Time for a break....: Day 52 – 30/05/2013 – Total so far 3265.7km (2024.7miles)

Sarria – Sandiago di Compostella

114.4km, 8hrs 56mins, 2258m total climb

Woke up in our little pension in Sarria. We got ready to leave and were confronted with the first hindrance of the day. The day before we arrived wet and hung our clothes in the drying room, but the whole place was freezing cold and our clothes didn't actually dry. Never mind, we thought and put on our damp clothes thinking that probably we are going to get wet again or if not the clothes would dry off anyway after a few km.

We went downstairs to the garage where our bikes were parked for the night and were confronted with the second hindrance of the day. Greg had forgotten to change his brake pads and as his brakes were metal on metal there was no way we could have started without him changing it. Panniers off, tools out – it's time to change some brakes. It actually only took about 20 mins, but it was still a delay and we knew that it was going to be a big long day.

Anyway, we started and everything went well...for the first 30km. We had a quick sandwich stop somewhere along a foresty A road. When we got back on to our bikes Greg noticed that my front tyre was going flat. Our first puncture ever! Hindrance number three, time to change an inner tube. We stopped at the side of the road, took all my luggage off and turned the bike upside down. Another 20 minutes job and the corpus delicti was eliminated – a tiny metal bit of a truck tyre.

We continued through the Spanish countryside and got more and more into little roads that we shared with the pilgrims. And there were so many all of a sudden and all seemed to be American. Interestingly, when we stayed at the pilgrims hostal a few night back we found out that as a walker you can receive a certificate (proving that you walked on the St Jacob's Way) if you walked the last 100km which means you need to have the pilgrims booklet showing stamps from places 100km from Santiago. As a cyclist you need to do 200km. As soon as we had hit the 100km remaining boundary to Santiago, the amount of pilgrims we saw multiplied several times. There were so many that it was difficult to navigate through them on the roads coming out of the smaller and more popular villages. The country roads were all set up for them, every few hundred meters there was another auberge, another café. Disneyland for pilgrims. Suddenly it just all appeared to be a big money making machine and those people had little in common with people like Michael, the Swedish pilgrim and even Lothar who were telling us about these 'Bus Pilgrims'. We also started to see a suspicious amount of buses with tinted windows.

It must be like doing a marathon and then in the last kilometer a load of new runners join in and to cross the line with you, getting the same medal!

Still, at least there were not the same fair weather cyclists happily doing the last 200km, or at least we didn’t see many.

We really expected the route into Santiago to be paved for the last few kilometers, with ever increasing Compostella paraphernalia but exactly the opposite was true. The cycle route was terminated at a big roundabout which each direction led to a motorway. We were forced onto the walking route (which we always avoided as it was rough and busy) but even that got confusing and the signs stopped. There seemed to be several ways into the actual city centre, like a river delta. We made our own route on a smaller road after trekking through some rough roads.

We had booked into a Holiday Village just outside actual city centre, so we decided to go straight there and leave the grande finale until the next day.

The Holiday Village was huge, probably 2-300 rooms, all in small granite bungalows with maybe 10-20 rooms in each. There was a refuge for pilgrims right at the top as well, which would have been bunk beds, but we decided to pay the little extra to get a proper room! 35 Euros per night.

We found out that dinner was at 7.30 so had a look around beforehand. It was obviously a big project and must have been huge in it's day. They had two huge restaurants, a shopping centre and several other small boutiques or stalls on another level of the complex. All were empty apart from one restaurant, a café/bar and the laundrette.

The restaurant was self-service menu-del-dia. Awesome. 3 courses and bread and water for 9 Euro each.

We stuffed our faces before a group of about 50 school kids came in and we took that as a cue to leave. We planned to get up and look at the city tomorrow so had a quiet evening and sorted our stuff out and enjoyed the comfort!

http://ridewithgps.com/trips/1363699