Birthday! A day of
Oldering and parties at
The End of the World.
Well! I am now a ripe old 22. :D I've managed to survive this long, somehow, despite all the crazy stuff that's been happening along this trip, and now we can't stop! We're officially two months in, and we have four months and ten days to get to Istanbul before we are expected home for American Thanksgiving. 130 days of endurance race!
We had a good amount of fun today. We dragged ourselves out of bed in the monastery at Santiago de Compostela after sleeping in (sleeping in!) to an unusually-extremely-late 8 o'clock. We packed our bikes and headed out.
The road we had decided to take to Fisterra led along the coast, but we had to get to the coast first. Everything between Santiago and Noia (the closest coastal town), it seems, is hills, hills, hills, and we had to ride over them. It took us a good, long time to make it the just 30km to Noia... so we decided to pause for lunch and make a more informed decision after food.
The restaurant that we chose (via coin flip, since I was being indecisive and was yet forced to choose due to my birthday-having-ness) was decorated like a dungeon, more or less, and so we sat down beside the walls of stone and pondered the menus. The house offered a menu of the day for 12€ which included two courses, a dessert, and wine (this is a very common thing in Spain, we've learned), so we all elected to go for that. Our starters were calamari and seafood soup, and for the main course we all chose the Parrillada, which was basically a giant plate of fried fish and fries. The photos on Picasa show the scale of our accomplishment in finishing it. The wine was called "Viña do Val" (wine from the valley), which seemed also to be a rather lucky thing. :D Anyway, it was all pretty amazingly tasty, and it gave us the thought power to make a decision about how to make it to Fisterra, which was still about 80km away over hilly coastal roads.
We chose bus. It was just 8€90 for each person + bike, so the price was right, and we essentially got to sleep for a couple hours and arrive to Fisterra feeling fresh in the afternoon instead of disgusting and worn out late at night. This did remove our credit as pilgrims, which is rather sad... but our trip is not about just the Camino, so we mostly got over it. There will be lots of biking ahead.
One thing, though, that we did follow through with with respect to the pilgrim tradition was the burning of clothes at the end of the world. Fisterra (or Finisterra, from the Latin for earth's end) is the "only end of the Camino" as far as the people there are concerned, and pilgrims come there to set themselves free from their arduous journeys. We couldn't burn our cycling clothes... but the sangría-soaked white outfits we had kept from Pamplona would do. We set them aflame on the rocks by the sea and watched as they slowly became charcoal. It was actually very cathartic..
It was a drizzly day, and this sort of added to the sense that we were on the edge of anything. There is a lighthouse on the cape at Fisterra, and beyond it to the west one can see only the sea. There are shores to be seen to the north and south, but these, too, were invisible to us as we stood there and looked out. We didn't wonder why Columbus had decided he needed to explore what was out there.
Our pilgrim tasks completed, we headed back into town to find a place to sleep and something decent for dinner. We were actually still quite full from our pile of fish at lunch, so we instead chose to seal up the cracks in our stomachs with local wine recommended to us by a very friendly woman working at the local supermarket. It was too late for any pastelería to have cakes in stock, so we did without that, too, on the thought that the paella we plan to eat on the beach tomorrow will more than make up for it.
So, that was my birthday. Burning things at the end of the world. There's no restaurant there, for those of you who are wondering; just a bar.