Friday, July 6, 2012

Day 1: Loyola to Zumarraga (July 2)

Rested up from a nice weekend, we set out! Before departing Loyola, we stopped in the Basilica where it was cool and lit only by natural light so early in the morning. Together, we prayed a decade of the rosary and lit a candle for Greg's grandmother, who would have been 81 today, our first day of the camino. With a few last pictures of the exterior, we began walking.

We made quick time to the first town, Azkoitia, and after navigating town, quickly found our path again. This path basically led us all the way to Zumarraga on relatively flat ground. The cool, and slightly spooky, part of this path was that it went through many tunnels, some of them quite long. We learned later that these tunnels were originally built for trains to pass easily in the mountains. As dark as they were, we were really thankful for this engineering breakthrough that wouldn't have existed as a luxury for Ignatius.

In Zumarraga, we had a little challenge finding our hostel, but we met a nice little man named Miguel in the process, and he showed us the way. Unfortunately, it seemed to be closed, so we found a different one listed on Greg's master spreadsheet and secured a room. We learned that our room wouldn't be ready until 5 or 6, so we had about 3 hours to pass. So we ate! Every place we went to seemed to be closing as we were eating our pinchos (tiny sandwiches), which seemed a little strange, but it just prompted us to find another place. Before going to check in at our hostel, we met Fermin, who was the first person to do this entire pilgrimage back in March and has been a great resource in planning our camino (he's also done the Camino Santiago 13 times!). He told us that it was a big festival day in Zumarraga that day (which explains the closing restaurants), so we should go up to the La Antigua church to check it out and then meet back up with him.

Checked into our hotel and showered, we found the free buses that were taking people up to the festival, so we hopped on, checked things out at La Antigua, lit one more candle for Greg's grandmother, watched some awesome coordinated dancing, and rode the bus back down to town. As we were about to board our return bus, Greg really wanted one of the embroidered handkerchiefs that lots of people were wearing, so he asked someone who was wearing one where to buy it....turns out, they don't make them anymore, so this really nice man insisted on giving Greg his (see photo).

We met up with Fermin and a bunch of his family back in town, had drinks at a couple of bars, learned lots of history about the area and camino from him, ate a couple more pinchos for dinner, and headed back to the hotel for bed.

Notes:
This first day was 18 km....I'll post all distances in kilometers throughout the blog....if you need the conversion to miles, it's 1 km : 0.62 mi.

The link to our picasa web album will be updated when we have access to a desktop, so we'll let you know when new pictures are up!

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