Distance 14.6 miles 6 hours 30 minutes elevation gain 1500. moderate
**** Just a note- I hope you know you can click on the photos and see the pictures in a slide show. It skips the reading and scrolling to the bottom of the page.
Today was a long distance but sort of better because we weren’t carrying too much weight in our backpacks. It was a day we were looking forward to because we were going to pass Alto Del Perdon, the metal sculptures shown in the movie “The Way”. In the movie the sculptures comes late into the Camino when actually they are at the beginning.
14.6 miles is a new distance record and would have been a lot easier if we didn’t need to climb that mountain. We won’t do this many miles in one day for some time.
There were dozens of pilgrims on the Camino today. Considering the main season starts April 1, we were surprised how many people we saw. We walked with a German couple for about an hour but lost them when we stopped for our picnic lunch.
Getting to the location of the sculptures is another story. First it takes a 3 mile walk just to leave Pamplona. Then the Camino goes another 5 miles and up 1500 feet to pass over the mountain between Pamplona and Puenta la Reina. The sculpture is on the very top of the Camino pass. This is the highest elevation we will be for the next 100 miles.
It was cold and very windy today. The clouds were threatening rain but it held off all day. Good thing it was cold and good walking weather or else it could have been harder. When we checked into our room and started to relax it started to rain hard.
I don’t have too much to say other than it was a quiet day with cars far away. The few small towns that we did walk through were pretty empty. One big disappointment was all the small Churches that we read about that are supposed to be beautiful, they were all locked.
We had dinner tonight with the German couple we met on the Camino. Our 5 words of German and their English along with Google translate made it a delightful evening. Unfortunately we all hated the meal. But it was cheap.
