El Camino de Santiago

What was once a tiny fishing village protected from the unpredictable ocean by Banderas Bay, Puerto Vallarta sits nestled between the water and the mountains. In some areas of our city the hills come right to the waters edge, in others, such as our neighborhood, or "colonia", we have a buffer of about 4 blocks. Our home sits high on the hills of the Cinco de Diciembre colonia and this has given us an excellent training ground. The four of us have been training in these hills for over a year in preparation for our camino. Hundreds of hilly miles (my last pair of shoes had 600 "Strava" miles on them before I retired them last month...from one year of use).

Through illness and injury, heat and humidity we've persevered. In spite of this, we have always planned to make our first day in the Pyrenees a short one. Instead of our expected daily average of 14 miles, our first night we chose to stay in Orisson, a 4 mile hike gaining 2200 feet in elevation.
This was planned to give our travel sore bodies a chance to rest, adapt and recuperate.

Our training prepared us well physically and mentally, but I was surprised by the relentlessness of the climb. It was one continous hill the entire way--for our PV friends, think 4 miles of Calle Nicaragua!--I did fine for the first 3 miles, but had to rest many times on the final push to our Albergue (hostel).

Melanie, Jav and Kat and a warm bowl of vegetable soup was waiting.

All in all, on what is supposed to be the toughest physical part of the camino we are doing very well and are just so happy and grateful to be here.
Oh, and the views!

Updated at 8:00 pm
We had our first communal pilgrims meal at the albergue. It was an experience I'll never forget and it gave me the reasons I am doing this.

Posted by JimRead more