Tuesday, May 14,2024 – Vilanova de Arousa to Padron

Vilanova de Arousa to Padron is about 30 kilometers. You can walk the 30 kilometers or you can take a boat. I made a reservation for a boat. There were two choices. A large covered boat.

Or you could make a reservation on a small boat where you sit outside.

This is the small boat where you sit outside.

I decided a couple of days ago to reserve the small boat. It sounded like fun to sit outside.

When I got up this morning the weather looked ominous. I got an email from the boat operator that they would sail come hell or high seas and we better wear warm clothes and prepare to get wet.

My reservation for the small boat was for the 10:00 AM trip. The big boat showed up at 9:00 AM and I begged the guy to let me ride with him as a stowaway. No dice.

In the hour between the departure of the big boat at 9:00 AM and the arrival of the small boat at 10:00 AM the rain stopped and the sky kinda cleared.

The first stop on our 1 hour river voyage was a tour of the mussel gardens.

There are hundreds of rafts in the river that are home to mussel gardens. According to our boat captain/tour guide, this is a big business in this part of Spain.

The next stop was the first station in the 12 stations of the cross.

Some local entrepreneur decided to start this whole boat trip Spiritual Variant thing a number of years ago. In order to make the boat trip spiritual instead of just a way to avoid walking 30 kilometers to Padron, they erected 12 crosses along the shoreline of the route to Padron and called it the Stations of the Cross Variant. Not one person in our boat knew anything about the stations of the cross and they all gave me a blank stare when I tried to explain it to them.