Author: charlie

Post by Wynette: We stopped at a Casa Rural a kilometer short of the tiny town of Munitibar which had no other place to stay. Charlie walked into town and bought fruit. We made fruit salad with that and pecans we brought that my mom picked up for me in Carlsbad. We enjoyed our dinner. Food here is great but we have to make a real effort to get enough fruit and vegetables. We had a great restaurant lunch earlier today. I’m getting hooked on ensalada mixta. It usually consists of lettuce, good tomatoes, tuna, white asparagus, boiled eggs, corn, sometimes potatoes. These salads are refreshing. The lettuce is always so fresh.

You may have heard that the Basque language is not related to any other language and may be a stone age language that still exists. There are no cognates at all and everything looks strange. I was buying milk today and could not sort out nonfat, low-fat, and full fat. And we are staying near Minitibar. What’s with that? It doesn’t even have any of their ubiquitous Xs or Zs. We just call it mini bar.

Post by Wynette: We walked 9.6 miles today. (Charlie walked an additional 1.2 miles to buy us some grocery store food for our dinner.)

Above, the yellow arrows took us through the grounds of a monastery with a beautiful church (below). We’ve seen far fewer churches on this path. So far, this Way doesn’t seem to have a pronounced spiritual side to it. Nothing like that of the Camino Frances. We continue to try to stay present and accept what comes. That is always a good (and hard) practice.

Early this morning we took the bus and skipped 17 miles of walking. There was a long stretch with no services which we weren’t up for. (We knew this was coming and had planned for it.) The skip took 3 buses but all went smoothly. We met some helpful Basque men at the bus stops. They are very proud of their culture. One, after telling us of his admiration for Michael Jordan and his disdain for Trump, told us that there is a large Basque community in Chicago.

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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.

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

… 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.