A Biergarten and a Queso Salad
With 36km ahead of us, Fem and I decided we should get an early start. It doesn’t get light until 8am though, so it is a little tougher to do. Back to how we originally met, we agreed to leave at the same time in the morning for the feeling of safely in numbers, but not actually ‘walk together’ since we both like the peace of walking alone in the mornings. It was nice to have someone nearby as it was dark for a long time, and there was a lot of dark forest walking.
We reached Melide after 10km without coffee. Once we reached town center, we stopped at a nice cafe and had an indoor coffee to warm up, as it was still quite cold out! Who was there already? None other than William the Scotsman! Nice to see him again.
As we were leaving, the cafe owner noticed that I did not have a walking stick, while Fem did, and he rushed to a closet and gifted me one! So nice! I’m not sure if it is actually useful, but I’m willing to try to ease the load on my shin.
Fem walked ahead and I pushed the next 14km to Arzua alone. I heard that Arzua is a cheese town, so I went on a cheese hunt. The grocery store had a deli style place and I got so much cheese!! Arzua cheese, goat cheese, mystery squishy cheese! We also bought a ton of vegetables to split do we could each make a salad (I found Fem at the grocery store). I wanted to buy a small tetrapack of milk to make a decaf cappuccino with, but the only small containers available were of whipping cream. My bag was sooooooo heavy by the time I left the store.
Whoops.
I walked another chunk alone (Fem tends to walk faster than me) and it was a lot of shaded forest walking. It didn’t get very hot today either, so the walking was quite nice even though my bag was so heavy. I found Fem taking a break with about 4.5km to go on the day. We decided to walk it together.
There was a biergarten along the way where it appears that if you drank a beer you could write a message in the bottle and contribute to the decorations… Neat!
The coffee made with whipping cream was awesome – no regrets. The queso salad I made was off the hook. The heavy bag was totally worth it for the rad dinner!
The final treat of the day was that I got to talk to Jacob before going to sleep. Today was long, but it was a good day. Tomorrow I’ll sleep in Santiago.