Oct 4 - off to Negreira

Leave the refugio early.  Two older women are kicking through the leaves in the park, picking up chestnuts, placing them in plastic shopping bags.  I go through the market and pick up some fruit at an open stall, then to a bakery to get a sweet roll and an empanada.  I eat the roll before I even leave town, when I get to the main plaza at the cathedral.

At the refugio in Negreira, I meet the three Irish women who have been walking the Camino in sections, this being the last. We go grocery shopping and then out to dinner. Keep making eye contact with an older, beautiful, Italian cyclist. He reminds me of a heavier version of George Clooney. The Irish women tell me a story about meeting the father and brother of someone who died in the Pyrenees in 2009. He had prepared for the winter Camino in the Netherlands, but hadn't been prepared to cross the mountains into Spain in a snowstorm. This was the same storm I experienced a bit of in Lourdes. The storm that made me decide to start in Pamplona that winter instead of St. Jean. It's a very small, interconnected world.