On the Camino de Santiago we met Tom Doud and his niece Nikki on our first day. It took a week or two of running into each other and sharing experiences on a regular basis for us to connect and form a deep friendship. Their kindness, inclusiveness and thoughtfulness captivated us. One thing we learned from them was to take a rest day on a regular basis. We applied that today.
My bladder woke me up about midnight. Of course that got my mind going and soon I was thinking about the upcoming day. Weather was predicted to be very wet. We were planning to ride a train, then a bus, hike 8 or 10 miles and then bus and train back to our awesome apartment here in Marmore. I got to thinking, “If it is raining as hard as they are predicting, even with rain gear and umbrellas we are going to get wet. To wait for a bus, ride a bus, wait for a train and then ride that trains over a period of a couple hours, all while soaking wet-not a great plan.
I fell back asleep, but I was prepared to present my analysis to Sally when her alarm went off at 4:45. Typical of our sleep pattern, she woke up before the alarm and before I could say anything she said, “ I’ve been thinking, that’s a lot of logistics to hike that section of the route in the rain. What do think of just resting today?” Bingo. And with that, we emulated Tom and made the right choice.
We lazed in bed until 7:30am, reading and writing. As the morning wore on we discovered two things, (1) we were tired and laying around seemed like the right thing to do and (2) we both are terrible at laying around doing nothing and were soon fidgeting and getting antsy to do something. We suppressed the urge until about 8:45am when we walked 50 yards down the road to the store to buy some food for breakfast.
As we cooked potatoes, sausage and eggs Sally said she would like to take a bus three miles up the road to the lakeside town of Piediluco. The woman in the grocery had let us photo a bus schedule and we saw a bus came through at 9:25. We cooked breakfast then went to the bus stop across from the grocery and waited. No bus came? hmmmm . . . About this time we noticed a QR code on the bus stop sign. When I scanned, it displayed the bus schedule for that stop. Theirs had been posted for October 15. Our grocers was a summer schedule. We abandoned the idea of Piediluco and returned to our apartment. The sitting down felt good.
About 11:00 we got antsy again. Maybe we should go watch the falls again when they open it up again at noon!
Lunch, then with umbrellas in hand (the predicted rain had not made an appearance) we used our pilgrim credentials to obtain tickets, but the clerk told us the falls only run on the weekends this time of year. That’s okay, we will just go sit at a lookout and enjoy the view. We did, then we decided since we did my thing we should get to do Sally’s thing and go to Piediluco.
Now that we had a proper bus schedule we knew when they would arrive. I brought my pack with rain gear, some snacks and extra clothing and we caught the bus for the ten minute drive to Piediluco.
As soon as we got off the bus we stepped across the narrow street that the wide bus barely made through and scanned the QR code to see when the bus back to Marmore would come. Yikes!! Not until 5:45 tonight. We would have to walk back. We explored the town for a bit, then started walking toward the end of town in our direction home. We found another bus stop, scanned it and found the correct time table. A bus would be by to take us to Marmore at 3:25. This gave us an 45 minutes to walk the town, which we did. The bus was on time and we rode it back.
Dinner, rest, prepacking, “The Diplomat” and the day was done. We felt like we rested today, although we weren’t as stationary as we should have been.
Dinner of baked potatoes and broccoli, then packing up our gear for our early morning train ride to Rieti.
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