Salceda to Santiago...the Camino in 27 days

Had a chance to talk with our hosts before we left Salceda, they are doing well, they have made this old farmhouse into an ultra modern hotel/alburgue. Blair still hasn't figured out how they will change the bulbs/ballasts in the lights behind glass embedded in the walls.

Our hosts at Salceda Posada, hardworking folks!

Built in 1740 restored and renovated on 2012.

Beautiful as usual, misty mornings, dogs barking, cocks crowing. We were waiting for the hordes to show up but they never did. Had a seemingly quick walk in as the kms melted away, hard to believe we have walked 800 km.

Started to get worried when we saw this group accumulating but turned out to be an anomaly.

A last beautiful misty morn on the Camino.

The paths have been filled with chestnuts and acorns, were thinking we should get hard hats.

The path to Santiago stayed very rural very close to the city, what a treat.

The rain held off till we hit Santiago, but was only a light misty rain. We have been truly blessed with weather on the Camino. Three separate occurrences of rain showers for only a short period of time.

Lavacolla, 10 km to go, Lavacolla seems to mean to wash up, apparently pilgrims would stop and bath before going into the city. There is some controversy as to the exact meaning of Lavacolla but the most popular version seems to be wash your penis and /or scrotum. Hey, this is just what they tell us!

 

We walked into Santiago arriving at the square at about 2:45. Stopped for a few pictures then off to the pilgrims office to get our Compostelas. Yay! Had about a 15 minute wait in line, also got a distance certificate that confirmed we had done the 775 km from St John Pied de Port. Then off to find lodging as we were a day early and the hotel we booked was full. No problem though as there are lots of accommodations.

First glimpse of Santiago.

Of course we had our Templar knight to guide us in.

We ran into a couple of people we had walked with somewhere along the way, including one 74 year old French man who had completed in the same amount of time as us. We expect to see more people we know tomorrow. We are planning to attend the pilgrims mass at noon tomorrow where they will read our names and say where we are from. If we are very lucky they will bring out the botofumiero, the largest in the world, needed to be so big so they could not smell the pilgrims or so the story goes :)

After the rain the tourists came out of the woodwork.

We made it!

The Cathedral undergoing some serious restoration.

We will be tourists in Santiago tomorrow so more photos then. Tomorrow will be our last Camino post. Monday we will be getting on a train to Cartagena on the east coast of Spain,12 hours of bliss with our feet up! We will be following that with stops in Alicante, Valencia and Barcelona, we will continue to blog for those interested until Oct 17, when we head to Toronto to see our girls for a few days :)

 

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