Depart Time: 7:50 Temp: 53F RH:60%
Walked today: 7.9 mi. Camino 2024: 7.9 mi.
The two-day R&R at Roncesvalles allowed our travel-worn bodies to fully recover, as hoped. The comfortable rooms, good service and excellent food offerings are a gem in this unique location. We have stayed here in 2012,13,17,19,22,23 and now 2024… for a total of 12 nights.
Our internal clocks are still adapting to the time zone difference, but we’re sleeping well enough, already, so that our ability to cover today’s distance was not adversely affected. Also, this morning’s cool, dry air was a welcomed change from the hot, very humid weather we’ve endured in South Carolina throughout our “training” during June and July.
After walking an easy 1.5 miles, we stopped for breakfast in Burguete,
a picturesque Basque village, reminiscent of those typical of the alpine communities we’ve visited in Germany, France and Switzerland.
Leaving Burguete, we walked through paved and gravel roads through pastures, then forests then back onto a secondary paved road leading into Espinal, another alpine’ish village.
We stopped for a break and fresh squeezed orange juice at an albergue, newly opened since our last camino in July/August 2023.
The second half of today’s walk was somewhat more difficult due to relatively long climbs and descents and challenging walking surfaces.
We arrived at our destination, Bizkaretta, shortly after noon. Our room is a dated, but clean, casa rural (visited in 2022) but was not available until 2:00, so we reversed course a few hundred yards, to a newly opened bar and had pizza. The hours of operation of the limited number of eating facilities in the village made this our lunch/dinner for the day. Along with our pizza we enjoyed chatting and sharing information with a young lady from Houston, Texas, walking her first camino.
We checked in at 2:30, did our routine chores and blogged, rested and read until bedtime… a nice beginning for Camino 2024.
Jimandi 