God's final test complete

We're in Santiago de Compostela - the third holiest city on earth, apparently. Over a week ago, when I was complaining about the distance from A Coruna to Santiago, Neil turned to me and said, in a loud booming voice (alright, obviously it was Neil so it was neither loud nor booming, but you get the idea): "This is god's final test for you, Angela." Frankly, I thought that was deeply creepy, and told him so. It turned out to be pretty prescient as well, because it was an absolute bitch of a cycle through a mountain range, faced by the added challenge of climbing with a dead iPod battery accompanied by some of the hottest temperatures so far. Anyway, we made it so nyah, nyah god - test passed.

Anyway, this is going to be a very quick up date because we are sitting in a bar using free wi-fi, sipping beer and enjoying the sunshine, and my iBook battery is nearly dead. We've pushed our average up to around 70-80km a day. Flatter days we do over 90km, hillier ones we do around 50-60km. We took a disastrous short-cut a couple of days ago - but I'll leave that for Neil to tell you about as it was his genius idea (suffice it to say, painful lessons have been learned). A Coruna absolutely rocked and was easily my favourite city so far - a port on one side, a beach on the other and a beautiful headland of parks and lighthouse in between. Lots of tiny little bars and great places to eat, people were lovely, and everything you could possibly want is easy to get to. Hopefully when I get more time I'll post something longer.

This is our second night in Santiago and we're heading off again tomorrow. Yet another lesson learned - nothing is open on a Monday. Sightseeing-wise, that is. Still, this is an amazingly beautiful city and I'll put some new pictures up as soon as I've downloaded them off the camera.

We've nearly broken our first thousand kms, and should be in Portugal in the next few days. Camping is going great and the bikes are running well. Injury-wise, nothing *too* serious yet - Neil got heat rash yesterday and I burnt my lip drinking coffee from my travel mug. We have cracked and bought inflatable travel pillows, though. In six months time we'll probably have acquired entire bedroom suites which we'll lash to the back of our bikes with curtains, or something.

I think my battery is on the way out, so I'll post this now - sorry about the lack of interesting pictures, but I'll race over to Flickr now and see if I can get some up before battery death overtakes me...