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Pamplona to Puente la Reina

First day down! We survived. Days without injury: 1

Reader, I should have prepared more.

Gina arrived around 11 pm last night after taking a train, bus and taxi to get out of France. We were awake by 6:30 this morning and on our way by 7.

It took us an hour or so to get out of Pamplona proper, and then we were mostly in the countryside with a few very small towns in between.

If you saw Gina's Facebook post today, you'll see we walked 17.7 miles, 39,000 steps. And my feet are telling me they resent every single step.

We had a little sun, some rain, gray skies, blue skies, a late breakfast of cream croissants and apples. We walked up some dreadfully steep hills (hills? No one told me there would be hills) and gingerly made our way down rocky slopes.






We chatted with people from the UK, Sweden, Germany, Japan, among others, plus Gina made friends from Ukraine, Malaysia and Ireland when she was stuck in Lourdes.

Possibly my favorite moment was when we were eating our breakfast in Zariquiegui, watching a Jack Coode handsome grandfather push his toddler grandson back and forth in a stroller. The grandfather would sing to the baby, and point things out to him. Then he noticed us watching them and came over to chat.

We didn't get very far with our limited Spanish and his limited English, but we smiled at each other a lot. We said goodbye to the baby -- "Adios" -- and the grandfather said, "Agur ... Basque for adios, agur." My first Basque lesson!

Today was dedicated to Olivia Coode, in the hopes that her surgery went well.
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Comments

  1. UnknownJune 25, 2018 at 1:02 PM

    39,000 steps! You beat our step total from the Arras pilgrimage by about 2,000!

    ReplyDelete

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