We woke up to the wonderful aroma of croissants and bread baking and remembered that our pension was above a bakery. With our mouths watering, we headed down to get a coffee and pastry before heading out. The door to our Pensión was a heavy metal door like the door to a castle and somehow as we were coming back in to the Pensión the door slammed shut on my pinky finger. The pain was excruciating but I cleaned it and put a bandage on and we headed out. The walk out of town was beautiful. We went past the church again, passed an old sardine packaging building (Sardine packaging used to be big industry in town) and walked past the beach. After a while we then headed inland.
at one point we were looking ahead and missed the yellow arrow which is the Camino trail marker. We didn’t realize we were going the wrong way when we heard someone calling out to us. It was the two women from Germany we met a couple days before at dinner. We were so grateful as we were heading down hill and would have had to climb all the way back up.
While John took a nap, I took a walk around to check out Laredo. It did have a nice beach and an old city section but it was so windy, sand was blowing in my eyes. Overall, Laredo seemed like a tired old city that had seen better days. Like all towns in this part of Spain, restaurants don’t searve supper till 8 and sometimes if you hiked all day that is just too late. We decided to go to the supermacado and we bought pasta sauce and ravioli to cook. The albergue had a great kitchen with lots of cooking utensils. It was also super clean and the owners were very nice. One of our roommates was from Taiwan and was doing the Camino also. Our other roommate was an artist from Dublin. Another young woman from Austria, Stephanie, ate with us. She had just finished medical school and was going to be starting studies in maxillofacial surgery. The other was an artist from Dublin who was just in Spain visiting friends. After dinner i decided to take the bandage off my finger that had been smashed in the door that morning. Stephanie, the medical student upgrade me to go to the farmacia to get antibiotic ointment. I headed to farnacia and the pharmacist looked at my finger and told me I should go to medical clinic. It was hard to bend my finger and it was quite swollen and purple. I headed to clinic which happened to be down the street from aubergue and the physician there did not think I needed an X-ray. The cleaned and bandaged it. I write about this as my visit to clinic was very easy with Google translate. Everyone was very nice. They took my passport info and I did not need to pay any money at the time. I think they will send an invoice but I am sure it will be much less than visit to Urgent Care in US. Tomorrow we will head inland a bit to Güemes.
