After our super lucky day yesterday, we woke up in pouring rain and heavy storm this morning, our yet longest stage laying before us.
We had breakfast at the hostel with gluten free toast and muffins with our fellow pilgrim friends. The english man said he would probably be “strong and happy” for the first 10 k and then change to being pissed. We chose “strong & happy” as our day’s motto and set off pretty late but motivated at 8 o’clock.
The first three hours took us on roads through villages towards the coast and along the seaside through 35 km/h wind that blew in the exact costrary direction. We were pretty happy with our rain trousers and jackets outfit – the other pilgrims with their ponchos looked like flying tents. Entertaining ourselves with more Black Stories, time and kilometers went by relatively fast and it didn’t rain very much.
As predicted, our strongness and happiness decreased a little after the first 10 k but we repeated the mantra as many times as necessary to feel strong and happy again. A spontaneous shortcut through the wet sand instead of walking on the road also lifted our spirits.
Our new strategy for coping with exhaustion and pain is using a very strong intrinsic motivation we both share: food. To survive this extra long stage, we would be making food breaks every 5 km. You can always walk 5 km more and it is much less destroying to think about the next 5 k and the food you will eat there than to think of 30 km at once. Also, we are the food pilgrims in general. We are by far the pilgrims with the most quantity and quality of food in their backpacks and that make the most and longest food breaks. Especially if the landscape and route is as little appealing as today, this strategy is very helpful (even if we feel like having descended to the motivation method that generally works with dogs). We spent the whole day walking along very curvy and not too low frequented country roads with no sidewalks or any safe place to walk; Hiking on hard, feet-killing asphalt for 28 of our 31 km.
Our second big breakfast took place at a bus station with roof at San Vicente de la Barquera after the first 10 km. We stopped again after another 8 for the third breakfast and suddenly, not really feeling like it, our destination Unquera was only 7 km away. We walked further on ugly roads on hard asphalt, trying to ignore the pain until we could justify a lunch break. A short forestal path began and the only place to sit down was right next to a train route.
As we had only 3 km left after that and Unquera had only one albergue with very few beds, we decided we still had enough energy to walk 2 km further to Colombres where we knew we would for sure get a bed in an enormous 123 bed albergue.
When we walked through Unquera, we knew it had been the right decision; it was by far the ugliest village we had seen in the last days.
We crossed the river after Unquera and with it the border between Cantabria and Asturias. Cantabria hadn’t really convinced us too much in the last days. Non-perfect way markings, many slightly rude people, not very good food and 100% Camino on asphalt and roads. Asturias greeted us with a very steep mountain and impressive views on green mountains in the fog. We had been seeing the Picos de Europa mountains for two days now and were getting pretty close.
We arrived at Colombres half an hour later and saw the beautiful, steel-blue albergue building from the distance. Happy about finally having arrived and looking forward to the company of 121 other pilgrims, we were greeted by the hospitalera at the door who told us that there was not a single one of the 123 beds left for us.
Disappointed, we looked up the next bed and kept walking for another kilometre. Heavy rain started to fall while we made our way to a pension that had a double room at pilgrim’s price for us. We checked into our unexpected luxury room with two beds, a whole room just for us, a private bathroom and shower and even a balcony and felt pretty strong and happy after all.
We could cook some food in a microwave in the garden (it was freezing cold and wet) and eat it in the bar. The woman working there took excellent care of us even though we ate all our own food. She even gave us plates and cleaned them afterwards. We had our evening-beer that usually gives our brains the rest and fell into the post-food coma immediately afterwards. Quote Johanna: “Let’s go to bed, it’s almost nine!” (Anyone who knows us a little bit, knows just how strange this sounds).
The physical activity and fresh air together with our continuous pain make us enter a very weird, black-humored, funny state where we spent most of our time laughing about everything while complaining about everything at the same time. We give our muscles voices, we wash our Tupper boxes with toilet paper or washing powder and find it perfectly normal, we put on dirty shirts after showering, we love tuna and bananas, we just walk around suffering all day in any weather and find it pretty absurd but absolutely fun. The pilgrim’s life is funny, and painful, and exhausting, and sometimes enraging and hard and then hard enough to be funny again. It kills your muscles and your brain, cleans and mixes up your emotions and challenges your body. Walk, eat, sleep. “Strong and happy!, Strong and happy!”…
