Today my visitor and I prepared for next week’s full camino (from Tui to Santiago) by doing the 22km Redondela-Pontevedra leg backwards. By which I mean in the direction of Portugal, not Santiago. The Galician weather Gods treated us to their speciality – the Atlantic Blanket. Worse, it was the wet version, meaning it rained non-stop from the time we set off at 9.30 until the time we left Arcade at 1pm. Whereupon we celebrated the change in our fortunes by heading off in the wrong direction. By which I mean the right direction, of course. Normally.

Anyway, there was no shortage of kind Galicians to tell us we were walking the wrong way, some of whom even stopped their cars to tell us. We hit on the right response to this when a Portuguese pilgrim heading towards Santiago asked us if we were walking to Fatima. This became a stock response to the implied question of whether or not we were mad.

Having got rather wet the previous day walking from Padrón to Santiago and having found the waterproof poncho given to me by a generous friend to be rather uncomfortable, I had decided we would resort to umbrellas for today’s wet-weather challenge. This might seem obvious to you but it’s just not done on the camino and I felt we were getting rather disdainful looks from the drenched pilgrims walking in the opposite direction from us. Which was all of them, of course.

Anyway, I now know where not to get a decent menu de día in Redondela and I have a decent idea of how to walk the right way from Redondela to Pontevedra.

And, tied up as I was, I didn’t have much time to read worrying articles like this one. In which I could have learned that “The epicentre of the credit crisis is moving to Spain where the seizure by the central bank of CajaSur over the weekend has torn away the veil on credit damage from Spain's property crash.”


Incidentally, the CajaSur is owned by the Catholic Church and it was reported last week that they’d eschewed the obvious solution of a merger with another local savings bank because this would have “delivered us into the hands of the Reds”. I rather liked the cartoon in El Mundo earlier this week, which showed a CajaSur cardinal holding the hand of a larger person, identified on the sleeve as The State. The caption read “We have a Papá”. Which means (sugar) Daddy, but is rather similar to Papa, or Pope.

I wonder how wet I will get tomorrow.