Talking of wine, we lunched in Santiago de Compostela yesterday in a restaurant called Gondola I, at a nearby table to but not quite WITH a bunch of Camino de Santiago trainee volunteers for manning the pilgrim office. The restaurant calls itself a pizzería, which we all decided was a bit of a mistake as it is much more than a pizza place. We, and I suspect quite a lot of other people, tend to walk past pizzerías when looking for a likely place to lunch, unless we specifically want pizza. And while at the Gondola they serve pizzas, they also do a good menú del día with plenty of variety. And the decor is very pleasant. Well worth visiting!
We were lunching adjacent to the volunteers because our friend Ian had been manning the pilgrim office during the morning while the trainees did their training. He had invited us along to the lunch expecting us all to sit down together but then discovered that the trainees were having a working lunch, deciding rotas and such. So we were introduced to everyone and then went to a separate table and had a non-working lunch and listened to them being very noisy and excitable. Enthusiastic volunteers, obviously!!
Afterwards we had a final little drink in a bar in the old quarter which must have more bottles than any place I’ve ever been. Today, we had a quieter lunch in Pontevedra: quieter but still very pleasant. And then we caught the next rain back to Vigo after an excellent week in Sanxenxo and an equally excellent few days in Poio at our friend Colin’s house.
We found Pontevedra station in a state of chaos. They have dug up lines one and two and so far have just replaced them with heavy machinery. Whether this has anything to do with the supposedly imminent arrival of the highs speed train, the AVE, remains to be seen. Anyway, we trundled our bags through the underpass to platform 4 and waited for our train to Vigo, which arrived late, but only about 10 minutes late so we didn’t make a fuss.
Pulled up next to one of the other platforms was this colourful little train, clearly some kind of special tourist train.
It informed us in Castilian Spanish, Galician Spanish and English that it was going through the “Route of the Camellia’s Gardens”.
In the bright sunshine and wearing my sunglasses instead of my distance glasses, I read this as “Rode of the Camellia’s Gardens” which struck me as odd. It was only when I saw the photo on screen that I realised my mistake. 
However, I am not sure that the English translation is exactly right as it is. Which single camellia is it that has some gardens for us to ride though on this little train? 
And why was the train sitting there at the platform for the twenty minutes that we waited for our train (ten more than we should have done but there you go) with its engine going? Presumably it was running the air-conditioning system but as there was no-one on the train, this struck us a prodigious waste of energy. What’s more it was very noisy. And then, in the middle of one of its Spanish language notices it said quite clearly, “Sin servicio”. If it was not in service, did it need to waste fuel? Another Galician mystery! In the end our train arrived and we made it back to our flat in Vigo without further incident, just rather hot and sticky. But such things can be remedied. Unlike my poor Rosie and Basil, the rosemary and basil plants, which have curled up and died in our absence. I did leave them standing in a container with plenty of water. This would no doubt have been fine had the cool and cloudy weather we had before going to Sanxenxo had continued. But the poor things just got dehydrated in the heat wave that began almost as soon as we left Vigo.
Thank heavens they are now easily replaced from the supermarket next door.
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