After a nice day roaming around Santiago de Compostela, time to check out more things. We started the day by visiting a farmer’s market, walking there from our hotel.
I took this while we were waiting for the elevator
In Spain, there are a lot of ruins. When a building builds over a ruin, they install glass floors so you can see the ruins beneath. Our hotel had this, and a shoe store in a different city (I think it was in Lugo) also had it!
Yep, drizzling!
I bought some saffron and smoked paprika from that vendor.
The produce was so beautiful and fresh!
Fresh scallops. In the states usually the ‘foot’ (the orange part) is removed
Cockles
Barnacles! In the off-season Jorge harvests barnacles. That job is not for the faint of heart but he loves it!
Some of us partook in having a raw oyster – it was the most delicious oyster I have ever eaten! The salty brine was amazing!
Then time to hop on the bus to travel to Cape Finisterre.
But first, we had to have candy. I love this candy! I ran out of time to try to find a supermarket to buy it though. Darn!
In Galician this reads “The End of the Way”
A short boardwalk stroll to the beach
Jorge telling us about the Costa da Morte (Coast of Death) – named for the innumerable shipwrecks over the centuries.
It was raining pretty hard today. No surprise! But it was beautiful!
This was somebody’s address sign on their house.
You can’t tell from the photo but this was a very steep hill:
Not only rainy, but foggy too!
We reached an outcropping of rocks. Jorge explained that these rocks were featured in the movie The Way. He had us all put our hands on it, said the rock was magical, and then started rocking it! It was weird – made me dizzy for some reason!
We went to the lighthouse but it was really foggy, so we decided to have lunch and then see if the weather would break for us.
Grilled cheese salad!
These peppers were so delicious, and not hot at all
Barnacles thanks to Matt who wanted to treat us to something different
Grilled scallops
A bunch of us saved our shells, since the shell is the symbol of the Camino
The Galician version of Paella
Jorge helping Kenn have a drink of wine
After lunch, back on the bus and back to Cape Finisterre.
The fog had lifted a little bit so we could see a bit more than we did earlier
The coastline is so strikingly beautiful!
So, here’s something interesting. See the photo of the post here? Look at the next one – it’s in Palo Alto, CA!
I can’t believe I saw the same posts about 7,000 miles apart!
Just a random person posing for somebody else
Km 0.000
After our journey it was time to head back to the hotel and town for a free afternoon before our dinner together. Here are the Don Quixote books I bought. Kenn was knocked out by the thought of me reading these in Spanish!
We walked around town for a bit and did a little shopping. Then time to walk to dinner – at O Curro da Parra (this is Galician – it means ‘the vineyard’). It was AMAZING!
Grilled Artichokes!
I think this may have been raw tuna – can’t remember now – darn!
I had ‘baccalao’ (cod) – it was delicious
Others had pork belly. Looked amazing
Dessert was a berry sorbet that was also amazing. My photo was blurry so not including it here.
Afterwards, some of us went out for drinks (surprise surprise)
This photo was funny – Matt (on the left) is probably almost 6 feet tall. Two giantly tall guys came into the bar so Matt walked over next to one of them so I could take a photo!
We went to another bar after this that had a celtic group playing music, but, I was pretty buzzed by then so no photos. It was cool though!
And this was essentially the last day of our REI Trip. Met a lot of nice people and had a great time. The next morning Cilla and got up and walked around town. Ran into Matt and Margarita. I’ll post those photos in the next post.
Hope you enjoyed reading about my REI trip – it has been nice for me to reminisce and remember things from the trip as I’ve been writing this!