Saturday 22 August 2009

Day four - Santiago

After our day full of setbacks and the hot weather causing us to run fast out of clean clothes we decided to stay over for two nights, sleep in, wash our clothes and get them hanged out to dry and search for a bike shop to get a wing mirror. Also it would be a shameful to be in Santiago de Compastelo and not do the tourists bits. The day started out miserable and wet, overcastted and drizzling, we might as well have been in Ireland.

After breakfast we decided to go ahead with washing the clothes and hope for the best. While the machine was washing we consolidated all the photos and picked the ones for the blog, loaded them on the PDA for update later the night.

By the time we were done with that, the laundry was done, and there was a thin blue line of sky towards the west. We set up a laundry line, hung out the washing and drove the 35km's back to Santiago. Pat remembered seeing a bike shop on the way and we stopped there but it was closed for some festival or at least that's what we made from the sign in our limited Spanish.

We retraced our steps of the previous day hoping to come across the other shop Pat saw in Santiago. We ended up at a familiar parking lot of a Lidl and while I was fiddling with the GPS and google trying to locate a Yamaha dealer, a tiny Spanish lady drove up on a big Honda VMax in her denims, jacket and red high heals. I walked across, gave her my best possible "ola" followed by a beaming grin shown her the remains of the broken mirror and pointing to her bikes mirror asked for Yamaha dealer. Using single syllables she explained that our best bet is close to the train station.

I tried Google again to get an address for the train station when another biker drove in on his Yamaha. I went through the same motions from "ola" to pointing to mirrors. He gave up almost immediately and offered to drive us instead. He stopped at the bike ship about five minutes away, went in with us and talked with the shop owner relaying to me in single syllables. Five minutes later I had a new mirror, a new screw in the windshield and I overused as other new Spanish phrase "muchious gracious".

We shook hand with the biker, and drove away looking for the old part of the city were al the action is. Watch this space for some photos once wet get to a camp with power so we can do the transfers.

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