No short items today. We walked 7.5 miles, up 950 feet and down 830 feet, actual altitude ranged from 46 to 466. In an early blog, 2013, I noted that the pleasant phrase “rolling hills” is actually not that much fun to walk. Some were quite steep.
But today was a very nice walk. The whole way we were walking through rolling hills of green pastures dotted with farm houses. And lots of cows today. They say that walking in nature makes people happy and that was the case today. We both felt at home and in harmony with the environment. It was a good feeling. We always feel energetic and invigorated at the beginning of the walking day. That is an advantage of our short days, we get the good part at the beginning and by the time we are getting tired we are just about there.
It is a bit ironic really since these landscapes are not the least bit in their natural state. They are farms. But still, it feels so good to walk through them.
We saw a few pilgrims today. We chatted with two women from Ireland who were resting on a bench as we passed. They had started the Norte in 2017, got delayed by the pandemic and are now finishing it. They are slow walkers also, although not as slow as we are, who is? But they were saying they liked to go slow and enjoy it.
We are staying at a cute little pension in Oreña, a tiny town, looks like fewer than 100 people. The pension has only six rooms. The owner said that starting soon and through September she is full every day and she could rent every room six times over every night. This is quite a popular vacation area. As it gets hot the Spanish people like to come to the north coast where it is cooler. One reason we like to go in April is that you can actually find places to stay. It can be a bit cold though. We just discovered that our radiator is actually hot. I think this is the first one on this trip that was.
There are no services here so, on the way, we stopped at a supermarket and picked up food for a picnic lunch, a WynChar menu del dia: olives, salmon, two kinds of very good bread, crab salad, a packaged Caesar salad, a chicken empanada, strawberries and some little dessert cups. The pension owner brought us two glasses of water. It was delightful. We had as much fun picking things out at a “Lupa” supermarket as anything we did today. We carried out packs in the grocery cart. Fortunately we are easy to please. 😉
Note: I typed the old-fashioned happy face, ;-), there and it converted it into a emoji, because if I use an actual emoji in one of these posts it fails. It took me a while to figure that out because WordPress just said it couldn’t save and it didn’t say why.