Day Forty Nine: Fonfria to Sarria

May 15, 2017

This stage of the tour is drawing to a close

We are now at the blue dot on the map above. So we are closing in on Santiago!

The lady from Casa Lucas helped me wheel the bikes around from the barn. I will send her the photo, since I think she looks rather dashing as a Camino cyclist. By the way, while a pilgrim here is a pelegrino, a cyclist on the route is a bicigrino!

At least for the start of the day, we remained deep in the hills of Galicia. It's an interesting patchwork of woods and pastures, something like what we have seen in the Palouze region of Washington State. The most common comparison, though, is to Ireland.

We continued to enjoy watching and greeting the walkers, when their way parallels the road. We passed one, with a knee brace, that was seriously limping. (Dodie can not draw much sympathy around here - everyone walks with two sticks and many have knee braces!) The next one would have been limping, except it seemed both his legs were bad, so he was just kind of slowly stomping. He turned out to be from outside Tucson, and was only doing 10 km per day. His objective on the walk is to lose weight. We met him 10 km futher on, in Samos, so he is at least meeting his distance objective.

Weight loss is not our primary objective, but I must not be pointing out quite enough panaderias, because Dodie anyway, is beginning to waste away. She is now having trouble getting the pants she started with to stay up, and they used to be snug!

When we hear a snatch of English or French from some walkers, we are likely to engage them in a bit of conversation. This morning there were four ladies, from Canada and US. They lined up across the road and we stopped on our side, for some extended jabber, mostly about where back home we each were from. Still fun, though.

We had set an easy target for today and so knew we had time to hang around in the on the way town of Samos. Samos's main claim to fame is a hugh Benedictine monastery. This seems to be alternatively known as the monastery of San Julian de Samos, or as the Royal Abbey of Samos. Either way, it is a large complex, occupying basically a city block.

Little village of San Cristobo in a hollow

Most buildings here are made form stones like this - often with little or no mortar!

We are often seeing little groups of cats - so cute.

Dodie loves Benedictine monasteries, so we tried extra hard to find an entrance and to get in on a tour. Tour (spanish only) times were posted, so we hung around and waited for the next one. What had been an empty waiting room filled up near tour time with other pilgrims, not to mention a bus load of school kids. In due course a black robed monk emerged and unlocked a gift shop/ticket office. We got our creanciale stamped there, and now that I look at it it does indeed say St Julian de Samos.

This little chapel was the start of the great monastery. The cypress tree beside it is often mentioned.

The gift shop displayed a book about the monastery history, which is a normal thing to see. But this book had 600 finely printed pages! We bought instead the 64 page "baby book" about the place. Later, Dodie threw me this book as I waited in front of a supermarket - to keep me quiet. But then as we cycled on I recited all I had read. You will be glad to know that here in the blog I will only hit a few highlights!

This monastery is more than 1000 years old, and actually hit a high point in terms of power under Alphonse II, in the early 800's. Alphonse grew up in the monastery so I guess that is why our book calls it the "Royal Abbey".

It was great to look at the cloister, cloister garden, main church and altars and such, but the zippiest part, to me, is "modern" and came because of a fire that devastated much of the place in 1951. In the reconstruction, all the walls on the second floor - in a square surrounding the main cloister - were painted in frescos by three (obviously modern) painters.

The subjects were maybe traditional, like the depiction of the life of Benedict (San Benito), but the art style seems very "avant guard". I particularly liked the one painter, Celia Cortes, who included great realism in the faces of the people shown.

The 600 hundred page monastery history. Actually, that's less than a page per year!

In the monastery shop - Camino shower gel! Are they sending me a message?

Kids! (fortunately they were shepherded away - too noisy)

The nymph fountain. could be embarrassing to some monks.

The apothecary. Benedictines are known for potions (and liquers)

These guys would be scary to have over your door

Franco stayed here (1943). Several rooms have been converted to a hotel. You could stay in Franco's room if you could stomach it.

A leg bone of Benedict. This must be a super powerful relic.

A 17th century table, saved from the 1951 fire.

The "Harry Potter" guy below is up in this ceiling somewhere.

This guy, obviously a fugitive from a Harry Potter movie, was in a corner of the ceiling, high over head.

During the tour we were glad that all the kids had been shepherded away, and were being given separate treatment by their teachers. However as we all piled out, I ventured to ask one how he had enjoyed the visit. Since this was a teenage boy, I got a vacant or maybe nonesense reply, but a girl (much more mature at this age) stepped in to say "Very interesting!". We agree. And now I have 64 pages for great re-reading in the bath, after we carry the darn book 8000 km to back home!

Our Cicerone guidebook refers to Sarria as unattractive, and perhaps we agree, since it seems to lack an old centre, except for the one street that our hostal is on. Once again it is a building with stone walls, which are very decorative on the inside, very clean, and with good plumbing. As we now see, the building is run as an annex of another albergue, about a km distant. When you enter you have to pick up a phone, and a lady drives over from the other place to check you in. That's fine, but it seems the only place they had to store the bikes was at the other location.

It took some time, given the language barrier, for it to be explained to us that we would need to walk the km back and forth to the bike storage. Not to mention trying to figure out exactly where this was, and who would open and close it for us and when. I made the trek once and then put my foot down. I then made the trek one more time, retrieved the bike I had stored, and declared that the bikes were going to live at reception, in location one, where our room is.

That totally blew the english skills and management authority of the young lady who was trying to deal with us, but a phone conversation between me and upper management, I guess, has the bikes installed here.

We will spend some time tonight looking at the map and plotting our next stops. We want to perch soon just outside Santiago so early in a day we can roll in and look at everything. Then in due course we will make for Finisterre, the "end of the world".

The hostal lady used her smart phone translation app to converse with me. It worked fairly well, 'till things got complicated.

Today's ride: 39 km (24 miles)
Total: 2,161 km (1,342 miles)

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