I left behind a rock bought from a little girl who had set up a small stall in the stunning mountainside village of Rabanal del Camino (where we'd stayed a freezing windblown night in the tent), and who was trying to make pocket money drawing pretty patterns on the stones.
Lisa and I both made our wishes, then climbed past the Camino's highest point (1517 metres) a short distance from Cruz de Ferro and gazed at stunning vistas of snow-capped mountains with fields of purple lavender and others of reds, yellows and greens.
It's the first really steep climb we'd had since the Pyrenees. But it wasn't a slog.
Instead, with narrow cobbled paths and warm, calm weather we were finally experiencing the Camino I'd imagined before we began.
It's also a steep rocky decent. But arriving in El Acebo, a village hundreds of years old perched high up on a steep 30-degree incline, was the perfect way to cap one of our most enjoyable days on the trail.
With stone balconies overhanging a central gutter in the road, El Acebo offered us a glimpse into a now vanishing world. Its population numbers barely 100 and it remains a pilgrim village, with a range of albergues, refugios and hotels.
It's not our last mountain climb - in two days' time we'll face perhaps our biggest challenge.
The climb to O Cebreiro is shorter, just eight kilometres, but is reported to be brutally steep in three sections of 2.5km.
O Cebreiro might be home to just 20 people, but the views out over the green Galician mountains are said to be breathtaking.
From there, there'll be just 150km to go.
Route marker: 575km down, 200km to go.
* Simon Winter is a former nzherald.co.nz news editor. He and partner Lisa are following the sun through Europe.
