Yesterday morning, Dave and I set out on the Camino from Lubia, at about 8 o’clock, our usual time to hit the trail. Right from the start, it was an uphill climb. We soon entered a section of trai that was the worst I had seen in all my 2500 kilometres of camino walking. There were whole stretches of mud, streams with precarious stepping stones, and huge rocks to get around or struggle over. After a couple of hours of this struggle, we got to the top of the pass and saw that we had reached the highest point on the Via de la Plata called the Portala de la Conda. We had climbed 744 meters and were entering into Galicia, the territory in which Santiago, our camino objective, is found. The views of the surrounding hills were stupendous and the thought that we were entering the last phase of our walk was exillerating. We are in the final 200 kilometres of the 1000 kilometre walk..
Today, as dawn broke, we walked among the peaks of the Galician mountains. They are much older than our Rockies and covered to the top in green, mostly brush with few forests. Each time we turned a corner, we were confronted with a new ista, with rolling hills as far as we could see. As might be expected, there is much climbing and descending but the beauty of the surroundings makes it east.
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