< Norte Day 21 — Norte Day 23 > < Norte Index >
20 kilometers, 5 hours, passing through Villapedre, Piñera, and La Colorada.
There remained only one more day on the coast after this one before the route turned inland and southwest toward Santiago. I knew damn well I would miss the sea. But I would be getting closer to Santiago and my flights home.
We had a pretty easy day of it this day. No rain and nice views. Hendrik left Luarca before me and I walked about half of the day by myself. I spent some of the time thinking about . . . nothing. The rest of the time I thought about food. Oh, and beating the rain to Navia.
As we neared the western edge of Asturias, terra-cotta tile-roofed homes gave way to black Galician slate. I’m not sure which I liked best. Just an observation. This appeared to be an affluent (there’s that word again) area, one that had done well for many years. There were many beautiful homes with dates going back into the early 1800s. They were built sound, and many had been very well maintained. The churches too.
Just as it started to rain for the first time that day, we found a great albergue in Navia. A nice man who knew all about the rest of the route to Santiago, and was happy to share, operated the two-year-old hostel.
Aurelio García, warned us of the larger number of pilgrims once our route intersected the Camino Francés. He said that during the month of October there are twenty-five pilgrims per thirty kilometers of trail on the Norte. But on the Francés there would be 500 pilgrims per thirty kilometers. Let that sink in. I did not look forward to the change.
Side note: Because it is a distraction, I have not said much about the freeway system our route crisscrossed almost every day. The A-8 runs across the north of Spain. If you were to drive from Irún to Santiago on the freeway system, you could quite comfortably have breakfast in Irún and dinner in Santiago the same day. Very often the freeway was overhead on long stretches of elevated roadway or underfoot in long tunnels. After a while, we tended to forget it was even there.