Day 25: Ukuleles and Warbling (Ponferrada to Trabadelo)

You may wonder in the coming paragraph which is worse, I will paint a picture of a Canadian Preacher called Stuart (he's 60+) and you can make your own conclusion in conjunction with mine. My dear Stuart has done the Camino once before, as such he (like many others) believes that this makes him an absolute authority on the subject! He listens into your conversations with other pelegrinos and shoehorn his own - unasked for - suggestions and anecdotes from his previous excursions. He seems blissfully unaware that others may like to find things out for themselves or do it in a different fashion. He then, quite foolishly, went on to suggest that men find the Camino much easier than women who always seem to struggle: you could visibly see Tarryn and a scottish woman called Laura bristle at the very notion and their hackles raised ready to strike him down! If this wasn't enough, he wandered off to his bed, to quiet cheers of glee from the rest of us, only to return with a bloody ukulele! I jest not when I say that he perched himself on the edge of a picnic bench in the centre of out brigade and began to sing (badly) a tuneless rendition of 'It's raining men'!... Okay, I forgot what the song was called but it was howling either way!

We tackled a lengthy walk, 33km which made my feet as sore as can be, so that our hike up the steepest part of the Camino, O Cebreiro tomorrow would be an 18km walk instead of a 26km walk. The climb is at the end of the portion so it would have been a killer to tackle it during the midday heat and when we were already tired.

Trabadelo was an insanely small, pokey little village which consisted of a handful of houses and one teeny supermarket that did have a fridge, ager buying a lukewarm can of Fanta and a chunk of bread I wandered back to my albergue and didn't really do much else. The only thing of note which I did was trim my moustache hair back with a nail clippers. I foolishly didn't pack an electric razor and I can't clean shave or I'll look like a ping pong ball! That being said I feel I did a pretty glorious job with the nail clippers, the lip toupee looks rather ravishing again.