Day 2: Family Day

Day 2. Sept 2. 30km. 6 hours.

Lights came on automatically at 6am so everyone was up, packing and getting ready to go. With 30 to a room it's impossibly to sleep even 15 minutes longer. It was 24.5km from Roncesvalles to Zubiri. I started out walking with Shelly who I'd met at dinner and a German guy Hellmuth. We all stopped for a photo with the 790km Santiago de Composatella sign. 790km to go! Which then I realised I'd already walked 27km and I'm going to end up nearly totaling 900km. If I make it to Finnister.

The first few kilometers were flat and through trees and it was raining yet again. I stopped at a supermarket at one of the towns and picked up a fresh baguette, chorizo and cheese to have for lunch and one of the biggest nectarines I'd ever seen. Easily bigger than an orange! We walked on the road, through paddocks with horses, past farms, through old villages all colourful with flowers under all the windows, passing by locals and greeting them with ‘buenas dias!’ I walked with a guy from North Carolina for a while, then an older man from Georgia. Its so nice just walking with different ones for a half an hour until your pace changes or you stop, then you leave each other and talk to the next. I met a family from Toowoomba along the way too. Then I ended up walking at the same pace as a German girl, Nina its so hard not to introduce yourselves when you're walking side by side and going the same way. Nina is a freelance journalist in New York. She was lovely. The conversations are so interesting! We struggled up the hills together, enjoyed just walking in silence, listening to the bells in the distance and also cursed the rain together. It was meant to be mostly down hill today but that was a joke. There were some tough up hill slogs! I probably looked like I was dying when I got to the top of one hill and who was there, Hellmuth and Shelly. So I left Nina and started walking again with Hellmuth and Shelly. There was a while where I dropped back and just walked on my own through this dark cold forest path and when you've got nothing to think about but your own thoughts, iI kept realising just how lucky I am that I can do this and more just looking around and going ‘I cant believe I am in Spain, walking across it!’ May have chuckled to myself a few times in disbelief. It's a thing on the Camino to say ‘Buen Camino’ to everyone who passes. And its great! Because even on the toughest uphill parts when someone powers past you and says ‘buen camino’ you cant help but say it and smile! It was a long day of walking and we got to a sign saying 5km to Zubiri and all Hellmuth, Shelly and I wanted was a coffee! But man was that the longest 5km of our life! I've come to realise I don't think the kilometer signs are accurate. There was a 1km sign where i know i walked at least 3km. Talk about depressing. Anyways the smell, taste and thought of coffee spurred us on for the next hour. It was quite a steep descent over a very slippery rocky path into Zubiri. We made it to Zubiri 25kms, legs aching, feet burning, shoulders sore, at 1pm and crossed this beautiful old stone bridge into the town and went straight to the first cafe we came across. Thank goodness im walking all day because at 1.5euro, id be drinking them all day if I could. As it was only 1pm and Zubiri was just a small town, I thought I may as well walk on another 5.5km to Larrasoana and cut a few kms off the next day so get into Pamplona earlier. So i left Hellmuth and Shelly who decided to stay and continued off on my own. It's so freeing just walking and not having anything to focus on but the path in front of you. I wasnt in a rush, I had all afternoon so I just wandered through the country side, past a big quarry, hills all around. I got to this beautiful village, stopped to take a photo and then every changed! I could hear a couple of people behind me as I was walking and they caught up to me at the village. It was Hellmuth, a Brazillian girl Amanda and another German guy Loreano. My walk changed from that point on. We walked together to Larrasoana, we were all so chatty, excited and just got on like a house on fire. Amanda is so bubbly and just laughs at everything, Loreano sets the pace (fast) and Hellmuth and I just follow talking. Helmuths an ICU nurse, Amanda, 32 a chemical engineer quit her job a year ago and has just been travelling, Loreanzo, 27 studied biomed and works in alzheimers research. It was in that hour from meeting them to the village that we found our ‘camino family’. Instantly you're all just so open and honest with each other. It's like we had known each other for forever. And I'm jumping forward now, but as I'm sittng here with ‘my camino fam’, writing our diaries over a beer, Hellmuth just asked if we were to put a title on yesterday what would it be. And we all said ‘family day’ and there were tears and hugs. We shared our feelings and thoughts and discussed the quote happiness is only real when shared. And we realised that its going to be so much better walking together then just on our own.

Ok back to it. We arrived in larrasoana at 2:30pm. It was beautiful, only small, cobblestone streets, white buildings, flowers, colourful flags strung up across the street. A big church in the town square.

We went and booked into our albergue (8 euro). We showered, did our hand washing then walked to the one bar in town. Oh and what an afternoon it turned out to be. We were the first of the pilgrims to get there so we got beers and sat in the plastic table n chairs outside in the square. Then as the afternoon went on more and more of the young pilgrims turned up, and wed met them along the way so we all cheer and say hi. So we ended up having quite the gathering of Germans, Dutch, Spanish, languages and laughs going on all the way. And as I write this all of a sudden I hear ‘there's my daughter!’ I look behind and (here's a story from last night I'll write about soon) 2 Australian men, 1 who has adopted me through some made up writing on a napkin last night and with him was Seamus and Donald, the Irish men from the other day. So hugs all round! So they've now joined us for beers.

Ok back to last night, we all decided to stay at the bar for dinner. And that's where I met the two Australian men from Brisbane. I've forgotten their names and I'm at the point where I've spent so much time with them its too rude now to ask their names so I just called them dad. Well it got out of control quickly. They accused me of eating too much bread, repeatedly asked for my mothers number so they can report home. I had met one of them on the first day and so the second guy had already heard about me before meeting me. Kind of concerning but kind of nice. I gave him a bit of stick and as soon as I did it was game on. Next minute he's adopting me. Also sitting with us at dinner was an Italian father and son. The father, short, grey, glasses, slightly rotund and had the best grin and no English. Except for his animated cheers! He was so cute. If there's one thing I know about this walk I don't think its the scenery that's going to make it, it's going to be the people and the comradery. I'm loving meeting all these people and having a go at learning bits of other languages. After a photo shoot with the Italians and my new dads, I said good night and wandered back to the albergue for some sleep but didn't get far. The four of us (Hellmuth, Amanda and Loreano) ended up sitting outside swigging wine from the bottle sharing about our lives. We then went to bed and ready for an early start in the morn. x