Month: April 2018

Surf School

We have seen three or four surf schools along the way and yesterday we saw what seemed to be a surfing class off a beach we were on. Surfing is definitely a big thing on the north coast of Spain.

WiFi

Is essential on trips now. I can’t stop taking photographs, usually 100 or so a day and we need WiFi to upload them. In the past the fast places would upload photos in 20-30 seconds, the slow ones in 1-2 minutes, and the really bad ones not at all — just wait for the next day. The second day here we were in a casa rural (photo above) and I started up google photos and 120 photos uploaded in about 2 minutes. I was amazed. The new phones use a faster WiFi (“ac” I think) so maybe that is it. It is great though. We have had 3-4 like that since then, basically one photo a second. And several in the one a minute category.

We took the bus into Deba and the bus had WiFi that uploaded at one photo a second. I was very pleased about that.

Rome2rio.com

We discovered rome2rio.com last Camino. It is very good and fun. Just put in two cities and it tells you all the ways to get from one to the other. It is great for finding buses when you want to skip a bad section. It is mostly accurate although occasionally we find errors. Not surprising when you think about the amount of information in their database. From Islares to Laredo it identified the right bus but put the fare at 20 euros (it was 1.35). A taxi was 19-21 euros.

Bypassing towns

We had another instance today where the Camino went up a hill and along a high point in order to bypass a flat section of road. There was a town along the road so we missed all the bars. Luckily we did not need to stop at a bar at that point but I wondered what the town thought about losing the Camino business. The Camino del Norte does not seem to be busy enough for the pilgrim traffic to be of much consequence.

On the Camino Frances and the Camino Portuguese we saw several instances of “sign wars” where the Camino organizers skipped a bad section and made it more pleasant and the bar and restaurant owners along the bad section would paint out the Camino yellow arrows with black paint and put the old ones back sending pilgrims past their establishments. Our Portuguese blog has some photos of obliterated signs.