Today was a good day.

We walked without too many issues (besides Laura not getting a coffee in the morning because all the bars were closed) and arrived at around 2 PM at our destination: Abadín.

I had to be careful about my knee, but overall it didn’t hurt almost at all. This put me in a positive mood, despite the tough uphill paths we had to walk.

After getting to Mondoñedo, where we realized we had just missed what seemed to be a nice medieval-style weekend of revelry, we had to climb and climb and climb until we reached the high plains of the so-called “Terra Chá” (flat ground).

This region of Galicia is one of the most important regions for the production of milk in Europe, and one can tell from the amount of pastures and cows that are present.

The stage was made more difficult by the lack of any rest place for a good dozen of kilometers after Mondoñedo. Luckily, before we left the town, we found an open bakery where we could get some tasty bread and a chocolate pastry, hot from the oven. Paradise for a few minutes.

After that, we walked (uphill) for more than three hours straight before getting into a group of houses resembling a small village.

It got so bad that at some point I saw an old man coming down towards us with a scythe. For a second I thought it was the Grim Reaper, and I was the knight in “The Seventh Seal”. I really need to get better at chess, just in case.

Honestly, I believe we could have stopped earlier than that, but we felt like we could have kept walking until we had found something worth stopping for. It’s just that there was absolutely nothing until that group of houses in Lousada.

To sum up, today instilled some confidence in ourselves and our ability to keep walking. The issues we’ve faced were mostly psychological or motivational ones.

In my limited experience, the third and fourth week are always the toughest. At this point, the body starts to carry the mind one step after the next, when the mind wants to stop and starts questioning the whole thing.

Luckily our bodies seem to be coping decently enough with the Camino, after our recent troubles.

We will need all the physical strength and endurance, in order to overcome any shortcomings in the “upstairs” department, i.e. inside our heads.