Brenda and Brent - Trip Diary

This is the balcony on our room in our hotel there. The balcony has been added, the outside covered with stucco the inside with plaster, but the rooms still show some of the original stone around the windows.

Here is Brenda trying out for the part of Juliet.

The bathroom walls were all a very interesting yellow marble. The faucet on the tub looked like a standard two handle faucet, but rather than hot and cold handles, the left controlled the volume and the right the temperature.

The room key was one of those electronic keys. It also served to turn on the lights - until you pushed the key into a slot in the wall you had no lights. If you left the room and took the key along all the lights went out.

It had been raining pretty steadily for the last hour or so when I took this picture. We have about one more hour of this to go before we reach the top.

This is not exactly what we had in mind. Pretty exhausting, but also interesting that were were able to actually finish this climb.

The doors in the far wall are actually shutters - they put the shutters on the inside of the window rather than the outside! So the sequence is: double pane windows on the outside that open out, double pane windows on the inside that open in, shutters on the inside of the inside windows that open in. When everything is shut, the room is very dark and very quiet. Pretty good system.

This is another Germany trekking group - their bicycles appear to have all been brought to the top of the hill and they are going to cycle down.

These are not your everyday mountain bicycle type folks - the bikes are Mary Poppins bikes and the people are Mary Poppins people. The bikes have soft seats, high handle bars, and just one set of gears. All the gearing is in the rear hub - not outside like on our bikes. It appears to be an improvement in the old 3 speed English bicycles of 30 years ago.

In spite of the simple appearance, their gear range appears to be almost as wide as ours, even with our 3 front sprockets and 9 rear sprockets. It could be we are due for a change in bicycle mechanisms over the next couple of years.

This group of cyclists were all cycling in their ordinary clothes. Most looked like retired school teachers or accountants, out for a little cycle around the park. There were about 30 of them, happily cycling down this mountain in the rain. That's right, the clear skies of last night let up and the rain is back for two or three more days.

There was one other couple in the renovated building we stayed in at the top of the mountain - a Dutch/American couple who are currently raising hothouse vegetables, in southern Spain, for export to the U.S. We had dinner with them - a rather rustic meal, with very cheap local wine but lots of food to refuel us after a very hard day. We learned a lot about Spain - from their point of view. We would have learned something very different from a Spanish couple. The truth is somewhere in between, I expect.

They were starting their pilgrimage here - about 150 km from Santiago. They say that lots of people start here. The rules require that you walk at least 100 km so, I guess it could have been worse!

She has a 5 kilogram pack and has planned this carefully. He is Dutch, so "failure [to complete the pilgrimage even without training hikes] is not an option".

This picture was taken at the end of a 1 hour session by this stream washing the wheel rims and adjusting the brakes.

Hours going downhill in the rain wears brake pads very quickly. Our pads are almost worm out and our bikes are only 3 months old. As the pads wear, they coat the wheel rims with brake pad dust, which seems to reduce the effectiveness of the brakes. So, you have to squeeze harder and they wear faster and so ...

I got some new pads but have not yet installed them.

This looks like a nice day but we were on the trail here, rather than on the road, so we did a lot of pulling the bikes up hill and carrying them downhill most of this day.

We were still tired from the big hill up to Cebreiro and the cold wet day down, so we did not put on many miles this day either.

Normally I would not bother you with pictures of peoples' vegetable gardens, but this is just too weird.

[The hotel we stayed in near Lisbon had two of these plants in large clay pots at the front door. The concierge said the Portuguese name is couva and they are used in soups.]

This metal sculpture is a fountain - you can see the spout where the mouth should be. On hot days, it was a real relief to find cool, fresh water along the trail. Most towns have fountains where you can refresh your water supply in the main square ("Playa Mayor").

I thought this was just a different way of serving olive oil. In fact, it turns out it contains a very strong form of alcohol - tastes a lot like 100 proof moonshine. The locals have a shot of this in their coffee at the end of their meal.

We are not locals. If we tried this we would be sleeping it off in a ditch somewhere along the way.

This being the hottest, driest summer in 100 years, the reservoir has been completely depleted, and the old bridges and buildings are again visible.

This bridge looks like it is still in use to cross this river. In normal times, this bridge is probably 100 feet under water. Looking at the edges of the picture, you can see the normal level of the reservoir in this area.

We had just stopped cycling in Portomarin and were about the check into a hotel when it really started to rain.

The first one I saw was behind a church, so I thought it was some type of a tomb. However, they soon appeared behind most every home in the country, and they were mostly decrepit - no longer actually used. My next guess was that they were being used to hang hams - these people are great for cured pig legs.

Eventually I was able to ask a Portuguese (not an expert, but a reasonable source) who said they were used to dry fruits and vegetables - a way to preserve them over the winter.

They have become such a symbol of Galicia that even new homes have them - smaller than this - even though they never intend to actually use them!

Here we are posing in front of a scuplture on the hill outside our destination - delaying our triumphant entry into Santiago and titillating the eager crowds who will be waiting beside the trail to toss rose petals under our tires as we cycle up the hill to the cathedral.

I had 10 seconds to run the 200 feet from the camera to the sculpture. The dumb camera though I was shooting a picture of the grass, so focused at 8'. Otherwise you could have had a better view of two very tired peregrinos.

They get all excited about someone stabbing a bull, but nothing for people who have cycled their butts off for 15 days.

Here is the front of the cathedral.

Looks like some early Guggenheim found a better way to spend his ill gotten gains that a wrinkled building and a buch of phoney art. "How about a statue of me?" Of course, it could be a depiction of some saint or other. Still, better than someone with a fish fetish spending all that money on a museum - so there was none left for art.

I have mentioned it before - the fact that in the evening everyone who has a baby in the family dresses up and heads out for a stroll. The idea to to show off the new unit, chat a bit, move on to the next friends/relations.

There are actually 4 in this picture with one faking it - the woman in the red sweater dragging the stroller behind her with her child walking beside her has probably been outed by a real recent mother and is heading home in disgrace.

Aside from this wannabe, the real mothers and fathers make a point of heading out for a stroll in the evening with their kids all togged out on display. This was common all across northern Spain. On our first night out in the city plaza in Portugal I was sort of expecting the same sort of thing, but the stroll idea appears to not extend beyond the Spanish border.

Along the way, we stopped for lunch at a truckers' cafe - the trucks were lined up outside in very careful rows, perhaps a demonstration of driving skill. Seeing people at another table had ordered a paella, we thought that would make a nice lunch so we pointed at it, waved off all other offers and this arrived. Not bad we thought and set to work on it. Brenda worked hard, but soon tired. I continued on, but could not finish it.

About this time I noticed that the two truckers who had also ordered the paella were now getting their real lunch - a huge platter of barbequed ribs or chops or something.

Now, I know trucking is tough and all, what with having to sit behind the wheel all day, but what makes these guys so hungry?

The Spanish had a very neat idea for restaurants - the three course meal, plus wine or water. It is called the "menu de dia". You get to order one thing from the first part, one from the second, and one from the third. The first is usually soup or salad. The second is the meat and potatoes. The third is desert. We half expected that this idea would continue on into Portugal, but it did not.

Across the road from our hotel this man was barbequing steaks and fish in a metal barrel on the sidewalk in front of his restaurant, so we headed in for dinner.

Renato (and his brothers, one of whom is a twin) makes anything out of plastic, but spends 30 hours a week on the road visiting his customers in Spain and Portugal. Lena is a lab tech - hospital lab type stuff.

They kept us up till 11 (very late for cycle tourists) then offered to meet us again the next night in our next town for dinner. They also planned our route through Portugal for the next two days.

Not sure how I managed to get a picture of them not laughing - they seemed to be laughing the whole time we were with them! Could it be that people get very serious when they know they will be on our web page? Fame can make even the least serious people think for just a moment about how they will appear to future generations.

Here are a few Portuguese men working hard at catching a few fish - Brian Tobin need not be concerned, there is little chance they are fishing off the nose (or whatever that little bit of the Grand Banks is called that got him so upset).

Nice spot, but very commercial. As soon as we stopped our bikes in front of the tourist information we were approached by someone with rooms to rent.

For our second last day cycling we had sun, a headwind most of the day, and lots of little hills but the traffic was not too bad. We drank 3 litres of water each during the 5 hours we cycled.

After about 1050 kms cycled in the last 3 weeks, along routes hillier than we normally do, we are both without injury - no blisters even. Cycling is much easier on the feet than walking.

We are both ready though for a little time off the bikes. We will be picking up an RV in Johannesburg and heading out on safari in Kruger National Park.