Days 2-4 and the cold hard truth

At 6:00 am the lights in the hostel abruptly turned on, giving us a pretty clear signal to get on our way. We headed away from the mountains and through a Witchcraft Forest where people practiced witchcraft in the olden days. We also passed through Hemingway´s favorite fishing town which had two little canals flowing on wither side of the street, so each house had a little mini bridge to get to their front door. It was absolutely gorgeous. We hiked to Zubiri after a massive downhill slope that was really rocky and steep and killed our knees. Zubiri was one of my favorite towns so far, it had everything, including a river with an old Roman bridge.

Day 3 of the hike we left Zubiri and headed towards Pamplona. The hike was long and hard, because we hadn´t made it as far as our map suggested we go the previous day so we had to make up for some lost time. We went about 24 km entertaining ourselves by singing Will Smith songs for as long as we could. We finally arrived in Pamplona and settled into the first albergue we could find, which happened to be run by a lovely German couple. We summoned the energy after a couple of hours of resting to go into the city and explore the sights. We saw the path of the running of the bulls which was already being prepped with large wooden gates and barriers. We also did a Hemingway tour and saw his favorite bar and cafe in Pamplona. We got our pictures taken with a Hemingway statue in his favorite cafe and even had a beer with Papa.

That night... was pretty rough. We went to bed at around 8:30 pm, but that night Spain played against Paraguay in the World Cup and won! It was also the Saturday before San Fermin started and it was crazy in the city... which meant that we were kept awake by drunks wandering past our albergue shouting, dragging trees around, and playing music until 5 in the morning. When we woke up at 6:00 and left for the day there were still drunks wandering home with drinks in hand. We passed through the main square in town and it was completely trashed. Pretty disgusting. So, because of how crazy it was in Pamplona and our complete lack of desire (and sleep!)to be around such a scene (even though we´d be missing our chance to see the running of the bulls) we decided to head on towards Puente de La Reina with just two hours of sleep under our belts.

So, the walk today was difficult. We had a lot of rocky trails and a big uphill towards the Alto de Perdon, the literal Peak of Forgiveness. We met a nice Spaniard that we nicknamed Spanish Grandpa who told us all about the surrounding area and gave us candy when it was time to leave. We liked him =) On top of the mountain ridge was a wind farm. We had never been that close to windmills before and you could actually hear the massive amount of air that they were pushing around.

So, around the last 8 km things got really tough. We started hurting pretty badly. Part of it was probably the combined injury from 93.2 km of hiking, and part of it was the extreme downhill climb after the Alto de Pardon. Dan has blisters pretty badly and has a lot of pain in his feet. We´ve bandaged them several times, but nothing seems to be working with the stress he´s putting them under. We even stopped at one point along the trail and several other pilgrims wandered by-apparently talking about feet is the cool thing to do here- and gave their lovely advice in hindsight. One lady even touched Dan´s feet and bandaged them herself. Nice, but weird because she didn´t ask first, just grabbed his tootsies and started touching. As for me, I was doing great. Surpringly, amazingly great. Sure, my back was preventing me from lifting myself up and Dan had to help me up everytime I wanted to move... but my feet were good, and I was felling less and less sore everyday. Until about 6km before we arrived in Puente la Reina. Then the shin splints started. By the time we got to the albergue I could barely walk. So now we´re both gimps just barely hobbling along and wondering how we´ll make it through another day.

We´re weighing our options now as to what we´re going to do tomorrow. We might take a day off to rest if it´s still really bad. We could also hike about 10km instead of the 20 we had planned and just stop at an earlier stop. We could take a bus to a city that´s further down the trail. We don´t know yet. We just had a fabulous buffet dinner and we´re going to head to bed soon to get off our feet and try to heal as much as possible and then we´ll reevaluate in the morning.

For all of you at home we wish you a very happy 4th of July. We finally found another American and we joked about finding a book of matches to celebrate. Watch some fireworks and enjoy the barbecue. We´re thinking of you all.