Behind the Albergue Door: Inspiration Agony Adventure on the Camino de Santiago

of sheep bit.ly/lY33lD
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Oct 28
    O Cebreiro could be heaven if I had a warmer jacket
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Oct 30
    Never…ending…hike #sotired
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Oct 30
    No, I don’t want to see how your blisters are doing, but thanks for asking #twat
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Oct 31
    Apparently in Spain they honor their dead on Halloween. I prefer candy.
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Oct 31
    Oh look, everyone dressed up as boredom for Halloween. Boredom with unkempt beards. #shaveitalready
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Nov 1
    Somebody call me a cab
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Nov 2
    The end is nigh. Unfortunately nigh doesn’t mean now. #sodonewiththis
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Nov 2
    Look what the cat dragged in bit.ly/6resL4 – and the gang’s together again
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Nov 3
    Good till the last…13 miles or so #neverhikingagain
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Nov 4
    Well, hello Santiago, fancy meeting you here. No, it was no trouble. No trouble at all.
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Nov 4
    I’m thinking a double? Triple, you say? Don’t mind if I do. #celebratelife
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Nov 4
    V is for Victory! And Vaseline. And vagina. Just sayin’
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Nov 4
    Tlod you I culd hold my OWn hair back bit.ly/37xCcR the rest’ll wash RTF out
    Zoe Mills @zoemills86 Nov 5
    Who is this guy and what the hell is he doing in my bed? #wineheadache #dirtygirl



Food and Drink
    No matter how much we prepare for a given trip or destination we always end up somehow surprised at how the food situation shakes out. We had read a few things about the food on the Camino but most people just talked about the tapas (tiny appetizers designed to be awkward to eat in more than one bite but just a little bit too big to have all in one go) and Pilgrim’s Menus and wine but there was a glaring lack of information about breakfast. I am a fairly plain and picky eater at the best of times and, although I am considerably more flexible late in the day (much like a daytime hooker), in the morning I tend to have a very limited selection of foods that don’t turn my stomach just thinking about them. And it seemed very unlikely I was going to be breaking out a big bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and cold 1% milk every morning so it looked like a Plan B was in order. And not like last call at the bar Plan B which just means settling for the one wearing a Philadelphia Flyer s jersey over noticeably lopsided breasts, but a more serious compromise like eggs, fruit or, ugh, porridge. Which is only part of the reason that preparing for breakfast soon became the bane of our early evenings. Despite the vast quantity of restaurants and bars (not bars the way we think of them in North America, Spanish bars are more like cafés that also offer numerous ways to get tipsy) catering to the pilgrim community a shocking few actually opened their doors before 8 am. And since most pilgrims were on the trail by then, breakfast quickly became a skip it or pack it the night before proposition. So most afternoons Laynni and I, and usually Madeline and whoever else we happened to be hiking with at the time, would find ourselves not so patiently waiting for the one store in town to re-open its doors following afternoon siesta so we could stock up on buns, packaged meat and cheese, maybe some yoghurt and an uninspiring selection of bruised bananas. We mixed it up occasionally based on the circumstances – if there was a decent kitchen at the albergue we might pick up some eggs, during mediocre bursts of creativity or out of necessity we sometimes went with oranges or apples instead of bananas, and I think porridge made a sludgy, beige appearance once or twice. Following a supper in San Juan de Ortega where we received an absolutely ludicrous amount of cheese, the kind of cheese platter that could bung up a Mexican toddler, we had a filling, if rather unbalanced, breakfast of yet more cheese, plus an imitation Twinkie from the vending machine.
    Occasionally, when we hadn’t generated an adequate amount of initiative to plan our breakfast the previous day we would just head out in the morning on the strength of a hope and a prayer, and maybe the remains of an old chocolate bar we found in one of our pockets. One particular morning, despite having nothing for our rumbling stomachs to cling to and seeing nothing promising on our map, we decided to chance it, hoping a café or International House of Pancakes would just magically appear along the way.