As we saw our first “Camino de Santiago” sign along by the road and launched into a rendition of “Is this the way to Santiago?” (to the tune of “Is this the way to Amarillo?”) we began to ponder on the theme of pilgrimages. The Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela is the endpoint for many pilgrimages; people travel along different routes, for different reasons to reach this destination. Because there are many different routes, all leading to one point, the scallop shell is the symbol for the pilgrimage (as its lines lead to one point).

As it happened, our time in Santiago de Compostela was very brief due to some rather inclement weather, which didn’t make it the ideal time for wandering. However we did visit the cathedral and saw several pilgrims arriving; some looking a little worse for wear from their journey… we could only wonder what their stories were.

As we reflected, we realised that our trip is a kind of pilgrimage.
The Oxford English dictionary defines a pilgrimage as:

a journey to a place of particular interest or significance

It’s about the journey. Now we’re not sure that we’ve got any one place that we would count as the endpoint of our pilgrimage. In fact it could be argued that even though our journey is physical, our destination isn’t; it’s more that we’ve grown on this journey. But anyway, back to the story!

Having had our wander, we had a choice as to whether to pay an extra 12 Euros to stay in the car park overnight, or drive to the coast where we could stay for free at an aire there. Easy decision. As we left the city and headed towards Fisterra (an optional extra to the traditional pilgrimage), the rain cleared and we had a beautiful sunset drive along the coast.

The following day we drove around to Fisterra, only to find that it wasn’t that motorhome friendly… so we turned back to the last beach before it, parked up, had some lunch, then went in search of some scallop shells. It’s traditional to wear a scallop shell in some form as you do the pilgrimage and as it’s possible that we might walk a route one day, so we thought it would be appropriate to find one from near Fisterra. We like collecting shells!

Now the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed from our timeline that around the time of our trip to Santiago we’ve had a couple of blown fuses (well, Bertha has), leading to all of the lights going off. That’s partly the fault of a dodgy laptop charger and partly my fault for choosing to have our 12v charging points on the same circuit as the lights. When we removed the old spotlights above the bench seat, that left a couple of wires dangling… which I then attached to a 12v charger. Bad call.

After two blown fuses (we replaced the first one, only to have the replacement go too), I decided to move the charging points to different circuits; one to the solar panel controller load output, and one to a brand new circuit with its own fuse. So far, so good… but then it’s only been a few days, and we haven’t tried the dodgy laptop charger again. One job we definitely need to do in March is move the fuse box so it’s more accessible; at the moment it’s inside the control unit (again, my fault when we were doing a bit of re-wiring) and at the same time we might add an inverter… but that’s stuff to think about when we’re back in the UK.

After that, it was only a short few days of driving (compared to what we’ve done so far!) along the coast to Santander where we end our first loop. As with our journey through most of Spain, we hugged the coast, spending evenings in little villages near some stunning waves. Have we ever mentioned that we like the sea? I think the pictures speak for themselves:

So we’re nearly home from the first loop! Hasn’t Bertha done well!