the café for a cola cau and café con leche.

The journey took two trains – one to Ourensee (which we would be walking through later) and then the second to a Guidina where we would be starting our walk.

Before we could get onto the station our bags had to go through a scanner something which took some time as we had to unwind valuables bags from our backpacks.

The trains in Spain have so much legroom! After British trains they were a very pleasant surprise and on both trains we had assigned seats. There were 12 minutes to change between trains but seeing as they were on platforms next to each other that wasn’t a problem. Before we had even set off someone had come around with a bag of free headphones (and yes this is the Camino and you have to be careful about weight but they were free so of course I took it) and once we’d started a film started playing on the screens (there were three attached to the carriage’s ceiling) and it was ‘Asterix and the Mansions of the gods’ so we of course watched it (and plugged our headphones in to listen as well, we couldn’t understand that much of the Spanish but we both knew the story as Dad is a big Asterix fan).

Once we got off the train we chose a direction to head (into the village) and soon found our first arrow and then the albergue. This was a Xunta albergue (all of the walking we were going to do on this Camino was in Galicia) and we had to call to be let in and soon had our first sello.

We went for a look around the village and by the time we had gone back to the albergue there were two other people there.

We had dinner which was Boots sandwiches bought yesterday at the airport and let three cyclists into the albergue.

When we went back upstairs though it was to bad news as bed bugs had been found upstairs and everybody (us included) moved very quickly to the pension nearby (which made the woman there a little flustered as she suddenly had to check-in so many guests!).

The Pension had free wifi which was good as our walk in the village had included us looking for where the Camino went the next day and we had found a sign saying that the short route was closed because of construction work for the new high speed railway but there were newer signs that pointed to the route so we were confused (and not happy about the idea of having to take a diversion) so we went on the Camino Forum and asked if anyone had recently walked this route and knew whether or not it was open.

We bought bread, ham and cheese and had a little picnic in our rooms and then settled down early.