Camino del Norte Day 30: El Pitu to Soto de Luiña
We had a glorious, restful day which began with a lovely breakfast in our hotel. Toast and crepes with plenty of cafe con leche. We utilized the wifi to get some work done until 11am, letting our clothes finally dry thoroughly in the sunshine.
We hit the road around 11am passing out of El Pitu via a nice dirt path through the woods. We stopped at a truck stop for lunch sandwiches and stocked up on food at a huge grocery store. The path was quite nice until we hit a patch of construction. Apparently the superhighway flyover has been under construction for the past several years, so all the guidebooks seem to feature different detours depending on the state of the construction.
Following the signage, we ended up along highway 632 for a bit before we were directed to a side road, which curved pleasantly down to the beach. The view of the previous flyover and the new construction was quite amazing and futuristic. Spain seems to build superhighways that pass straight over valleys, rather than dynamiting the mountains or building tunnels. They are quite impressive and massive structures, looking rather out of place amongst the sleepy villages and grazing lands of the peaceful valley.
After navigating the detour, we enjoyed a pleasant country road and then forest path which lead us to Soto de Luiña, a very sweet little town that is surprisingly well-equipped with several bar/restaurants, a good grocery store, various other shops, and a large albergue with 20 beds on a donation basis.
A local cafe even has good fast wifi, so we are really set!
Around 7pm as we ate our grocery store dinner, hospitalero Pepe appeared at the albergue with several laminated topographical maps in order to talk us through tomorrow’s route. He was a very polite and formal character, and it was most useful to hear details about the route. It is always fun to figure out how to translate the message into the various languages gathered, e.g. I translate to English, a German guy translates my English to German, someone translates the German to French, etc. The hospitalero says “acantillado,” I say “cliff” and various other translations bounce about until we all understand more or less.
Tomorrow looks like it will be a fun day with sea views along the “acantillados.” 🙂 It should be around 24 kilometers to Cadavedo where we hope to spend the night. We’re feeling good knowing that we’ve walked over 800km so far (according to the GPS, which includes detours and walking around town in the evenings). We have under 300 more km to complete of the actual trail so are about 2/3 of the way finished with the approximately 830km trail (we will likely walk more like 1200km total with the detours and walking around towns).
