Farewell to Porto this morning, and on to Santiago de Compostela, but with a long stop in Barga on the way. When you take the extension, you really don't get that much of a chance to see the extension city, but it's nice on the day when everybody has to be on their way to the airport, and we can have a civilized breakfast and 9 a.m. departure. 
Our trip to Santiago was about five hours, but we had two stops. One was at the oldest shrine in Portugal, (I think -- but maybe it was the oldest shrine on the A-2 -- all the superlatives are starting to sound alike. It's another one of those 600 steps places, and we didn't go up or down them this time, either. Only because they didn't give us time to do it, of course. This church had a very unusual altar, though. It was 3-D with life sized statues in a tableau. Believe it or not, this is the first place we have encountered pay toilets on this trip. 
From there we went into the nearby town of Barga, which is a very interesting little town with maybe the oldest cathedral in Portugal -- or not. However, it has the oldest organ in Portugal, and it sounds good. We were there when they were having mass, and they have people who actually go to mass filling the church, this great organ, which is also beautiful, and a wonderful choir. In my opinion, everything you'd want to go to church for. 
We had a little walk around the old part of town, stopped at Ferreiras and had their eponymous dish, which is a lot of sheets of thin pastry, like filo, with hamburger and cheese cooked into it. I didn't realize the hamburger and cheese was the default filling and any other filling was added to it, not instead, so I had an egg on mine and john had ham and cheese on his. It was very filling. The other claim to fame of this restaurant besides inventing this, is that some years ago while doing some repairs, they found roman ruins under the cafe, so they put in a glass floor so you can see the ruins below you.
Tourist business in this town is largely devoted to religious stuff -- statues, rosaries, etc., etc. I'd say at least every fifth shop was strictly religious stuff, and the rest of the shops catering to tourists had a section for that kind of holy chatchkes. They are getting ready for St. João's celebration, which I finally discovered is really June 31, but really, why wait if you can start partying now? Today's event was a drum band, which was able to totally drown out five bagpipes. We got as far away as we could from that!!
It's interesting how the landscape changes. The Douro valley looks a lot like our part of California, then we get into a much greener coastal area on our way to Spain.
We arrived in Santiago at about 4 pm, though they are an hour ahead of Portugal, so we had to set our watches ahead. I didn't think we were all that far north, but the sun was still in the sky at 9:15. We had a little introductory walk from Viking at 6:30. Fortunately john and I had gone and bought umbrellas. because it was pouring 8 guests started the tour, 6 went two blocks and went home, but John and I did the whole tour. Three hours later we're still trying to get our shoes dry.
Santiago de Compostela is a beautiful city. It is totally dedicated to the pilgrims who do the trail. This has to be one of the oldest tourist cities in the world. I'll have more misinformation about it tomorrow, I'm sure. Meanwhile, here's a picture just before it started to rain. And they say only true believers come to compostela. 
We had tapas for dinner tonight. Yum. 
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