Today was really, really long. We woke up early to a breakfast that Chuspi, our hostel host, had prepared for us. A while back she spent a year or so in Dallas, so she was excited to have visitors from the States.
Setting out for our walk, things didn't look bad, but we knew we had a sizable hill to climb early on and that we would travel about 35 km in total today. Fortunately, the weather was overcast and the hill wasn't as difficult as those in the previous two days; however, when we arrived at the top, our directions became more scattered, and we spent a significant amount of time wandering through fields of livestock...imagine grass expanses with cows and horses hanging out and making lots of noise with their bells and grassy knolls covered with grazing sheep.
Once we navigated the mountaintop (and dodged our share of animal droppings), we had a manageable downhill across roads and paths, a little rain (so we got to use our rain gear!), and made it to a valley with three tiny towns.
The first town we entered was Ullibarri...while it was pretty cool that it had a truck that drove around selling fish and other small groceries (imagine an ice cream truck with announcements instead of music), there was no eatery for us, so we moved on. The second town was Alda, which is where this stage of hiking is scheduled to end, but we learned in planning our trip that Alda has a hostel but, again, no eatery, so we moved on to the third town, San Vicente. There we found a nice little restaurant where we had the menu of the day and, as we were leaving, a nice little lady asked if we were doing the Camino Ignaciano, and the bar owner had a stamp for our credential!
Leaving San Vicente, we were encouraged that we only had 10 km more to go. So we threw on some more sunscreen and things went well until about 4 km outside of town....the exhaustion and aches were starting to set in, and we watched the town that was our destination grow closer little by little. In town, we learned that the place we were staying was up a hill/mountainside, so we climbed and climbed and finally arrived. Turns out, our 35 km day was actually 39 km, and we did it in about 8.5 hours of walking (plus extra time for lunch, little rests, and picture taking)!
While it was certainly a long and exhausting day, we're encourage that we only have a very short 6 km day tomorrow, and we try to remember that these aches and exhaustion are part of what camino is all about.
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