Day 41 – 6. Bilbao – Pobeña. KM 139

I guess you wouldn’t be able to appreciate the better days if there weren’t shit days like today.
Yesterday’s events and confusion affected our plans for today and instead of skipping the next stage after Bilbao like we had planned to do from the beginning, we walked.
We left Bilbao at 8 and took the short and “nicer” version of the stage along the river. After passing through the nice city center, including the Guggenheim, we had 11 km of extremely ugly industrial cityscape that took us to Portugalete. We though of taking a bus various times but carried on in the end.

In Portugalete, we crossed the river with the famous “hanging bridge”, which is a kind of floating-hanging ferry in the air. At least that was somehow interesting.

We took a short break in Portugalete, already pretty pissed and destroyed of the walking on hard concrete all morning. Then we carried on to the next village where we wanted to spend the night – Pobeña.
Our way was the local bike path, pure asphalt again. Flat asphalt is a thousand times worse than steep forest paths. It permanently destroys your feet within few km, apart from being extremely unattractive (Walking these kinds of ways is completely pointless for me, why would I walk something ugly and uncomfortable that is perfectly drivable?). Our maximum contact with wild nature consisted of a solitary chicken on a traffic island.

Trying to get as far as we could before having lunch, we finally sat down on the most beautiful spot we could find, about 5 km from our final destination – a kind of concrete block next to the bike path where we could at least sit down and spread our hurting legs.

We arrived at Pobeña around 4. It is a nice little village with a pretty big beach and dunes which looks like the place for a summer trip for the people from surrounding villages.

The albergue had beds for us and after taking a shower, washing clothes and finding a supermarket (had to walk another 2k…), It was already time for dinner again. We had a very mediocre menu in the restaurant next to the albergue and finally went to bed after doing a little tiring planning for the next days. These plans include a break-day two days from now in Laredo.

It doesn’t seem like it, but these pilgrim days are extremely full, hard and long but super short and we never have time to do anything, not even to properly plan our next day. We get up super early, eat, walk, eat, walk, stretch, shower, wash, buy, eat, sleep and then it starts all over again.
One can only hope that paths will get better and motivation will come back again in the next days.