Day 17 - To Ansião

To Santiago de Compostela: 416.5 km
Walked today: 18.5 km
Total walked: 259.6

Up at dawn, I had a quick breakfast of herbal tea and a ham sandwich.  Katherine from Ireland left before us.  Atia from Germany and the two teems from NY, Kaly and Amira, were still getting ready when we left shortly after 6 am.

All of them sent her backpacks with Carlos all the way to Rabaçal.  Since we had planned to stay at Ansiao we carried our full load.

Up, up and up the hill on the road, then we switched to a beautiful dirt trail. Most of the walk would be on this trail.

We had word from the pilgrim grapevine that there were some very aggressive dogs that had bitten the pants of a Japanese pilgrim friend of us. The dogs were at the town of Venda so we had the hiking poles at the ready.  In fact the dogs - not very big, mind you - came at us but the owner was nearby and he called them off.

Everyone who was at the albergueria last night passed us (the excuse is that we were the only ones carrying our full backpacks). 

We walked only 15 km do this was a very short day. When we arrived to town, shortly before noon we saw Claire and the girls sitting at a pastry shop that has fabulous desserts.  We joined and had pastries with hot chocolate for lunch. (They were delicious, weren't they LeeRay?)

We walked on to the town library to get a "carimbo", a stamp, for our pilgrim credential.  The librarian, a very likeable lady, Monica, became an instant friend.  We would see her a couple more times later on and had a couple more laughs with her.

Studying the map we realised that Conimbriga is not far from here.  The largest and best preserved Roman settlement in Portugal is there.  So decided.  Tomorrow we will take the bus there and instead of walking on the Camino, we will spend the day exploring the Roman ruins.

The pictures ate from the trail and include s picture of the asphalt that I cannot figure out how to delete.