Day 17 Santiago de Compostela!! 17 miles Hotel Rest Style

We are here!!

And here we stay!!  Lovely hotel just booked for another 3 nights.  

We are tired, very tired and even with Tylenol and the super pain relieving cream my feet aches and ached last night.  Craig too so we fell asleep finally and didn’t awaken until 9:30 this morning. 

Think a little sunstroke was at work yesterday.  

We waited on line at the Oficina de Peregrinos for about an hour to receive our Compostela meeting several of our cohort there.

Santiago is festive and very crowded with peregrinos and tourists alike, also locals and the nightlife is happy, loud, and long! 

We’re still hatching our next plans.  For now, siesta while watching the Royal Wedding.  Perhaps the Queen should take us back? 

Yesterday’s walk into Santiago though long and hot was quite lovely in that it was mostly on shady trails, some hills, lots of farmland and little villages to walk through and unlike the Frances, it was not a slog through a big industrial area and airport.  In fact almost all rural until the final kilometer when the busy streets with bars and hotels was a welcome sight!  

 Potential lucrative business- a few umbrellas and chairs, an espresso machine and fresh orange juicer and beer and wine plus bocadillos and a fortune is made! 

Noted: when we presented our credential to receive the Compostela and filled out the statistics sheet, with our ages, there was a gap of at least 7 years between the next oldest.

Not going to go to that line of thinking again!

And then a lovely thing happened.

After dinner as we were walking back to our hotel at the corner comin toward us were Mattias and his girlfriend (name forgotten) whom we had met st Casa Fernanda- the couple who met on the Camino Primitivo.  We embraced like close friends who hadn’t seen each other forever!! 

And perhaps not forever again.