Rest Days and closure to this Camino

Oviedo is a big city on hills, too much walking to enjoy with a sore leg so we visited the Cathedral second in importance to Santiago.  

Spent the night and caught a bus to Lugo Sunday morning.  Even though the Camino goes straight to Lugo from Oviedo ( ten days walk) it is so remote there are no highways for a bus to travel directly so the bus first goes over a big mountain range  to the south east to Leon then turns west to Lugo.

We had walked through Leon on the Camino France's in 2010 going west to Santiago so the bus ride west to Lugo really brought back a lot of memories. We started seeing a line of "pilgrims", shell signs and yellow arrows every so often along the highway or up on hills.  We'd see the name of a town coming up and remember where we had stayed or what the trail was like or who we had met or already had said goodbye too as the injured were peeling off by that time.

Gaudi building in Astorga passing through on bus

Lugo is bigger than Anaheim but the walled city is smaller than Disyneyland and fairly flat although it sits on top of a hill.  Perfect for a day and a half of rest and entertainment.

We hop (limp) off the bus and find we are less than a block from one of the 10 gates that let you into the walled city.   Walking in through the gate we see everyone dressed in Roman costumes and realize we are in the middle of a super crowded  festival.  "Arde Lucus" celebrating the founding of the town in 13 BC by Augustus Ceasar.

With the help of a local really nice older women who had offered us a sit at their table on the square, we were able to get a room in a ****hotel just around the corner from the main square.   

We wanted to walked the wall early in the morning trying to beat the heat but by the time we leisurely had coffee the cool fog was already lifting.  Afterward we spent the day taking in a couple museos, the Cathedral and trying to find shade as it was near 90 degrees .   

Neither of us make very good tourists we felt a little like orphans not quite fitting in. Not locals, not tourists and no longer pilgrims.  All our friends were days behind as we had taken the bus and those pilgrims we'd run into we'd have to explain we were no longer walking.   Weird feeling but it was nice to have a couple days to adjust that we are on our way to Madrid airport on Alsa Supra in the fog

thankful we got as far as Villaviciosa near where the Primitivo begins.

438 km or 276 miles of walking from Irun.