March 27, 2017
One of my LEAST favorite things about El Camino is “hiking” through the cities. It’s hard enough walking for so long but having to walk on super busy streets with super hard concrete? It’s some kind of torture. That was how our day started, “hiking” aka navigating through a populated Pamplona. Okay…rant over! Ha!
On this section we got to see the famous pilgrim statue featured in the move “The Way” with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. See picture below!
(Showing the bliss I felt looking to the left of this photo, see next photo to to see what I am referring to)
The first half of the day was ABSOLUTE HELL. It was raining, cold, windy– everything but snow. Oh how I miss the dryness of snow! Ironic right?
All of a sudden, at the top of the mountain with the statue, everything changed. I looked towards the direction I was going and it was as if heaven was running towards me in the form of blue skies filled with sun.
(Not sure if this fully transposes but you see the sun shinning on the land in the wee distance!)
As we descended the mountain, I joined the two gentlemen I met the first night, Frank and Menuh (probably butchered that spelling.) As we were going down, Frank stepped on a slippery rock and fell over. He has two new hips and with a heavy backpack on he went down hard. But all was well, he is a trooper and got up like nothing happened.
Basically this day was all about extremes. We experienced super highs and super lows. After experiencing the super “low” point I was elated to experience the warmth of the sun, even with 7 miles to go I felt like I was a “spring chicken”, as my Granny would say!
(It was straight out of a MS Windows screensaver!)
Later that night we ate our Pilgrims dinner (3 courses for about €12.) Alice, the wonderful lady from Melbourne, lent me a pair of long shorts for dinner since it is so cold here. I proudly display my “pilgrim fashion” in a picture below!
(I gladly trade in my work clothes for this look ANY day!)
(Just to give you a idea this is the first course of a pilgrims dinner, wine of course too!)
Until tomorrow,
-Ash
El Camino Chronicles 