A very hot day to reposition

Last night, Guadalupe (who is not a nun but a “consagrada”) told me a sad story with a very happy ending. Last fall, vandals set fire to the ancient doors at San Miguel de Aralar (the church that I walked up to yesterday). A boat building company in San Sebastián uses wood from this area to make replicas of old ships. When it heard about the vandalism, the company offered to make replacement doors, using the same type of wood and from the same place that the doors had originally been made from. Yesterday, the doors left San Sebastián, on a cart pulled by oxen. They will stop in villages along the way, with festivities at each stop, and on Sunday they will arrive and be installed.

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My main goal today was to get myself to Arbizu so that tomorrow I can try to climb Beriaín. I have to admit that having it in sight almost all day yesterday and today has given me a bit of trepidation. It looks very imposing and inaccessible, but there is a church up on top so it has to be reachable.

Walking the Camino route between these two towns would have been a pretty straight shot of about 10 km, so I had spent some time at home getting routes that I could add on. My first choice was to walk up in a beech and oak forest where there were lots of old “bordas” for livestock. The Ruta de las Bordas, but I had to get to the starting point. My first attempt was on a route that I tried to put together at home on wikiloc —fail. Then I tried to use mapy— fail. Finally, I asked a young woman out walking — success. But since I had lost almost 2 hours wandering around the forest looking for the trail, once I finally got there, I decided to cut it short after a couple of hours and get to my hotel in Arbizu. 22 km and 400 m are plenty for this old body in 85F/30C degree temperatures.

Arbizu is a pretty little town in the province of Navarra, which is not in the País Vasco. But the predominant language here is definitely Basque, and the pharmacist explained that even if the government doesn’t consider this the País Vasco, the people definitely do. I talked with one man in the grocery store who had trouble managing Castellano.

Looks like the temperature will drop a little tomorrow, and cloudy but no rain. I am staying here again tomorrow night, so I can leave all my unnecessary pack contents in the room. It really does make a difference, so I should banish my bad thoughts about all those people who have their packs sent ahead on the Camino.Read more