Today, another grueling day, my shoulders hurt just touching them and I had to carry a 25 pound pack. We still have not been able to mail those things.
We also were down to our last 2 euros.
A went a whole day without coffee. I wouldn’t drink vending machine coffee, maybe i am a coffee snob, still dont think so. does anyone drink vending machine coffee? but this kinda explains the headaches I guess. But I started my day again with too little sleep and a headache. Then walked 16 miles anyway carrying that dam pack. Ok Tonya, put 25 cents in the jar for me.
This is kinda funny, a women came up in queue behind us and said, ” oh yeah this is the man I almost slept with last night” we are assigned bunks at our albergue, I was #61 and Al #62. We already set in advance I was not sleep in any top bunk. And with there being record breaking pilgrims walking right now there were almost 300 pilgrims last night. So the bunk beds, yes bunk bed set up in a big Hall two by two, so Al was next to some women, as in a double bed. I was next to some other women. They both knew each other so one recommended we switch, and they both take top bunks, thank you to who ever is praying for us! So we started out from Roncesvalles later then we wanted to. We thought it would be mostly down hill, how could we possible go up anyone than we had already, well we did, and we had some downs too, which honestly are just about as bad now. My knees are killing me! Money still a problem, shoulders and hips aching, again last in at night. Albergue full but they had 50 mattresses they could lay in the gym, we got the last two, again , thanks for those prayers. Talked on the phone, forever, but got money, got dinner, pics to follow, fell into wine induced slumber, for a few hours anyway. Here are some pics for today,

My shadow

Our meager dinner, 2 pieces of sheep cheese , I asked the gentleman what king of cheese he had, he said, ” cow, sheep, sheep ” , also 2 slices of Salami

The gym we slept in, on the floor. Not too bad.

All the houses were so pretty.

I climbed one of these

More scenery

Long road

The monastery we stayed in last night

Our goal!

One of the many way markers

Cows and the mist

Al, wet and soggy

Sheep in the mist, we could hardly see them, but they wore bells.

Made it to Spain!

It was just beautiful wherever you looked. Jonathan you would have loved this!

Me getting a refill, we ended up running out.

Nearing the top.

Today was grueling, we left St. Jean at 7am,in the rain, pouring rain. We immediately started walking uphill, and that continued for19 kilometers, then finally, thankfully, the last 8 kilometers were mostly down hill. It was difficult. I don’t do well on hills and our backpacks are overweight at the moment. so it was slow going. We want to send things home that we got in Paris, and the extra things we packed and that we are now asking ourselves why. But we cant find a place that we can post from. That’s why we are carrying so much weight.
After we dragged our tired hurting bodies to the next albergue we checked in and bought some tickets for the evenings pilgrim meal, thankfully they excepted a credit card. which was pretty nice. When we left St. Jean, no breakfast and no place to eat along the way. We were super hungry. I did pack dried fruit and granola bars, but we never really ate the day before either. Al was starting to look at me kinda funny so I’m glad we finally got to sit down and eat a decent meal. It was tough in France, we ate out twice, and only got omelets. I know, boring, I tried to talk Al into getting escargot,which was a special that night, but no luck.
Anyway enough about that. Here’s some stats of what we did today; we walked 25.1, which adjusted for climb comes out to 32 km. the accrued ascent was 1.390m. The high point that we reached was Col de Leopeder at 1,450m which is 4,757 feet.
Here are some pics of that day.

Allen also has something to say;
Day 1:
Definitely grueling. I thought we weren’t going to make it through the day. I realized that I should have gotten more euros before we hit Spain. So far no banks no ATMs, and everyone wants cash. We are hungry, tired and basically broke. When we finally got to the end of our walk that day we stayed at this monastery that was only 12 euros for the 2 of us but that meant we couldn’t eat that night. We did check out the dinning hall which turned out to have this huge resultant connected to it that happily took a credit card. We ended up having a great pilgrims meal with people from all over the world. A pilgrims meal us usually 3 courses, there was a soup course, I think carrot, then pork cutlets and fries and it ended with yogurt. It was fantastic. Not just the food, which was good but the company as well. Then we were off to our bunks.

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