Ireland to Sarria- Day 1

Lifford-ignore the clock, it's broken!

Dublin airport

We set off in the very early morning sunshine from Lifford, by bus, to Dublin airport to meet up with our fellow walker and to fly to the Northwestern corner of Spain. We hoped we would arrive in sufficient time to make the "good" bus connections to Sarria-plan A, as I had this strange notion that I did not want to see Santiago before I arrived there on foot. As it turned out this would not have really been a problem because the bus station (Estacion del autobuses) is nowhere near the historic city centre but we only discovered this much later on!

After deboarding the plane, which was a little late, we found Murphy's law was looking like coming into play. The closer it is to the time of the bus departing, the longer it takes for your hold baggage to come up the baggage track. Grainne volunteered to go outside to find the bus ( with a view to stalling it! ) whilst we waited for what seemed like an age for our bag to appear and the departure time for the bus ticked past and we reckoned we would disappointingly have to move to plan B. 

Eventually it appeared and we ran out the door only to find the bus just about to leave was going to the city and my very limited command of the Spanish language did not elicit an answer that I could understand. Thankfully a gentleman nearby was able to tell us that the direct bus to Lugo was coming a little late so we were delighted that we could revert to plan A.

We were like excited children on the bus as we passed through some of the towns along the Camino route and saw walkers still wending their way to the next stopping points. The countryside was lovely not unlike Ireland, very green. Lugo looked a really nice town  and here we changed buses for the final leg of our trip to the starting point for our Camino in the town of Sarria.
On arrival in Sarria we had quite a long walk to our pension, the Il Fiorino,as it was located on the eastern edge of the town where the walkers enter from Triacastela and Samos.

Sarria is a very pretty town on the banks of the rio Sarria. After settling into our lovely room we went for a walk to explore the town and get some proper food having only really nibbled snacky stuff all day. After checking all the menus and having a dander along the lovely riverbank we decided to have pizza at Club de la pizza which offered an amazing range of pasta and pizza with free Wi Fi- pronounced "weefee" in Spanish.

Here we had a lovely meal outdoors beside the river, were able to "skype"our families and enjoy the Spanish  tradition of a little dish of complimentary food which in this case was a little chocolate/nut type desert. The young lady who served us was an absolute delight and we got our first stamp on our pilgrim's passport.