Day: April 10, 2026

I was raised a Catholic and am familiar with the votive candle idea. As we have toured Europe we have seen dozens of the displays. But there has been a disturbing, to me, trend to electrify them. It’s not the same at all and I don’t like them.

So I was happy to see none of this nonsense at this Saint Jean church. Plus they offer supersized candles, only 2€, 1€ for the little ones.

What’s with all the hyphens? Dunno, that’s how they write it. I looked on Google Maps and all the multiple word place names in France are hyphenated but none of them in Spain are. Claude.ai says it is mainly tradition in the two countries.

At 10 am (Wed, April 8) we took the bus from Pamplona, through Roncesvalles, to Saint Jean. In 2013 we took this bus to Roncesvalles but the steepness and ruggedness of the terrain was a surprise this time. You can forget a lot in 13 years. And beyond Roncesvalles there is a steep down (note to self: we are walking this back up in two days. Yikes!) And the Pyrenees are serious mountains.

A shout-out to our bus driver: I don’t know how he does it every day, the road is narrow and very curvy. We have noted before that trails in Spain have few switchbacks but the Spanish and French highway engineers are intimately familiar with them.

Saint Jean is a lovely small French village similar to Spanish villages except that Wynette doesn’t know the language, which makes things harder. Our hotel guy used his phone to translate which was slow but worked.

Saint-Jean is the official beginning of the “main” Camino, the Camino Frances.  (They call it that because it starts in France just across the border from Spain.)

Our flight went from Albuquerque to Dallas to Madrid to Pamplona. The flight out of Dallas took off an hour late but made up an hour due to a strong jet stream pushing us from behind so we arrived in Madrid on time. Still a tight connection but doable. Unfortunately in Madrid we mislaid a boarding pass and had to go a long way to get another one and missed our flight time. But after we thought we had missed the flight, we found out it was leaving an hour late and we made it. Whew.

Pamplona is a big city — 200,000 — but has a tiny airport, not sure why.

We got a taxi to the hotel. The driver was chatty and said there were a lot of pilgrims this year. We asked him if the people in Pamplona got tired of pilgrims and he said (paraphrasing ) “no they are good for business, even if they are not big spenders.”