Lugo to middle of nowhere...

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Day 40

Thursday 7th May




The lights came on automatically just before 7am so no chance of a sleep-in...



Luckily we were able to leave our bags at the albergue so after packing up, we set off to have some breakfast and explore Lugo, making a few special purchases...



We have a few options with the next section of walking. We can cut down to the Camino Frances, or we can walk along a less-used path to join up with the Camino Coastal, which then joins up with the Camino Frances but not for a day or two longer. Given the crowds on the Frances route, we decided to take the option which would give us less time with the hundreds of other pilgrims... Either way it was a very exciting feeling knowing that we only have about 100km and 5 more days to go until we reach Santiago!



Our plan for the day is to walk only about 10km out of Lugo and camp for the night, meaning we have less to walk the next day. So we set off about 5pm so as to miss the heat, still having a good 5 hours of light left in the day so plenty of time.



Leaving the city we passed a film crew taking shots of a pilgrim arrow on the ground and as we walked in the distance of their shot we assumed we would be in the background of the shot. We didn’t give it much thought and continued our way out of the town. Passing through the city’s walls, we stopped on the side of the road discussing/arguing which way to go as it wasn’t very clearly marked. We were all standing around, holding the map up and generally looking very lost. Lauren happened to glance behind her and saw the film crew that had followed us and were filming us in our very confused state looking like complete twats.... not our finest hour. The embarrassment was compounded when they then asked us if we were American... which we agreed to so as not bring the Aussie name down!



About 7.30pm we found a campsite in a field and set up camp. We hadn’t seen an arrow for a while but weren’t overly concerned as we still seemed to be heading in the right direction with the signs still pointing towards a town on our list of directions. However, when Ben went to fill up our waterbottles he got talking to a local man who informed us that we were about 5km off course as there are two towns with the same name and we had spent most of our walk today heading towards the wrong one... So tomorrow we will have to backtrack, making our nice easy 15km day more like 25km... Sucks but what do you do.

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