Day 2 Crossing the Pyrenees: Day of Mud and Moaning

This friendly bartender offered us dinner and drinks at the Restaurante Sabina.
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Getting across the Pyrenees never looked easy, but the getting across was something else again!!

The Auberge Orisson offered a quick breakfast, and 20 or more Camino walkers left the comfort of Orisson and set off for the high ground.

Thank God for GoreTex!

It was ever so briefly sunny around 8 am, as I set out with Franzi from Austria, a fellow pilgrim.  Thirty minutes later the rain we had heard all night returned and continued unabated all day.  Walking ever upwards, we got colder and colder, I eventually put a spare pair of socks on my hands for mittens, thanks to whoever left that tip on the Camino bulletin board.

Franzi and I at dinner - we clean up nicely, don´t we?
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Several hours, but only a miserable few kilometers, later, we had trudged up past the shrine to the Virgin of the Camino - where everyone stops for awhile to take photos - to the highest point, approximately 1500 meters, near the French border with Spain.  Ah!   We have made it! Wrong!  It was only the beginning of the MUD!!!  We skirted along a muddy lane, remember it was raining this entire time, feeling somewhat proud to be avoiding the mess.  But that was not the real mud, which we discovered all too soon.

Vision through the rain - a dry building, our room for the night!
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And there it was, a road with a fence alongside, the entire road a sea of mud!  A hill to our left, a fence at the edge of a forest sloping steeply down on our right.  Nothing to do but walk through it.  Thank God for GoreTex, which made those particular waterproof trekking shoes waterproof.  Too bad GoreTex doesn't keep one from sliding down on one's butt in the mud -- which is what happened next!

Yes, yours truly decided to avoid the road of mud by walking on the little goat track on the hill beside the road.  The track got smaller and then vanished all together, so I tried to rejoin the main road, mud and all.  My feet slipped, I landed on my butt and slid down about 1o feet landing in more mud at the bottom.  Franzi and I just laughed, what could we do?

120 beds in one big room. BUT they had a washer!
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We still had about 5 hours to go, downhill now, still in the rain, before Roncesvalles came into view.  Ah, the wonderful sensation of hot showers and dry clothes.  And, miracle of miracles, the Roncesvalles Refugio had a washer and dryer.  Both work well for mud. Next day, on to Pamplona...

To be continued...