43 km (800.7 km) – 68,230 steps
Saturday 23 April
Today was the first day that I actually walked all day with someone else; Katharina, a lovely German girl who I’d bumped into a few times over the last few weeks. She had stopped for a day in Leon and caught up with me yesterday evening. We left Azrúa at 6:30 to ensure a reasonably early arrival at Santiago so we could rest and then have a celebratory dinner and some good wine, as opposed to €1 a glass vino tinto. Today just flew by, I took no photos in anticipation of taking a string of photos as we neared Santiago. Our plans all went a little awry though, as plans often do. We passed the airport, 11 km from Santiago, and a couple of kilometres later we stopped for a coffee (and the obligatory cake) we then left to start out on the final 9km to Santiago…about half an hour later we were back at the airport! We were tired and chatting and had not only missed the turn off but had walked on for two kilometres and passed a huge sign post, facing the other way, indicating Santiago 9km. This gave us a mere 4Km further to go, which sounds like nothing but after 39 seemed much more. We finally arrived into Santiago at 17:45, more stumbled in, with no photograph taking just putting one foot in front of the other; tired but happy to the point of feeling giddy/drunk. We kept discussing that it was the journey not the destination that counted, that we’d heard that the actual arrival was an anticlimax…but the feeling of elation when we reached Santiago was immense, a real sense of achievement. Daniel was there to meet us, he looked very clean! We had great difficulty finding the entrance to the cathedral and in finding the certificate office, not sure if this was down to tiredness or that after 4 weeks of following shells and yellow arrows we can’t go anywhere without them (I have to get out of the habit of greeting every passer by with buen Camino too). We went out for our celebratory dinner;  nearly fell asleep in our tapas and ordered the vino tinto – house wine, so much for the big night! So we have a rest tomorrow and then it’s off to Finisterre on Monday.

I can’t convey how much this has meant to me without sounding like I have indeed been drinking all the vino tinto but suffice to say it has been an incredible experience and I have a strange feeling that I’ll be back…