Day 4 - The peace in silence
We left Melide early... this was our hardest day.... basically we had squished 2 recommended days into one, resulting in a 20 ish mile odessey to complete today. Melide is also the place where the primitivo route (the one we were on) joined the Franco one. Thus in my head I had expectations of the route being much busier. Also given that we were counting down the miles to Santiago, I was expecting that much of the route would be alongside the road. From the bus on the way here I had seen pilgrims walking alongside the road and assumed that most of the route was like that. So once we left Melide I was expecting tarmac but to my surprise and delight, our path branched off very quickly onto gravel and into woods. We had passed some nice cottage like houses with views over the fields and the woods were full of Eucalyptus, with a smell that made all else suffer with insignificance. Today was absolutely about getting the miles done and although we had made tentative plans for stops at 5,