Second Day On The Camino September 19, 2018 Roncesvalles To Zubiri

This is the map covering the walk from Roncesvalles to Zubiri.

Today’s walk is only about 20 kilometers and the guidebook says it rolls gently downhill. That is a flat out lie. For goodness sake, we are still in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Everything is up and down. It was a beautiful walk but there was plenty of uphill, although not as long or steep as yesterday, and there was plenty of downhill, especially the last four kilometers.

I got up at 6:00 AM and packed. I had breakfast, a ham and cheese sandwich and a banana and orange juice. I then went back up to the room and waited until 7:30 when dawn broke and there was enough light to walk. For the first 5 kilometers the trail passes through a thick beech forest that was the home of a coven of witches in the 1600s. It was very foggy and just a little bit spooky to walk this stretch of the Camino. The sun gradually burned away the fog that was hovering in the valleys like puffs of white cotton candy.

Our first stop was in Viskarret where we had lunch. Abe and St. Christopher were not hungry. I had another ham and cheese sandwich. They had chorizo on the menu and I tried to get them to substitute the chorizo for the ham. I was emphatically told it was a ham and cheese sandwich, not a chorizo and cheese sandwich. The Spaniards love their ham. By the time this pilgrimage is over I will have grown a snout and a curly tail. Oink 🐷

Lunch

Once the fog burned off we walked along a ridge line with a beautiful view of the meadows and the towns in the valley.

What a great view.

The last four kilometers to Zubiri were difficult. It was the end of the day, the shadows made it hard to see the surface of the trail, and it was all steeply downhill.

Tough trail.

The surface of the trail was a mess. The sheets or layers of rock had been pushed up and rotated 90 degrees by some ancient tectonic force so that they were standing up like solders at attention. One of the hikers said the rocks looked like the dorsal plates on the back and tail of a stegosaurus. I think that is a colorful and accurate description of this section of the trail.

I finally got to Zubiri at 3:30 and had to find the Pension Amets, track down the owner to let me in and complete the check in paperwork. I took a shower, did laundry and started working on this blog post. The internet was so slow at the hotel last night that it took me three hours to upload all the pictures and type the text. Today the Pension Aments has great internet and I breezed through this blog post in an hour.

Dinner

After I finished and published this blog post I went out to look for a place to have dinner. I found a bar on a plaza down by the Arga river that runs through Zubiri. Outside the bar there was a collection of tables and chairs for pilgrims to relax and enjoy a cold glass of beer 🍺 or a glass of the local wine🍷. I invited myself to join a party in progress and before long we had seven people at the table from the United States, Canada, France, the UK and Germany. We had a few refreshments and talked about our Camino adventure so far while we feasted on delicious plates of tapas provided by the delicatessen adjacent to the bar. Before long Jack from Canada was playing his ukulele and singing cowboy songs.

On the left side of this picture is a woman who is from Lancaster PA. Her family and her husband’s family have Springfield roots going all the way back to Abe’s time in Springfield. Abe was beyond thrilled to meet her and they spent the evening chit chatting about Springfield and the Gettysburg Address.

Tomorrow I either walk to Pamplona or take a detour and stay at the convent at Zalbadika, which is about 8 kilometers short of Pamplona. We will see how it goes tomorrow.

I hope everyone had a great day today.

Good night from Zubiri, Spain.