More random photos

On the Santoña beach this morning
Yesterday afternoon. Bull fight on TV in bar where we hung out to blog.
The center of Santoña
This is the man who waved me over to the albergue and told me they had my raincoat. We chatted a bit. I told him we were catching a bus to Laredo. He was interested to know a bus was available. Here he is at the bus stop with us. We have been calling him “the wandering minstrel”. He seems to be walking the camino but didn’t have a typical backpack or typical hiking clothes. He told us he bought everything he was wearing (including coat) the day before in a second-hand store in Castro Urdiales. I thought he looked very sharp. I think he is British. He said he’d spent the last 4 months in Morocco.
This is Kelly and Christina, also waiting with us for the bus to Laredo. Kelly is the Episcopal priest we mentioned in previous post. We kept running into them over two days. Christina told us she was a retired church musician. She said it was a stressful and highly underpaid career. Kelly had just wrenched her knee so had to stop walking for a few days.

Safer road walking

From the front

Charlie started this post but I (Wynette) will finish it. We were doing some road walking (albeit quite safe since very few cars came by on this tiny country road) and I thought, why not put on our high-viz gear? Can’t hurt to be a little more visible. I did not succeed in talking Charlie into donning his.

My mom helped me make these little hi-viz skirts before we left. She sewed the little edge for inserting elastic around the long edge. Thanks, Mom!

We didn’t bring these for sunny day road walking but for putting over our dark blue raincoats on dark rainy days should we have to walk along a busy road in those conditions. So far, we haven’t needed them for that.

We have heard that one can get fined in Spain if walking on highways without wearing something like a hi-viz vest. We’ve walked many miles on Spanish roads without one and no fines yet. But, we do have reflective tape on our backpacks and on my hiking poles.

El Brusco!! No!!

El Brusco is a steep hill along the trail today. We climbed it in 2018. Beautiful views, super steep, both up and down. You can check out our 2018 for photos. But we were still in our 60s then. This time it was “How could we have been so stupid as to try that?” and we went around. Here is the track and elevations. El Brusco is the big spike in the elevation map.

And here we are today, satellite view. We are the blue dot, walking the beautiful beach and being glad we didn’t have to climb El Brusco to get to the next beach.

When we got to the end of the beach we turned left. Missed the beach on the other side of El Brusco. All the rest of our walk today was inland.