28th of August Villafranca-del-Bierzo offers three churches to see of which one is a Romanic one. In the first church where we wanted to get our stamp we saw a girl going throuh her backpack, desperately searching her credential to get her stamp. She might have forgotten it at the last hostel. By coincidence this hostel was just beside the Romanic church which was supposed to open in ten minutes. So I had a look for her credential and there was one lying from Veronica. Unfortunately, she hadn’t written her telephone number in it. So I thought it was better waiting for her to come instead of missing her along the way. When she arrived she was nearly in tears and so happy that I had found her credential. We had a look at the very simple Romanic church and skipped the third church to keep on going.
After crossing the bridge of Villafranca-del-Bierzo it was for a very long stretch nothing but uphill the valley of Rio Valcarce. As we had started again quite late we needed to have a lunchbreak already at Trabaledo, because there were not many villages coming along the way. So we took the first choice possible, which offered at least some pasta for the hungry bikers.
The Camino was for us bikers today mostly along the road, because the pilgrim path would have been way too steep for us. So we were zigzagging around the motorway on the national road, which was luckily very empty.
Before we reached Piedrafita do Cebreiro we crossed the Border to Galicia. At an intersection we met two Germans who were pulling a bike trailer for their dog and a pram for their belongings behind them. They had been doing the Camino Künig which had been described by a German monk in the 15th century. One of them had a collection of walking sticks he had made himself to sell. They seemed to us out of a time when they still could have known Hermann Künig from his days. We didn’t leave the mountains to the left as he had described his way to Santiago, but tried to join the Camino Frances again at O Cebreiro.
Getting up to O Cebreiro I had my “Déja-vu”-moment as I am an extremely visual person and immediately remembered the scene from the film “The-way-my-Way” of the Australian Bill Bennett, who we had met in Munich at his German cinema premiere. It was the scene where he was sitting on this wall with a lady, discussing whether she had to blame herself for the suicide of her husband or if it was his own decision and she could free herself from this thought.
The still from this scene was even used for the cinema poster, but was not so well retouched by the graphic designer that I wouldn’t have realized the bad Photoshop work done to the real landscape. In reality the landscape was much more spectacular and we were so lucky to be able to see all the way to where we had come from yesterday over the Montes de León far in the east.
O Cebreiro is a very magical place where the stone buildings and the Romanic church had been brave to the elements since centuries up on this mountain of more than 1.300m altitude. Inside the church it was cosy and warm due to all the devotional candles, while outside the weather changed rapidly. We lit a candle for family, friends and souls who were guarding us on our long trip. We had to get our rain gear out to be prepared for the storm building up and as we saw the pilgrim statue of San Roque at the next pass we understood how demanding the Camino can be, fighting the weather like we just did now. Actually we thought of continuing to Triacastella in the valley, but the sky opened up again at Fonfria and Robert discovered a beautiful hostel where he wanted to stay and enjoy the beautiful mountain view.
There were two bikers from Italy, Martina and Francesco from Padua, and Ivan from California as the only guests with us for this evening. Modesta, the landlady Casa Galego, was cooking for us one of the best Minestrone-Soups we had had since our tour. You could tell she was proud that all the ingredients were out of her own garden. The great mountain view disappeared more and more in the clouds and the weather forecast had predicted a storm rolling in of the ex-hurricane “Erin” changing the situation completely. Luckily we had a wonderful bedroom and didn’t worry about hearing the howling wind around the house.
