Muddy Track: Getaria to Itziar, Sunday, April 15

Post by Wynette: We walked 10 miles today. A lot of steep up and down. 90% on quiet paved country lanes. Above was the exception. It was quiet but not paved! About half a mile of mud. I liked it though. Fairly flat and peaceful and easy on the feet. ? Our pants and shoes got very muddy but they still served us at the nice restaurant where we had lunch about an hour later.

Ponies!

Everyone loves ponies. We read in another blog that there were ponies on this Camino and we finally saw some today.

Pintxos

… are part of the culture in Basque country. All the bars have them even in little towns. We stopped at this bar and, for breakfast, had four of these little sandwiches which were excellent and we had two cups of coffee each because it was so good.

Small Basque Town

Elorriaga. You can see how small it is. We had coffee and oranges at Toli Aloi, a small bar. Very good coffee. We had two cups each. Basque is a very different language, not related to anything, no cognates. This was the view from our table.

Do you speak English?

Post by Wynette: When we start to talk to someone who we are pretty sure isn’t Spanish, the tendency is to greet them in English but I hated to just assume they spoke English. (Although nearly everyone does. The Latvian woman we met spoke fluent English.) Today I decided to ask before launching into conversation with the men above: Do you speak English? The answer was, with a laugh from the man on the left, I am English. He was from Cornwall which, he said, is a lot like what we are walking through right now. (The man on the right was German and he spoke fluent English as well.)