Day 3 - Zubiri, 15 miles
In retrospect we would not have waited for breakfast at the monastery… it was a long cold wait, and it set us back in time…
It looked threatening with dark gray clouds but the promised day of rain did not transpire, and we quickly had to remove our ponchos, and unzip our jackets.
We began with a lovely walk in the woods that it turns out were famous for witch covens in the 17th century, there was a white cross monument to the witches burned at the stake and for protection to pilgrims (I’m not sure of the connection between these two things, witches and pilgrims…)
This was probably my favorite day so far for spectacular scenery. I was enamored with the small stone bridges we had to cross, over streams in the forest, and the magical fairy like quality of the paths and the trees. It was a perfect day for walking, sunny skies and crisp temperatures.
The several resources we consulted all said we would only have to hike 11 miles today…but it became apparent quite quickly, that the Spanish have an interesting relationship with distances… One sign told us we had 6.5 km to go and after walking for 20 minutes the next sign said we had 7 1/2 km to go… Linda has tested the accuracy of her GPS system to be accurate, and we ended up walking 4 miles more than all the books told us we would for the day… Not much you can do about it…just keep on walking and keep your sense of humor.
The terrain was quite hilly, up-and-down, up-and-down… lots of wonderful picture taking opportunities…we sat to take off our shoes and rub our feet. We had a beautiful salad for lunch at a little café in a quaint village.
We were not making very good time as we were having such a wonderful day and we ended up walking quite a bit further than we thought.
We had planned to go onto the next village, but we were trashed as we walked ourselves into the beautiful little town of Zubiri at 4:30pm
During our walk today we had agreed that we would get a nice room for the night preferably with a bathtub (we spent some time conjuring up this beautiful vision in our heads). We walked past the first couple of albergues, turning our nose up because they were not what we wanted…. However we quickly found out that the town was Completo… Meaning fully booked! every single place! To our dismay we then discovered that the next small town and even Pamplona the large town after that were ‘Completo’….. Ruh roh!
I left Linda to have a beer with some friends we had run into and I went off in search of anywhere we could sleep tonight… We quickly had to let go of our dream of soaking in a hot bathtub…
I ran into our friend John looking as tired and dejected as us, he told me that he had just booked a spot on the gymnasium floor that the municipal albergue had opened to any pilgrims like us that were desperate! And we were desperate… We could go no further, and it was becoming very cold.
John, Linda and I had a pilgrim dinner with our friends and then retired to sleep in a large, unheated gym on a cold concrete floor with no mats, just our sleeping bags. The three of us spooned in an effort to stay warm but to no avail, the cold concrete floor won out, and my body shivered through most of the night. I’d had a couple of glasses of wine, but there was nothing to prepare me for this night… sigh! The only word to describe it was miserable…
We didn’t actually wake up as we never truly went to sleep… We decided to call it a night at 4:30 AM, so we got up, packed our things, took a quick shower and got on the road in the dark using my tiny headlamp to guide us..
