I took my time that morning. My plan was to go to Porto by bus the day after, and once there to figure out how and when I would be going home. But for the time being, I intended to enjoy my last day in town with the friends I had made on the road: most of them should have made their way to Santiago by then.
We went to have the free pilgrim lunch. Loïc also had the free breakfast and told me that there was a weird but funny hobo with him. I showed him a picture of the one that was at the bar the previous night and it was the same guy, as I expected. He was also there for lunch! He was from germany. I tried, but couldn’t really follow his life story. The meal was not especially good, consisting mainly of leftovers, but it was good of the hotel to have kept this tradition alive.
I booked my trip to Porto and rested for a good part of the afternoon then went out to met with Elena and Dorothea for coffee, right before going for dinner with Krista and Loïc. Then it was bar hopping again! We found the main group of pilgrims taking all the space at the end of a restaurant, drinking wine. Most of my camino “classmates” were there, something that didn’t happen a lot: the italians, the girls, the mexicans, Monica and Becs, Sacha and the koreans…
I stayed there and drank a little with them then went on my own to A Gramola, the bar from the previous night, to see if Ben, Ollie and the others were still around and tell them to join us. Sadly, they weren’t, and the bar was unusually quiet. Jose was there though, and he was literally begging me to help him find Christian, Loïc and the others. I told him where the bar was but he really wanted me to take him there so I ended up leaving the bar with him, even though I wanted to stay at Gramola to talk with Dorothea and the few people there.
Of course, once we reached the bar, they all had moved on to another place and nobody was answering me… We tried a few bars randomly but didn’t get lucky. Until somebody finally answered me and told me they all went to A Gramola… Had we stayed there in the first place, all would have been fine.
It was maybe half an hour since we had left the bar, and now it was full of people, mostly pilgrims! Even more than in the previous bar, with Paul, Susan, Laurent, Amy, Jenny and the irishmen having joined. Only Ben and Ollie were missing, the former having gone back home and the latter resting, according to his father. We stayed there and had fun until everybody started moving in different directions, with some going in a club. I tried to stick with them but clubbing didn’t appeal that much to me; around 4h, I went to bed for the last time.