Day 10 – the variante espiritual, a camino Angel and a pilgrim blessing

Pontevedra to Armenteira 26 km

Everyone warned us about the big climb out of Pontevedra so we set off early. So early some kids were just leaving their parties and heading home (about 645 am – oh to be young enough to do that again!)

Pontevedra looked like an interesting town, I don’t think we did it justice. It was pouring rain for most of the time we were there so we didn’t get to see much. We did see this church dedicated to Santiago….

We holed up in a vermut bar to get out of the rain! ( and you can tell by my hair we got caught in the rain )

Anyhoo, we started the day with our usual photo… this time against a grafiti wall in Pontevedra

And this is what the streets looked like at 7am…

It was a pleasant walk out of town, the morning kms being way shorter than the afternoon ones as usual (a curious camino thing). What I mean by that is the km you walk in the morning take less time than the ones you walk in the afternoon.

So we got to the fork in the road just outside of Pontevedra and took the spiritual variant…not quite sure how that might change us.

We missed a marker early on, and a camino Angel appeared in the guise of a 70 year old woman in a velour burgundy quilted dressing gown. She raced down from her bedroom to tell us we had missed a marker and we were now going the wrong way. She proceeded to tell us the right way in rápido Spanish. I was still scarred from my last encounter with rápido Spanish to be honest so I prayed to the Camino gods that this time I heard it all correctly. I did, and a couple of detours later we were back on track! Phew!

Eventually we arrived at the seaside town of combarro.

We visited the monastery of Poio, unfortunately closed.

The big climb we had been warned about was not so big, or we’re getting fitter! Eventually we arrived in Armenteira where we attended a pilgrims blessing service conducted by the 8 nuns who live in the monastery. One was about 30, another about 80, and the rest in between.