This Coast - CDN to Colunga

We put a good two hours of hiking in the dark to get here at dawn. It was worth it. This IS the best breakfast spot of the trip, and we aren’t going to rush.

This coastline is rugged, jagged, and sharp. You don’t want to trip here. The waves are big today, and the sound is deep. The roar of the ocean hitting these rocks is ancient. It goes deep into our psyche. I can’t stop watching the waves.

The sun rises a little. We walk on. We start finding active bufones! It’s as though the ground is breathing through these nostril like openings connected to the sea.

It’s all hydraulics of water pressure pushing air through a narrowing tube. They are all over the place! And they “breathe” in time to the ocean swells.

This is not an easy coastline to hike, and it works us. It also slowed us down. But that doesn’t matter, this is why we are here. To embrace it all, and this coast is worth embracing.

We stop off for an early lunch in some town along the way. It’s a bar for old men, run by an old man, with food made from scratch by an old woman. We love these places. They are reliably open in the morning. And they serve good food.

Then what you know what we did? We got on the bus! We weren’t going to make it to our next town before dark at our current pace. We fast forward two towns by bus, and got out to walk the rest of the way home.

Die hard Camino purists will likely criticize our move, but so what? We are making our camino work for us, and this was the right move. We may not hike every single step of the trail, but we will get 75% of them. And 75% of 510 miles is still a hell of a lot of steps.

Besides, check out this scenery. This is how we spent our afternoon, walking through paradise! We are so lucky to be alive and healthy enough to be able to walk these paths.

I love these fence lines…

So over it for the day…

We made it to town! We had a couple drinks in the late afternoon sunshine, content to do absolutely nothing over a glass of cool albariño….

“Ahh, Is this not happiness” ~ Jin Shengtan, 17th Century Chinese sage