Day 13, A night at the padres' albergue

Top of Alto de Perdon
see all photos »

Day 13, May 30

Pamplona to Puente la Reina

707km to Santiago, 243km from start

Distance: 23km

Village on the way
see all photos »

We left Pamplona and into more traditional Spanish countryside. Sunny all day. We passed several small villages but the first real order of business was getting up and over Alto de Perdon. It’s a high, green ridge lined with several large wind turbines. A 500M climb, it was our highest with backpacks. The trail was well graded so we made it without too much trouble. At the top, there were iron silhouettes of pilgrims traveling to Santiago on foot and burros.

After a rocky descent, the day was going nicely. Good weather and several other nice villages. We did see a lot of pro/con Basque graffiti and posters, which looked grim. Then I decided to take a detour to Eunate, the site of an 11^th century a Knights Templar church. The write-ups were very good but the detour was long, the church not inspiring, and doing this in near the end of the day was a mistake.

The queen's bridge
see all photos »

We dragged into Puente la Reina (the bridge of the Queen) after six hours. Totally beat (at least I was). We tried an albergue. This one was run by a monastery, the Padres Reparadores. After a very formal sign in process, which included logging in and stamping our Credencia, we paid our 5 Euro each and were assigned a dorm. The facility houses 100 pilgrims and has filled daily for the last few weeks.

Our dorm room had six bunks. We were one of the early arrivals so we so got a good bunk away from the door. Our mates included a Spanish couple, a German couple and two girls from Quebec. Never figured out the rest.

see all photos »

We took showers, dressed and limped into downtown. It’s very small, but there were three impressive churches, a bar that served larges glasses of Fosters, and the famous old bridge dedicated to the queen. We bought a bottle of wine, brought it back to albergue, and made a dinner with our sausage and cheese. Enjoyed dinner next to a lady from Montreal and a guy from Lyon who just loved cooking. Both were nice conversation.

In the evening, we knocked around town. As the sun went down, we headed back to the albergue, eased ourselves into our sleeping bags, and turned on our MP3’s. The German couple was in the bunk next to us. The lady began to get ready for bed and promptly got butt naked while changing into her night stuff. Not possible to turn your MP3 up high enough to block that out.

I started this trip with the best of intentions to use the albergue system as much as we could. But it just didn’t work. I find the daily stages from town to town are tough and are the central challenge of the pilgrimage. Piling on the cheek-to-jowl life of the albergue makes it tougher to recover each day and leaves you no sense of privacy. Marie’s a trooper, but she’s done too. Unless the village we reach doesn’t have anything else, that’s it for us.

Villages: Pamplona, Cizur Menor, Guendulain, Zarquiegui, Urtega, Muruzabal, Eunate,Obana, Puente la Reina