Milestone Sarria!

Today's destination is a milestone of sorts. It's the closest place you may start the Camino in order to receive your certificate.  Therefore the way becomes crowded.  We have less than a week until we are finished. It is very bittersweet.

Today we started out after coffees in the bar and as we do every single day, we followed the yellow arrows.  It wasn't until much later that we figured out we were deep into a detour to Samos, the place that is home to the oldest monastery in all of Spain and in the whole of the western world.  Cool I thought! It's no mistake. Until of course it meant I would be walking almost twice as far as I'd planned to.  Good thing I deemed the visit to Samos worth it.  The walk there was definitely the most beautiful of the entire trip so far.

It is so hard to describe the beauty of this place.  The lush damp verdant green. Peaceful and quiet, birdsong in the air.  Beautiful forested pathways in the dappled sun to walk on.  The monestary was absolutely huge.  My mind almost couldn't wrap itself around what we were seeing.  We paid our 3 euro each for admission which basically was the right to wander  around.  We learned that the original part was built in the 6th century! It's been added onto in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.  I can't even fathom the ancient ness of those dates.  There are 15 Benedictine monks who currently live there now. After the experience of my many silent retreats, I can somehow relate to the monastic and contemplative life. There were a lot of reflective and amazing spaces here.  On the other hand kind of cavernous and scary. Depends on how you want to look at it I guess. Interestingly, there is a bat colony that the monks are committed to protecting that live there now.  This sort of reminded me of the night before.  See yesterday's blog.

I'm so glad that the detour was worth it.  But I couldn't help but feeling ripped off that initially I was going to have a somewhat easy day, but it didn't turn out that way.  This is how my thinking is becoming by the end of the day.  The mind can so easily defeat us. Just when it gets unbearable there seems to be a bar/cafe around the corner with a cold beer on tap or a warm coffee that always revives.

We hobbled into Sarria and checked into an albergue that was clean. That's the only redeeming thing I can say about it.  We were in a room with four bunks with John and I on two tops.  Sigh....ok.  Showers felt good and at least we were given towels which is a first.  Found our friends Ken and
Elise, Lukas and Linda, had wines and a great Italian pilgrims meal. I am thankful for my earplugs.
I know I will never forget any of this, good and bad. I know that tomorrow the Camino will change with more pilgrims walking on the short run. We will be 'amongst 'em'.