"Easy and relaxing, my ass!" my husband grunted, annoyed with our guidebook authors ability to understate the inclines of the day. "What, did he grow up in the Alps!!"
We stumbled 12 kilometers later into an empty bar but for two brightly dressed old women. "Todo es carne?" I asked as the impatient bar keep sized me up. "Si," he said, before dismissively turning his back to me. We packed up and lifted our bags to our backs as the two ladies discussed and wondered over why pilgrims were not staying in the little alburgue over the bar. I looked up at the empty alburgue and spotted a sign stating "do not remove boots on the premises." After my run in with a surly barkeep, it was clear that this little town wanted the pilgrim money, but wanted nothing to do with the pilgrim. We left quickly.
"There should be a bar in the next town, Peñaflor," we trudged on, anticipating the fresh clean Fanta that awaited us and arrived to meet 3 other hungry pilgrims and a sign on the door stating "Cerrado Lunes." There was a beautiful Romanesque bridge crossing the river, but as we were hungry, we didn't notice.
25 kilometers from our starting point, my husband and I limped into the eerily quiet town of Grado, starving and in pain. After securing a room in the shabby though lovingly run cheap hotel Autobar at the end of town, I left my husband on his own to assess his blisters and damage of his first day's walk, and I headed out to explore.
Regal old houses stood with overgrown lawns and pealing paint, shutters hung crookedly. Buildings with crumbling corners and clinging cobwebs lined the streets forlornly. Broken glass, graffiti and shuttered stores led to the post apocalyptic feel of this town in decline. The eyes of the old men and women on their park benches followed my every move suspiciously as I window shopped my way down the street. The sound of children almost entirely absent in this forgotten town where the young adults leave quickly in order to find work. The old sit and watch.
"Something isn't right in this town," I said as I sat down to dinner next to my husband and a talkative warm German woman named Karin. I had just returned from my exploration and had had an encounter with an old man who had sung to me while trying to get me to buy tuna. "Everything seems a bit off!" Karin shook her head enthusiastically, "I will leave early tomorrow. I want to get out of here."
Our hotel and bar, run by a mother and son, offered a pilgrims menu of brothy fish soup and salad. Karin, Ameya and and I worked though our courses as we chatted of travel, politics, and the oddness of this first days walk out of Oviedo. I silently worried, as I wanted my husband to fall in love with the beauty of traveling and Spain was showing her ugly side. I worried that Ameya was uncomfortable and miserable, in pain from blisters in unmentionable areas, that this trip was a crazy idea to him and he didn't want to waste his vacation walking through creepy little towns and eating food he didn't understand. I worried that the next day, our plans would change. We would wake up in the morning back where we began, with no common ground. I ate my simple soup and I worried.
Ameya fell immediately into a deep esophagus rattling sleep and I laid awake on my separate creaky little bed with its threadbare cover. "James, what are we doing here?"
Saint James chuckled, "I wonder if the pilgrims of the Middle Ages would have used the train if they could? Pah, the way to my house should not be life or death or strewn with misery. Just come for a visit. See what you see in the morning."
I nodded and closed my eyes, falling off into the night's darkness.
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