Rubiaes

Today we walked from Romarigas to Rubiaes. We are staying at an abergue, apparently alone. We have the place all to ourselves, the whole big cold place. It’s clean with a kitchen and a sign-in book with the last entry in 2008. So, even though we are on the path, it looks like people don’t stop here very much.

We are missing our baked potatoes and onions with olive oil and rock salt at Romarigas. Since there has been a little less clouds and only some sprinkles, we are colder than before. Strange how we wish for sunny skies, then we suffer from the colder night.

I thought I was gaining some cold tolerance, but now I wonder if it’s possible.

However, our sweat was worth it, for we are now on a marked path with gold arrows to guide us. It feels so good to have some direction on our way. Now we don’t have to keep looking like two big babies, we can’t speak the language, we don’t know where we are or where we are going and we don’t have any idea where we will be at the end of the day of wandering. But who cares how we look. We make friendly contacts as we ask.

Eric is a great unstoppable question machine. I would be shy to keep trying to understand some of these farmers and store keepers. But he keeps trying. And then he keeps asking until he has about three people who agree on the way and that is the way we go.

A priest of the Church of Saint Salvador from Valença stopped by the abergue. He didn’t speak any English or Spanish but we surmised that he invited us to mass the next day at 4:00 and said that he would be baptizing a baby. So we set our sights on Valença by 4:00.

We walked to the only little store in the area and bought bread and cheese. There was a baby about nine months old pushing herself around in a walker. We asked and her name was Christiana. We ate our dinner huddled in the cold abergue.

Then I remembered that I had noticed some machine down stairs on one of the beds. It was very small and flat, so Eric thought it was an air freshener. However, it turned out to be a little heater. Eric went to check it out and voula, we had heat. So we hunkered down in the smallest dormitory, closed all the shutters and the door and floated blissfully into a stupor of dreamless exhaustion in the quite satisfactory heat. Thank goodness there was a wall plug that worked.

>We got up especially early because we had a goal to make mass and the baptism at 4:00. On to Valença!