Day: April 11, 2026

Our 2013 blog has the same photo except the sign was pristine and Wynette was a little younger. I guess these stickers are a thing but I liked it better before.

Today was the transition between three beautiful sunny days and the three rainy days to come.

We thought it odd to have just these few graves we could see walking along the road above this view. Then we noticed the rest of the cemetery above the road. Beautiful monuments.

Just outside of Roncesvalles.

Usually there are stones of varying size and stability. These concrete blocks were very stable but spaced so that we had to be careful going across.

I crossed first and took this photo of Wynette. The wife of the guy in the background crossed first and was going to photograph him going across.

When tired pilgrims come into a town they tend to stop at the first bar they see. We try to always go to the second bar if we can but sometimes they means doubling back.

Anyway bar owners know this also and so you get signs like this.

In fact, today, we stopped at the third, and final, bar in town. We’re glad we did because we had a very nice lunch there.

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Post by Wynette: As mentioned earlier, because I’ve been a little “mal”, as they say in Spain, we didn’t attempt the walk to Roncesvalles, either on the glorious Napoleon route ridge walk or the Valcarlos valley walk.  Instead we took a taxi. 

Note: we made hotel reservations for all the days of this camino.  This is something we’d never have considered doing on our earlier caminos.  It robs you of so much flexibility.  If we hadn’t had reservations we might have spent another day in Valcarlos to see if I felt better to walk the Napoleon route the following day.  But, all our hotel reservations were calling.  We made the reservations because the Camino has gotten more crowded and it is harder to get private accommodations and we feel less open to staying in a crowded albergue on bunk beds in a room with who knows how many other pilgrims.  Of course, that opens one up to interesting experiences, but … we’re ok with that.

Back to the taxi ride. We passed pilgrims doing the valley walk, walking on the highway with no shoulder, the same highway our bus was on with screeching brakes the other day taking us to Saint-Jean, we were so glad we hadn’t done that walk either.  It looked downright dangerous.  Not to mention miles and miles of very steep uphill.

People might not die in a snowstorm on that walk but it’s hard to imagine that no one has died by impact with a car or bus or truck or bicycle. 

We were impressed by our young taxi driver.  He was probably about 30, but a careful driver.  He’d speed up when he could see well ahead, but most of that road is blind curves, many of them hairpin, and he was very careful going around them.  I was grateful for that. 

After we got to Roncesvalles we walked around the town which probably took about 15 minutes.  Tiny town.  We poked our head into the huge albergue (biggest on the Camino).  It seemed calm considering how many people were staying there.  We spent a few minutes in the church. How could such a tiny town have such a spectacular church?  Well, the answer is that the albergue used to be a huge monastery.

We stayed in a small but nice hotel, Casa Sabina. We found a good table in the busy hotel bar and, finally, got our blogging started.  That’s where we wrote all the blog posts up till now. We are a day behind with our daily reports.

A few photos of the day: