Omg! A traumatic day! There’s hardly any photos from today. It was too awful to start messing about with photography…

The 3 of us set off separately with a plan to meet at a cheap municipal albergue in the village of Teo, about 12km after the town of Padron.

The day was fine, uneventful, rainy (I just take that for granted these days…) but okay. The scenery the usual, neither stunning nor overly dull. It was just fine…

On arrival in Padron I headed in to the town to find a bank and take out some cash before I headed back in to the campo. Then the rain came, like, heavy, heavy rain. That torrential rain that might follow a month of summer, the rain that tears things loose and makes you run for cover, sci-fi rain, dark sky rain, rains of doom. So, what choice did I have? Lots as it happened as I was in Padron. Several bars and restaurants and a couple of hundred euros in my pocket, lol. Had I been out in the sticks I guess I would have just had to stoicly storm forward with clenched teeth and determination. But by fluke I was just out of the bank and in bar-land. I got a coffee and waited for the rains to stop. They didn’t. I had another coffee. It was clear the rain was not going to stop…so I made a dash for it when it stopped being actually end of world ark building level. I got about 3 kilometres outside town when it started again. I think this was worse rain, 11 on the dial rain, viscous hit you in the face rain. But again, as luck would have it, there was a bar! A great big one the edge of town hotel place. I took shelter to wait for the rain to stop, again. It didn’t. By now it must have been nearly 5pm and I realised there was no way I was going to walk to Teo even if the rain calmed now, not before dark. It was still about 12km! I decided to head back to Padron and stay there for the night, unless there was a bus.

I knew that I would pass the bus station on the way in to town so called in to ask and sure enough! Yes, the woman at the station bar told me there was indeed a bus to Teo in 15 minutes! Brilliant!

I waited, the rain continued to fall, I realised I’d left my hiking stick at the hotel but was not going to be going out in to the biblical conditions to retrieve it.

A bus came. I got on and asked the driver to diga-me me when we arrived in Teo and off we went. He dropped me off at the side of a hideously fast and busy road and as I got off the bus the wind took me and tried to kill me by thrusting me in to the path of ongoing traffic but I was not going to be taken so easily. Fuck you wind! I got in the small bus shelter and took shelter. I couldn’t see a village. There was a bar opposite, the type people clearly drive to. No-one would walk on this road… I tried to venture out of the bus-stop again but it was terrifying, noisy, like being in a shipwreck but on land… I was back in my bus-stop. Fuck! Okay, I had to get across the road to the bar. I made a dash across the road and survived the fast moving traffic. Wine, I would have a wine…. The bar girl told me that if I went right, along the road for about ten mins, then took another right I would come to the village so I bravely set off, holding on to the crash barriers to stop from being blown in the 100km/hour trucks. I couldn’t even walk behind the barriers as steep banks had caused a trench of flood… The wind howled and the cars screeched and I wanted my stick and the time was ticking and the darkness soon would come…. I found a right, it didn’t lead anywhere, back to the road, next right, no idea.. I saw houses but had no clue where a ‘village’ might be…. I had to start knocking on doors of village people, like proper Galician shack village people who looked at me like I was mad, a small wet woman wandering about lost – off camino I was nolonger a pilgrim, just a nut-case….3 houses in and no-one really knew what I was talking about but all sort of sent me in one direction. I saw a bar! A sign I’m in an actual village! But it was closed. Doomed. Then one more knock and a Spanish woman says the albergue is just ten minutes to my right. Found it! Just as the sky turned black I found it. I was soaked to the skin, cold, and buzzing from relief! Anna and Lucille were there. The camino had been off route in a diferent direction. Lesson learned – never, never leave those beautiful, reassuring yellow arrows… Never….

The place was the usual standard Galician 6 euro institutionalised accommodation but I didn’t care. I was safe and warm (ish) and there was pasta and probably sardines, who knows, it was ages ago. It took days to get over and write about…. Tomorrow – Santiago!