Month: April 2018

Post by Wynette: We walked 7 miles today. (Plus about a half mile to beach, photo above, near where we are staying tonight.) We wanted to go a bit further but there didn’t seem to be any place to spend the night without having to walk about 8 miles further, 15 in all, much further than we wanted to go. There was one albergue two or three miles up the Way but apparently it is the albergue from hell, complete with bedbugs. (Thank goodness even albergues get reviews these days.)

So we are in a nice, but inexpensive, business hotel (with lousy wifi) on a highway. They have a popular bar and a huge restaurant and we ate a good lunch here. There must have been 100 other people eating along with us. We’ve noticed that good places to eat here are mobbed by Spanish families eating out on Sundays and when we arrive we are told they are “completo”. This time he said we could come back in an hour. We planned to eat at 1:30 and had to wait till 2:30. So we were plenty hungry when we were served our first course dishes of white bean stew and cooked vegetables with ham and then second course dishes of grilled bass and pork ribs (so tender) and dessert (layered cakes). We usually get the menu del día (around 15 euros) and there is so much food. We probably should start sharing one.

Post by Wynette: We walked 7.8 miles yesterday. We left early and started the day walking up the stairs shown above. (Only about a third of the steps are visible here.) Then we walked along this path:

Then we climbed down to see the top of an old castle.

Then we walked along the ocean path some more and then along a quiet highway:

And then along a green headland:

Then along the beach to our hotel in the old town in Castro Urdiales.

We walked by this today. A class was in session. And here is the view back on it from the terrace of the bar we stopped at soon after.

The bar had great coffee. I had two.

These cows and a burro were in a pretty narrow space. The steep hill went right down to the water. There was a steep path to get down to a slightly bigger area.

photos.app.goo.gl/gXB5bdv8evbLWmmn2

Today was such a great walk that I could only get it down to 105 photos.

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Post by Wynette: We walked 8.1 miles this morning and arrived at Pobeña around 10:30. We could not believe how easy and fast the walk was. We stopped at a bar and had breakfast and coffee, walked to our hotel, checked in, rested, walked around town a little, had a delicious menu del día at 1:00, rested, then Charlie walked back to previous town, along boardwalk shown previous post, to buy groceries for dinner. (Pobeña is tiny and doesn’t have a grocery store of any kind.) I met Charlie as he was walking back and we walked on the beach. So Charlie added 3 more miles and I added 2 more miles to our daily mile count. Makes me feel a little less guilty we are taking it so easy.

… and across the sand.

Post by Wynette: When we posted yesterday about the “hanging ferry” bridge we didn’t know much of its history. We have since learned it was built in 1800s by a student of Eiffel and is a Unesco World Heritage site. This Wikipedia article says it was built so as not to disrupt ship traffic. This is very near where the river flows into the Atlantic, which you can sort of see from photo I took hanging out of our hotel window. There was also a ferry boat just up river that took people, but not cars, back and forth.

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