37.5 km – 23.3 miles

7:10am to 4:30pm walking time

940 meters – 3083 feet elevation gain

My longest distance day and it was too much. My decision yesterday to go to Samos ended up being a bad idea. Sure, now I can say I’ve been to Samos, but the monastery and almost everything else in town was closed. My only food yesterday was a banana, a chorizo and cheese bocadillo and then one small tapas bread offered with a drink. When a town is closed on Sunday, you’re real limited. The detour meant it added 7 extra kilometers onto my day today.

On top of that, I seem to be with the tour bus crowd of Camino tourists and so every bed in every town from here to Santiago seems to be almost booked up. I barely got a place to stay in this town. So that added to the stress today. I’ve booked the last beds I could find for the next two days. Due to the influx of pilgrims and tour groups, you kind of lose the spirit of finding a place when you’re ready to stop walking for the day

Along with another day all alone – I didn’t see one pilgrim I knew all day until I got to Portomarin, I also found that the last 100km pilgrims have some different types of behavior/awareness. One man literally shoved me really hard while he was trying to walk out of a busy cafe with his food. I had moved over as far as I could and had no place else to go with how packed full the bar was. He was yelling at the man behind me to get out of his way…then he shoved me as he squeezed his way out of the door. He didn’t try to shimmy through sideways – just expected the world to move out of his way more than we had. When you’re already feeling really alone, that’s a great way to feel like you simply don’t exist.

The other issue you run into is people sauntering slowly (and everyone should go their own pace), but then doing so while walking 2-5 people across, blocking the trail for anyone who might want to saunter faster. I spent part of the day trying to figure out how to politely navigate that new challenge of the Camino.

I hit the 100km mark and walked several kilometers past that today. Sarria (where many walking the minimum to get the Compostela) is at the 114km mark. But there are several signs at the 100km mark that signify the location.

The one fun aspect of today was walking through Portomarin and seeing a group of four wearing geocaching themed shirts. They didn’t speak a ton of English but I talked to them for a few minutes. Hopefully someday, I’ll make it to Spain for a geocaching mega event to meet more cachers from the country – but that was a fun group to randomly come across today.

Hopefully I’ll see them again along the Camino. A caching friend from Australia is three days ahead of me on the Camino and sent me a good recommendation for a cache to find the day before I reach Santiago. Hoping our paths will cross, but timing may not work out that way.

Today was hard. My body hurts. Getting to town late today means I don’t have the full time to relax that it probably needs. The rest of the way is a lot of up and down, so there’s no easy day on the body. I’m hoping that since I caught up with a few people I know, I’ll get more chances to talk to people…but it can be hard to find people you know while wading through the masses of pilgrims.