It’s been a wet, wet day, the wettest day we have ever experienced on this or any other wet Camino. Our anoraks held out manfully but both are old and eventually the unrelenting downpour found its way onto our jumpers, our trousers and most especially our socks. Our non Gore-Tex shoes lost their integrity five minutes after setting out and we squelched the remaining 26.86 km from last night’s lodgings at Casa Maia

to tonight’s at the prestigious 5* Eurostars Araguaney hotel. Double the price but four times the luxury.

Naively, I’d assumed that the large white letter I on the backs of the two red capes in an earlier post and these today referred to their country of manufacture, presumably Italian but since lots of peregrinos had them and weren’t chatting in Italian, Dorothy pointed out that it it’s somewhat more likely that they’re reflective strips. Ah, duh.

As with previous days there are hundreds of people walking, mostly in groups of three or four, more on bikes today and again most with batteries. The muddier sections were made much muddier than necessary by the weight of these bikes churning through them which I suspect irritated walkers – it certainly did me.

It was nice to see, even so close to the city, small tracts of land given over to individual growing spaces.

Finally we’re below 10km.

We’re now in the process of warming ourselves up after today’s cold and wet experience. We’ll both have showers shortly and most likely, aim to have dinner here at the hotel rather than venturing out again with soaked anorak, socks and shoes.

I’ve always wondered which would be our last Camino. Would we keep going until physically we could no longer walk the distances required or would we simply become bored. It seems that the answer is neither. In 2016 when we first walked the Frances there were plenty of reasons why we stopped, painful feet, too hot, boredom but the Camino experience itself was authentic. There were friendly faces, individuals walked together for a while, chatted and then moved on. Small support networks formed around people who were struggling. Today, with more people in what are obviously pre formed groups there’s noticeably much less interaction between groups, it’s a much more local experience. Fewer people implies more interaction, much larger numbers implies far less interaction. Groups don’t talk to groups.

The plane leaves at 11:50 tomorrow to take us away from Santiago for the very last time.

Buen camino