We came to Oviedo Spain two days before our plan to start hiking the Camino de Santiago. We started planning this over a year in advance but since we were also planning such monumental life changes (quitting our jobs, selling our belongings and transitioning to a global nomadic lifestyle) we didn’t even consider spending the time to plan our multi-day Spanish hike on our own. Chrissy found a travel company who would arrange the whole thing for us which took just about all of the planning pressure away.
We decided to arrive in Oviedo two days before starting our pilgrimage just to make sure that we arrived with all of our stuff and were relaxed and ready to go. That turned out to be a great decision because Oviedo is a beautiful town, but also since it gave us time to figure out how to arrange our luggage for the Camino.
Our travel arrangements included transporting one bag for each person from hotel to hotel along the Camino. But the weight is limited to 20 kg each. Since Chrissy and I travel full time and would be arriving with essentially all of our belongings, we were going to have a problem, mostly because we would need to empty our backpacks of our heavy electronics to make space for water and food for our daily hikes.
What we ended up doing was acquiring another suitcase and loading it up with stuff that we won’t need. The post offices in this part of Spain will transport a suitcase to the post office in Santiago de Compostela where it will be held for you for up to 30 days. That was a huge relief for us.
We also went shopping at Decathalon (a popular international sporting goods outfitter) to grab a few more odds and ends. I made a radical last minute decision to buy a different backpack for the hike. I really wanted a bag that had a frame, an air gap and load lifters for the hike. But my travel pack isn’t designed like that so I took a chance and got one. We’ll see how it works out.
Since we’re only in Oviedo for a little over a day we didn’t get to do much but we did manage to sample some of its apple cider and Cachopo. Cachopo is basically like cordon bleu. Meat pounded thin, filed with ham and cheese and then breaded and fried.
Maybe someday we’ll come back and spend some time slow traveling based in Oviedo, but for now we have hundreds of miles to hike to get to Santiago. We’ll be hiking just about every day for the next few weeks. Wish us luck.
