Low and behold the Pilgrims landed yesterday in Santiago de Compostela. It was a long up and down,a lot of it was quiet backroad country paths, but again a section that is quite long with Pilgrim against high speed traffic. A bicyclist was knocked down by a truck, the referee called it a draw, nobody hurt. But, with a backpack you are the turtle on the road. At one point in the Santiago suburbs, you walk for about 20 mins.around and about under the freeway, and all you have really advanced is to cross a roundabout. That is all history, we arrived intact. We went to check- in at the relocated Pilgrim office (it relocated to a very much larger building and definitely required as there are some 275,000 Pilgrims checking in this year), apparently some 200,000 must have just arrived before us, as we had stood in line for quite awhile when they told us the average wait would be over two and a half hours. How long? Forget it we will come back tomorrow morning when they first open. HEY! We didn’t just fall off the pumpkin truck, we are smart enough to figure out how to avoid long lines. We get there early this morning and the line already has 100,000 people in it. So, we still spent hours in line, but we got acquainted with the Australian couple (walked the minimum 62.2 miles from Tui on the Portuguese route) in front of us, and the German couple (walked the 62.2 miles from Saria, on the French route) right behind us. When we finally made it to the desk and got our Compostela, we found we were the oldest couple of the day to check in, and we had walked about 225 miles? Santiago is a hustle bustle of Pilgrims and tourist, we did get to attend Mass when they have 6 or 7 men swinging the huge incense burner, but much of the cathedral is under restoration.
We only made reservations for two days here in Santiago, and the whole town is completo tomorrow, so we are on our way. As we don’t have a definite plan we are on our way to somewhere??? By the way, you can get very hungry standing in lines, so for lunch we had; a double order of Chorizo, an order of pork ribs, an order of mussels, an order of sardines, and of course white wine. The waiter seeing how famished we ere brought us a basket of small anise flavored doughnuts. It had been such a trying line standing day, we had to stop for ice cream on the way back to our pension.