Our friend Henry asked in a comment yesterday: “Out of curiosity, how many hours do you actually walk? I imagine that the gung-ho younger walkers cover 5.8 miles in about 2 hours or a little more, though probably all they see are their feet. Do you make it a four hour stroll + coffee stops and a stop for lunch, or is your late lunch stop the end of your walking day?”
Well, Charlie keeps a track of each day’s walking using an app called Wikiloc. So, Henry, it’s easy to answer your question with those tracks. Here are stats for our last 3 days of walking.
Thursday, March 24: 6.1 miles, 4 hours and 48 minutes total, 2 hours and 29 minutes moving time.
Wednesday, March 23: 5.8 miles, 3 hours and 40 minutes total, 2 hours and 6 minutes moving time.
Tuesday, March 22: 7.1 miles, 4 hours and 20 minutes total, 2 hours and 37 minutes moving time.
We do stop at least once for breakfast and again for coffee if we find an open bar (doesn’t always happen). So, you can see, it’s pretty leisurely. We’ve been arriving to our day’s destination with plenty of time to check into our night’s lodging, rest a little, and then go out for lunch. Our favorite time for lunch is around 3 or 3:30 and then we are pretty much done with eating for the day. (Yesterday was an exception when we had a group dinner with two other pilgrims at the albergue.)
Those actual walking times are Charlie’s. Sometimes he gets a little ahead of me and waits for me to catch up and the app stops counting that moving time. So, my moving time is longer than Charlie’s.
Charlie is a stronger/faster walker than I am. When we were planning our first Camino, we both assumed he’d get way ahead of me and then we’d join up at some point. But it’s turned out that we stay together pretty much all the time because we like to walk together and see things together and talk about things. Charlie’s been very patient with me over the years.
Also, Charlie carries more than 2/3 of our weight so that slows him down a little and allows me to keep up better.
I really appreciate this long answer. I kept saying to myself “they can’t be THAT slow, only hiking 6 miles in a whole day.” Your pace is actually quite reasonable: 2.5 miles per hour carrying rucksacks (to use an old fashioned word). I hadn’t figured that your day was so short, typically four to five hours. A bit of a late start… a stop for breakfast… a stop for a coffee… arrive in plenty of time to check out a place… have a rest (I bet you do some laundry in the sink)… enjoy a late, leisurely lunch… some blogging time… early to bed. Sounds like a thoroughly enjoyable day. I mean, who wants to kill themselves on a holiday?
Hi Henry, you summed our days up perfectly. (Except we usually try to find self-service laundries to do our laundry. Since weather has been so cool, we can usually make our clothes go for a few days before they get too smelly.) I’m always amazed how much longer it takes to walk 2 miles on the Camino than it takes to walk 2 miles around my neighborhood in Albuquerque. Of course, like you mentioned, we are carrying our mochilas (Spanish word for rucksack 🙂 and also there are usually lots of steep ups and down and also sometimes the tracks are rocky and we have to step carefully. And I’m very slow on the downhills especially. My knees do ok as long as I don’t try to take big steps or move too fast.