This morning we started walking at half 5 to try and get a jump on other people as today there are two routes one which follows the traditional Camino past a monastery or there is a shorter route some 6.5km shorter. As you can image the shortcut is a popular choice and we would be going through Saria which is the traditional place for pilgrims who are doing the bare minimum and walk 100k to get the certificate for completing the camino.
This is made worse by it being regarded highly in Spain on your CV for younger people.
We made good progress but soon learned there were a lot of ups and downs again in fact we climbed and descended 800m over the day which was the same as the mountain the day before. Further to this we were under the impression it was 34k which turned out was 38k.
Rosario and I were joined today by Francesca another Italian (its always Italians) but she did a year Erasmus in Glasgow Uni so her English is all good. We all made good progress but towards the last 5k myself and Rosario slowed up he has a shin splint and I developed another blister even after patching it up I couldn’t get my legs working again. Francesca to the rescue tho she is actually a walking speed demon and had walked on and managed to reserve us beds with about 10 minutes to spare.
The Camino today is full of what we are now referring to as tourists just doing the last 100k swaggering about in their shiny clean trainers. Not hardened veterans like us Saint Jean lot. The problem is a lot of the tourists will walk 15k or 20k and then take up a valuable bed and the numbers of beds hasn’t exactly gone up in huge numbers.
We are taking on aggressive day plans of longer days like ours mean if we rock up later we risk not having a bed. So the next few days could get tricky.
The albergue tonight is very new very clean and built specifically for its purpose which is very rare on the camino.
Tomorrow were going to try head out early at half 4 and with 34k target. Today we crossed the 100k to go mark and hopefully if we can hit our targets be in Santiago in 3 days and give me some time to relax before heading home.
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